So you want to be a... EIG Fellow
A chat with the inaugural EIG fellow, Ashu Yaligar (M2)
Though at times sheltered from this reality as students, we live in a world in which many of the forces shaping how care is delivered aren’t primarily driven by physician or scientist input. Decisions about workflow, incentives, products, policy, and priorities are often made in rooms where the patient experience is abstracted into metrics and the clinician’s reality is treated like just another business constraint. This is in part why the Einstein Innovation Group (EIG) exists: our goal is to prepare trainees to enter those rooms with fluency and credibility, allowing us to carry patient and frontline perspectives into the places where systems get designed, funded, and deployed. If more future physicians and scientists learn to navigate these spaces, we open up the possibility for stronger advocacy and ultimately, a healthcare system that works better for the people it’s meant to serve.
That belief is what brought Isaac Faith to the table in the first place. When he co-founded EIG, he did so on that premise: a career in healthcare is shaped by more than what we learn in lecture halls or labs. From there, the EIG fellowship was born of a simple principle: students should not be observers. Fellows would be embedded within host organizations for a defined summer period and expected to take on real responsibility, contribute to active projects, and deliver tangible work. The goal is exposure and accountability: learning how healthcare tools, companies, and systems are actually built by participating in the process firsthand.
Working with Dr. Sunit Jariwala and Dean Yoon Kang, Isaac pitched a straightforward analogy: just as medical students can obtain funding for summer research or global health experiences, there should be an avenue for students to embed themselves into an industry setting, be that a biotechnology company, digital health startup, healthcare venture capital fund, or any adjacent space to which students do not often get access to. Even just six weeks spent in such an environment could plant the seeds for an unexpected career trajectory.
Funding came first. The program would have remained just an idea without the generous support of Dean Tomer, Dean Kang, and Michael Slade. Their backing not only made the fellowship possible, but also signaled that this kind of training belongs in medical education. Then came the harder question: how to translate the idea into something operational?
When Ashutosh (Ashu) Yaligar, an M1 at the time, was recruited as an inaugural fellow, there was no infrastructure for how to pair students with companies. For the program to succeed, two things needed to be true: (1) a company had to be willing to take on a student in a role that exceeded basic shadowing, and (2) it had to genuinely match Ashu’s interests.
The successful match ultimately came through a personal connection and the alumni office. Dr. Jariwala was still in touch with a former AECOM student, Dr. Yair Saperstein, who by then was founder and CEO of the digital health company AvoMD.
What motivates Ashu?
It was a near-perfect match. While Ashu initially set out hoping to get a window into the venture capital world, he’s long been drawn to another frontier: digital health—the exciting intersection of technology, rapidly advancing AI, and the everyday realities of patient care.
As an MBA student at Stony Brook University, Ashu was already curious about the healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship space. Before medical school, he had spent some time working with an early-stage cardiac medical device company developing a novel monitoring device for use in cardiology practices. It was there that he caught the startup bug, in an environment where roles were fluid, hierarchies were flat, and instead the passion for a project allowed any single individual to wear many different hats, doing whatever needs doing to push the project forward. In Ashu’s words:
“You could be speaking to various stakeholders one minute, working on marketing the next, and end the day helping fix a software problem. We all did everything.”
Now in medical school, AvoMD was the perfect next step for Ashu.
AvoMD
Before we get into Ashu’s time at AvoMD, I wanted to communicate what it is the company does.
AI in healthcare is a deep rabbit-hole, and after realizing I was struggling to find the words that would properly describe the company’s mission, I asked ChatGPT instead:
AvoMD builds clinician-facing workflow tools that turn evidence—guidelines, pathways, calculators, and institutional protocols—into actionable, in-the-flow tools inside the EHR. Their platform pairs that content with AI “workflow assistants” (chart summaries, recommendations, and note generation, including an ambient AI scribe) so health systems can standardize evidence-based care and reduce burnout without relying on endless alerts.
When I asked Ashu to explain it in his own words, he described AvoMD as a company that integrates into EHR systems like Epic (and many others) to reduce the friction between clinicians and the constant information-processing that modern care demands. The most obvious example–at least to me–is their digital scribe, which can listen to patient encounters and put together a formatted note. But that’s only one slice of what they do.
What stood out most was that AvoMD isn’t shipping a one-size-fits-all product and calling it a day. The team works directly with clinicians and administrators within a given institution or department, figure out where workflow is breaking down, and then tailor their tools to erase those bottlenecks. And it works! I’m not here to moonlight for AvoMD’s marketing department, but their webpage lists a growing roster of healthcare institutions that have implemented and use these tools.
Day in the life
I asked Ashu what a typical day looked like for him at AvoMD:
“For the first week or two, I followed the CEO’s schedule. Every call, every meeting, I was there. This allowed me to get to know everyone at the company and get a taste for what every team does.”
