i-Human Patients

There is a huge shortage of medical doctors and nurses in the world and it's our aim to help solve that problem by creating software that can be used by medical schools to more effectively train more students. The skill of diagnostic reasoning, the process by which a clinician lands on a diagnosis given symptoms, is taught in a time-consuming and error-prone way (just watch the first couple of seasons of Scrubs).

We invent and build software that simulates an encounter between a doctor and a patient in a typical office or emergency room session. Students interview the virtual patient, asking questions about their condition and history, perform medical exams like taking blood pressure, listening to their heart and lungs, and order lab tests. All along they keep a list of hypotheses about the disorder and add, remove, and change the priority of these hypotheses until they are certain that they have a diagnosis. The software tells them how they did, what they missed, what they should have done (or shouldn't have done) and offers them educational material to help them understand the disease of the patient.

We're a fairly new company, and our culture is still in the formative stage. As a group, we enjoy what we're doing; we like writing code and seeing our stuff come to life. We recently moved into a new office in Sunnyvale that's bigger than we need right now, but we're growing, with several openings in development this year. In the central office in Sunnyvale, we're just the design and development group. Most of the execs and all of the sales people are remote. We use Skype and Slack to stay connected. We do our development on Macs (Powerbooks) with multiple external monitors and we sit at Ikea desks. We deploy our product to AWS using EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk.

Our primary language is Java, but we have a large component in Ruby on Rails. Our CTO, Corey Cerovsek, is cooking up a new software architecture for future products, and we need talented developers to work with him on that. We're interested in and studying Scala and generally like functional programming.

Our VP of Engineering has a long history of leading development teams and started as a research scientist at a NASA institute. He's also an annual exhibitor at Maker Faire and brings some of his work into the office.