Humanity in Health Care

With a heavy call center volume, mountains of paperwork, and complex scheduling demands, healthcare staff commonly face burnout and consider quitting due to high stress levels, leaving organizations in a "revolving door" of staff turnover. This heightened stress often prevents them from resolving patient needs in real time and offering the personalized care people expect.

Jerold McDonald M'08 wants to solve the root cause of the healthcare staffing crunch by using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate routine tasks, thereby increasing productivity, reducing costs and the risk of error, and, most importantly, humanizing the care patients receive.

McDonald acknowledges that there are a lot of questions about artificial intelligence, but he believes we're missing an opportunity to focus conversations about it by making it a black-or-white issue.

"AI's potential is endless," he points out. "You're already surrounded by AI today, whether you realize it or not, from navigation and dating apps to recommendation engines. Now the question is, how can you leverage it to help and minimize harm, to optimize for health and human potential, and to be like the Iron Man suit for you?"

McDonald envisions health care without the busyness, leading to increased access so that health care can be more equitable and work for everyone. Along with Ani Bagepalli, he founded Omaiven Health in 2018 with the mission to "save one billion minutes of busywork across health care." Omaiven is a spin on the word "maven," which is a person who is experienced or "one who understands," and the "ai" in the middle of the name is a nod to how the company uses artificial intelligence to drive purpose and profit.

McDonald calls health care a space that occupies simultaneously two different worlds-one of fast-moving medical innovation and slow-moving administrative tasks. He hopes to bridge the gap between those worlds with Omaiven.

"On the medical or care side, you can literally see what your heart looks like in real-time images. We can perform surgery where a patient and doctor are on opposite sides of the country. We can save people from a massive stroke within minutes. We can map the human genome. At the same time, all of the administrative work is still primarily done on a piece of paper, through fax machines, or with tons of manual tasks," McDonald says. "Our job is to close that gap [in healthcare operations] so that we are accelerating the same type of innovation."

McDonald has always felt at home in a healthcare setting. Growing up, his brother frequently required hospital care. With regular visits, the hospital became a comfortable place for McDonald. McDonald also connected with the service element of the healthcare industry.

"The through line of my life is service, especially coming from a family of military, social workers, and educators. Since I did not end up serving in the military, I found other ways to be of service," McDonald says.

McDonald earned undergraduate degrees in economics and corporate communication from the University of Texas at Austin and then enrolled in Trinity University's Health Care Administration (HCAD) On-Campus Master's Program.

"Health care administration was a good way for me to take my business skills and be of service," McDonald says.

After earning his master's degree, McDonald gained experience in operations, healthcare consulting, and technology implementations. Across his work in different areas of health care, McDonald realized how deeply access and resources are intertwined.

As McDonald notes, a lot of paperwork in health care is repetitive, which opens the door to more human error. If the wrong box is checked on a form, for example, all sorts of issues could arise. Omaiven's technology works 24/7 for organizations to help offload calls, leverage digital forms to update demographics, communicate with patients at-scale, complete financial clearance, and more. By automating those repetitive tasks, Omaiven uses AI technology to create a digital "workforce" to support healthcare staff, freeing them up to build the deep, meaningful relationships patients seek in their health care.

"Technology is not supposed to be the solution; it's supposed to enable the solution," McDonald says. "Think of AI as your support team, not your competition. In an odd way, we're using AI to enhance humanity in healthcare interactions."

Keeping in line with his spirit of service, McDonald continues to stay involved with Trinity's HCAD program. In 2022, he received the Momentum Award for outstanding achievements in the field of healthcare management as an early careerist. He currently serves on the department's Advisory Council, which provides advice to the program in terms of curriculum, residency development and placement, and resource enhancement. In this role, McDonald mentors students on how to think of innovative strategies to address problems in health care through pitch competitions like Tiger Tank and Healthcare PRISm (Healthcare's Problems Require Innovative Solutions), preparing them to lead with empathy and creative confidence.

McDonald follows the same empathy-driven approach in his own work with Omaiven.

"The only way to make healthcare technology better is to be around humans and exercise empathy to understand the reality people are facing. If you want to improve the accuracy of AI, that requires constant pursuit of representative data and improved feedback loops to power algorithms," McDonald explains. "In other words, we have to deepen our understanding of the human experience. AI is an endless string of evolving possibilities, but humans matter and always will."

Editor's Note: The photo at the top of the story was taken by Ryan Wilburn.