Founder Daniel Fabbri PhD

DANIEL FABBRI PHD, a 39-year-old serial founder and associate professor of Biomedical Informatics and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, told Venture Nashville he believes launching a healthtech startup anchored by intellectual property developed within academic and scientific communities remains one of the most effective ways to accelerate delivery of game-changing solutions to target markets.

Fabbri acknowledged that startup pressures are real, but added that as an innovator he is energized by both his faculty responsibilities and by being "at risk" in launching a business driven by results of his academic work.

He added that he has come to believe that entrepreneurship often allows the fastest iteration and alignment of healthtech solutions with market needs.

Founder-Owner-CEO Fabbri registered his second startup business, Brim Analytics Inc., five months ago in both Tennessee and Delaware.

Stakeholders in Brim Analytics include VUHealth System, VU Medical Center's Brock Family Center for Applied Innovation, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).

ARPA-H makes "pivotal investments" in breakthrough technologies, including Fabbri's recent DAGCAP work.

As Brim's website explains, Brim tools enable researchers, health-data abstractors and clinical trial operators to leverage existing Large Language models (LLMs) to "guide" extraction, abstraction and curation of patient and disease data from health records and disease registries, without "long chains of agreements and heightened risks" associated with data and governance protocols and the safeguarding of protected health information (PHI).

Brim Analytics sees rising interest in leveraging large language models -- e.g., LLMs such as OpenAI, Azure (MS), Bedrock (AWS), ChatGPT, Nova (AWS), Claude (Anthropic) et al -- rather than building specialized LLM entrants, particularly given reports that the economics of leveraging existing LLMs are improving.

Fabbri sees Brim Analytics as "allowing researchers to focus more on breakthrough insights and less on repetitive, monotonous tasks," adding in a report by Barchart, "We are proud to be leading the charge in integrating AI into chart curation for research and clinical trial enrollment."

Bolstering the case for BYO LLM, a few days ago Fabbri posted on LinkedIn: "There are a lot of things that need to go around LLM inference calls to make a full chart abstraction system usable, scalable and flexible including context window management, RAG, rate limit management, prompt engineering, prompt optimization, in-context learning, chart visualizations, user permissions, hallucination guardrails security controls, and more."

Operating within the scope of the "Bring Your Own LLM" model, Brim and other LLM vendors are allowed to run applications directly within the healthcare organization's cloud tenant, ensuring compliance and operational control over PHI (personal health information). Related.

Asked during a series of VNC interviews about potentially competitive companies, Fabbri acknowledged there are numerous "AI companies" addressing target markets.

As possible comparables, he offered as examples San Francisco-based Triomics and Cambridge-based Layer Health.

VNC also notes San Francisco Carta Healthcare (the recent acquirer of entrant Realyze Intelligence, which had been founded in 2021 by UPMC a health-system affiliate of the University of Pittsburgh). Carta investors include Nashville's Frist Cressey Ventures.

VNC research for this story on patent filings, citations and other sources makes clear that abstraction has drawn attention of such majors as IBM, Microsoft Technology Licensing, and GE Healthcare, to name a few.

Adoption advantage? Brim Analytics's adopters may elect to integrate with REDCap, a Vanderbilt University creation, the institutional version of which has been in operation for decades, as VNC reported here.

Notably, a Vanderbilt commercial REDCap license was issued in 2015 to nPhase (aka REDCap Cloud), led then and now by Scott Climes, with board members including Alan Bentley of the Vanderbilt Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization (CTTC), and with support of Cypress Associates and others.

NOTES

Brim Analytics's tools are currently in trial use by approximately 20 teams of researchers and others, Fabbri said.

Brim's outside advisors currently include attorneys with the Nashville office of Barnes & Thornburg and bankers with Truxton Trust.

The new company's capital requirements remain under discussion. No scenario has been finalized, Fabbri told VNC.

Fabbri previously founded Maize Analytics, a Michigan-flagged and Nashville-operated company he operated eight years, then sold to SecureLink (Austin), a company that subsequently sold to Imprivata (Waltham), on undisclosed terms. Read more on that startup and its advisors here.

Friction along rails of transformation: Brief VNC research online indicates steadily growing interest globally in accelerating transformation of unstructured medical notes and other data into actionable structured data.

Lest it go unsaid, we also note that demand remains strong for workers who can abstract medical data manually and-or with the assistance of natural language programming (NLP), to extract and code data using pre-determined rules. Clinical data abstraction is often defined as the process of identifying and capturing key administrative and clinical data elements, while the purpose of abstraction includes the collection of data related to administrative coding functions, quality improvement, patient registry functions and clinical research. NLM:NCBI resources 1 | 2

CEO Fabbri outlined his academic-to-entrepreneur journey in a 2023 LinkedIn post. VU did a similar 2021 piece. His LinkedIn. Fabbri's VUMC profile and Google Scholar link, are here.

Related Brim Analytics press release, Nov. 11, 2024. VNC

. last edited 1441 25 December 2024