Innovator of the Year Subha: Airan-Javia

Subha Airan-Javia, MD, FAMIA is the Sharp Index Best Health Tech Innovator for 2020. She is passionate about improving the healthcare workflow to provide a better experience for physicians and patients. As someone who sees herself as a physician first, she struggled with the decision to leave full-time practice to create her health technology company, CareAlign. Here she shares her story about the decision to focus on her business:  

“I realized early on that the way we practice Medicine is inefficient and, unfortunately, error prone. Not because clinicians don't care, but because that is the way it's always been done and it's the way we were taught. It is often done on paper, relying on disconnected, static workflows.  

As an intern I started working on workflow optimization and communication gaps, particularly during transitions of care. We were using word documents to create our written handoff documents (not an uncommon practice!). I lobbied for the resources to create a web-based platform to replace our word document and successfully implemented the first version of the platform that would eventually evolve into CareAlign.  It was well received and adopted throughout several of our residency programs. 

The experience of using technology to fix a problem that directly improved the lives of both my patients and my colleagues is what led me to pursue informatics as a career specialty. I spent the next decade at Penn Medicine working to improve clinician workflow by bridging the gap between front line providers delivering care and the engineers creating the technology we used. 

These experiences led to the creation of CareAlign, the third generation of that initial web-based platform I developed as an intern. The main goal has always been to improve the way healthcare providers collaborate as a team around a patient. The reality is, EHRs have improved the business of healthcare – streamlining billing and coding – but they have done very little to streamline clinical workflows. 

With CareAlign, we set out to remove paper from our workflows by creating a digital workspace for clinicians to collaborate in real time. Additionally, we aimed to reduce the number of clicks it takes to find the information clinicians need to care for patients. 

One of the biggest benefits of building CareAlign from inside of a health system like Penn is that my goal was purely getting the technology to be as helpful as possible for myself and my colleagues. To save time and give our patients the best possible care. I was never worried about selling the technology or keeping investors happy, which meant I could iterate on the platform until it was so well designed that it was adopted by all 150 inpatient services at Penn Medicine’s downtown hospitals, quickly spreading to over 5,000 users.  

After seeing the impact it had on patient care, clinician wellbeing, and efficiency, I knew I had to get it into more peoples’ hands. That meant starting a business. To be totally honest, I was conflicted. I wasn’t sure if I could make my goals for the technology and the goals for the company align. I did this to help people. To help my colleagues. To make things better. Not to make money.  

After some serious reflection, I turned to an important lesson I learned from Star Wars™: that the force requires balance. You can't have one side without the other. I could not innovate in a vacuum while still getting the technology disseminated widely. To do that, I needed the machine of economics. So, I took the plunge. To my delight, I have been fortunate to find investors and team members on the commercial side that have the same goal as I do - to make things better. Because at the end of the day, we all benefit from a better healthcare system with fewer errors. 

Thus, CareAlign was born.  Building on my initial goals, CareAlign is mission-driven to improve patient care, reduce errors, and improve the experience of clinicians delivering that care.  In short, we are making it EASY for clinicians to do the right thing for patients, and to have a good experience doing it.” 

•  Subha Airan-Javia, MD, FAMIA 

Dr. Airan-Javia is a shining example of how physicians can improve work environments and patient care in non-traditional ways. While her daily tasks may have changed, her goal to improve healthcare remains the same, and we are honored to work with her as the Sharp Index Health Tech Innovator for 2020.  

Want to nominate someone for a Sharp Index Award? Awards for 2021 are available here. 

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