His first assignment was full immersion, and AvoMD turned out to be exactly the kind of setting he enjoyed: fast-paced and small enough that you could actually experience and appreciate the whole operation. Crucially, Dr. Saperstein was intentional about making the fellowship a substantive experience rather than an observational one. After Ashu had seen every component and understood how things fit together, the two of them laid plans the rest of the summer: weekly check-ins with clear deliverables that would define work with real ownership attached to it. Finally, to ensure that the fellowship was fulfilling its educational mission, Ashu met weekly with Dean Kang and Dr. Jariwala, updating them on his progress and lessons learned at AvoMD.
“I also took some time to get to know the tech: the director of product offered to sit down with me for a couple hours and explain the AI models in depth. What was truly inspiring was that after the meeting, the director left to work a hospitalist shift.”
That moment stuck with him. It was a concrete example of a hybrid path; clinical practice and industry-based innovation coexisting, sometimes even within the same day. This was the balance that Ashu was looking for in his career.
And then the summer clicked into place. Ashu’s day-to-day work was what he called “stakeholder discovery”. For much of the time there, he spent the day on calls with clinicians across various departments–listening to what they needed, pinpointing where workflows were breaking down or causing friction, and identifying spots where AvoMD’s tools could relieve pressure.
“It’s not just about understanding the existing inefficiencies. I also needed to know inside-out what our tech could do before we could even discuss a potential solution.”
That ended up being his favorite part: living at the interface. He’d surface pain points from clinical teams, translate them to the people building the product, and then work back in the other direction, all while learning the toolset well enough to propose solutions that were realistic.
Ashu learned a lot about what it actually takes to build workflow tools in healthcare. It’s not enough to have a clever solution to a real problem; no matter how “in tune” you think you are with a clinical workflow, you can’t really understand where the friction lives until you talk to the people on the ground using (or avoiding) these tools every day.
One of the most useful tells, he said, was listening for the phrase: “I wish…” It’s often the first time a subconscious pain point gets spoken out loud. The other question he kept coming back to was even more direct: “What’s the reason you’re not using this tool?” That question led him to the real bottlenecks. It exposed the annoyances, time-consuming workflows, and systems that don’t work when pressure-tested.
“Once you’re there, the work becomes less about pitching features and more about drilling down to the why: Why is this workflow the way it is? Why is this system set up like this? Only then can you shape a solution to the client’s needs, rather than trying to contort their system to fit your solution.”
And that’s the broader lesson Ashu kept running into: you can think about a problem forever, but you won’t find the true pain points where a tool can actually provide relief until you cross the bridge and talk to end-users.
Lessons learned
Six weeks is hard to compress into neat takeaways, but Ashu did leave the fellowship with a few that stuck.
“There is so often a disconnect between the people building the tools and the people they are building for. This is where we come in as future physicians, innovators, and scientists—we can live on that bridge and connect those worlds.”
The fellowship also sharpened Ashu’s sense of what he wants next. He left the fellowship more confident that he wants a career combining clinical practice with close collaboration alongside industry teams, an approach he saw modeled firsthand throughout the summer. He loves the startup environment, and he’s already looking for ways to get back into it.
Maybe the most telling sign: after this summer, Ashu decided to learn how to code, something that’s suddenly much more approachable in the age of LLMs. With help from Claude.ai and Cursor, he’s even building his own health monitoring app!
For those interested in the EIG fellowship, I asked Ashu what advice he would give:
“It’s not all about prior experience. Take the time to immerse yourself into the company you get matched with and focus on learning as much as you can about the company, the landscape, and the technology. Also, try to be as proactive and ask to be involved with various facets of the company (i.e. marketing, finance, engineering) even if it may not be directly relevant to your project. With that attitude you will learn a lot and be able to contribute the most to the company you are working with.”
Academic spaces excel at generating new ideas. Many of the discoveries that become therapies, guidelines, and standards of care originate in institutions like Einstein. What companies like AvoMD do well is translation, turning those ideas into tools that fit within real clinical workflows, at scale, where they can meaningfully impact patient care.
Take AvoMD: much of the foundational work on large language models and machine learning came out of academia. But it takes people like Dr. Saperstein, as well as the teams willing to solve the problem of integration, to bring those ideas into the EHR workflows and the real day-to-day work. That’s the gap Ashu is pointing to, and it’s also what we care about at EIG.
The EIG fellowship exists to bridge that gap. By embedding trainees within the environments where healthcare systems, products, and tools are built, the program equips students with fluency that traditional medical education rarely provides. Our goal is not to divert students away from medicine, but to prepare them to engage more effectively with the forces shaping how medicine is practiced.
With the success of the program in its first year, EIG is actively working to expand the fellowship to include graduate students as well. If you are a student interested in participating, or part of an organization looking to host a motivated trainee for the summer, we would love to connect. For current M1’s, stay tuned for more information about the program this summer!