CyrenCare: My Personal Founder Journey for Emergency Medicine

As we reflect on 2023 and welcome 2024, we at CyrenCare are filled with immense gratitude. It's been a privilege to push forward in our mission to bring the focus back on patient care in Emergency Medicine.

In this blog post, I want to share my journey as an Emergency Medicine physician and how it inspired me to found CyrenCare. It wasn't a single pivotal moment, but a series of experiences that guided me to start.

1. Thirst for creativity and becoming a technology advocate
After finishing medical school and my internship, I realized I was longing for something more creative in my life. Feeling a bit out of place among my peers, I decided to follow my passion for art and design by enrolling in MIT's architecture program. It was a big shift, but an exciting one. It was 2008 when I was exposed to 3D modeling, 3D printing, coding, and laser cutting, using these tools to reinvent the way we think about building and design and re-designing each building brick. This experience opened my eyes to the power of technology and inspired me to become an advocate for its possibilities.


2. Contemplating mortality and embracing life
The collapse of Lehman Brothers steered me back to Korea and Medicine, where I chose Emergency Medicine. During my training at Samsung Medical Center (Yes, Samsung has an academic health system!), I discovered a deep passion for resuscitation and post-cardiac arrest care. This path led me to an academic career, tracking the journey of cardiac arrest patients from the emergency department to the ICU. Frequently working on the border of life-and-death, many patient cases have taught me to develop a healthy obsession with mortality. I frequently pondered the temporary nature of life and the inevitability of death, which inspired a deeper introspection about the choices I make. I often ask myself whether I would be content with my life when reflecting on my deathbed. This constant reflection motivated me to ensure that my actions align with a fulfilling life.


3. A 'taste' of entrepreneurship
Alongside my academic career, I ventured into entrepreneurship by investing in a Korean pork BBQ restaurant. Despite its loyal customer base, we encountered financial hurdles. While I enjoyed the delicious food—admittedly gaining quite a bit of weight in the process—I also gained invaluable insights. This experience taught me that passion alone isn't enough to sustain a business. It underscored the critical importance of profitability and scalability in any venture.


4. Building something that wasn't wanted, but everyone needed
As an Emergency Medicine professor, from time to time I've observed my peers and residents experience emotional strain during consultations over the years. I also noticed that physician communication during patient consults were inefficient, leading to delays. To address this issue, I spearheaded the implementation of a text-based consultation system within the electronic health record (EHR) at my hospital. It replaced the need for phone calls, making the process faster and more efficient. Despite initial skepticism and resistance, the new system greatly improved communication between providers, and there's no going back. Now, with CyrenCare, I'm excited to bring this approach to patient-provider communication.


5. Tackling fragmented communication in the emergency department
In the emergency department, I directly witnessed the frustration patients felt from being asked repetitive questions, exposing the fragmented nature of our communication. From the registrar to the triage nurse, and then various healthcare providers, each collecting information with different objectives, patients found themselves repeating their stories multiple times, with only fragments documented. This inefficiency prompted me to envision a system that could utilize patients' waiting time more effectively, allowing them to share their stories in a format tailored for clinical assessment. By streamlining this information, each step in the workflow could access the necessary details efficiently. Just as Starbucks uses mobile orders and Tinder provides pre-date insights, why can't healthcare adopt a similar approach to enhance patient-provider interactions?


6. Engaging and empowering patients when it's most needed
CyrenCare began as a digital health research project. We developed a prototype and conducted a pilot at Samsung Medical Center, where patients used CyrenCare in the waiting room. This trial allowed us to assess the feasibility and acceptability of this new approach to patient flow. A common feedback was how patients appreciated being able to organize their thoughts and symptoms before encountering a healthcare provider. We crafted questions in easy-to-understand language, enabling patients to articulate their concerns, which we then translated into clinical terminology for a structured clinical report. I realized that we were empowering patients by involving them directly in creating their own clinical narratives.

7. The untold patient stories missing in EHR Data
My exploration into digital health and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) revealed significant shortcomings in EHR data. Not only is the data often unstructured, but the documentation process primarily reflects the provider's perspective, leaving out the patient side of the story. The documentation is typically done by overworked healthcare providers, influenced by time constraints, varying levels of experience, and memory lapses—sometimes recorded hours or even days after. By collecting patient-generated reports and standardizing how we capture patient symptoms and other key details, we could augment the EHR data and improve the quality of data. In the future, this data could serve as the cornerstone for developing AI/ML algorithms with enhanced accuracy, paving the way for significant advancements in predictive analytics within Emergency Medicine.

Reflecting on my journey, I've come to appreciate how each step along the way led me to create CyrenCare. From my passion for creativity to my commitment to medicine, entrepreneurship, and the quest for improved communication, these experiences shaped my vision. What began as personal challenges turned into opportunities to make a broader impact. As I move forward with CyrenCare, my aim is to harness technology to transform patient-provider communication, streamline healthcare processes, and ultimately improve patient care. I hope my story resonates with others who are navigating similar paths, encouraging them to pursue their passions while making a difference in the lives of others. Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I look forward to sharing more as we continue to grow.