CalmWave, the company leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to bring Operations Health to hospitals, today announced the appointment of Dr. Richard Schaefer, Chief Health Informatics Officer (CHIO) of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, to the company’s board of advisors. Dr. Schaefer, a renowned leader in healthcare technology including AI, has spent over 20 years leveraging emerging technologies in the development of end-to-end healthcare technology solutions. Dr. Schaefer has spent years looking at the intersection of AI and clinical practice. He has written and published studies on clinical evidence-based medicine which highlights the criticality of transparent AI in clinical applications.

“Dr. Schaefer is at the forefront of using data and analytics to deliver the best healthcare solutions for our veterans. In our first meeting, Dr. Schaefer said ‘I’ve worked on clinical alarm fatigue for many years and I’ve never seen anything like what CalmWave is building’.”

 

“Dr. Schaefer is at the forefront of using data and analytics to deliver the best healthcare solutions for our veterans. In our first meeting, Dr. Schaefer said ‘I’ve worked on clinical alarm fatigue for many years and I’ve never seen anything like what CalmWave is building,’” said Ophir Ronen, Co-Founder and CEO, CalmWave. “We are thrilled to welcome him to our advisory board. We have strong momentum as we utilize transparent AI to present clinicians with a clearer, more insightful understanding of vast volumes of data, making it more understandable and actionable. Dr. Schaefer’s two decades of clinical, informatics, and technology experience will be invaluable as we move into our next phase of growth.”

“CalmWave is solving an important problem for hospitals today and their approach to AI is exactly what we need in the healthcare system: explainable, trustworthy, and reliable information,” said Dr. Schaefer. “I have seen firsthand the impact of alarm fatigue on clinicians. CalmWave is the first to develop a solution that works. I look forward to working with Ophir as it is rolled out to hospitals in the U.S. and around the world.”

As CHIO for the Kansas City VA Medical Center, Dr. Schaefer has worked on multiple projects related to artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, technology development and implementation and quality improvement in the VA. He has more than 20 years of experience working with VHA data and has served in multiple operational and leadership roles regarding data governance and big data analytics. This includes serving as the Pharmacy Data Migration Lead for the Department of Veteran Affairs Electronic Health Record Modernization program. Dr. Schaefer also serves as the AI Solutions Architect for the VHA National Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII), a sub-branch of the Office of Research and Development (ORD). He is also a funded investigator on multiple proposals regarding AI assessments in Veterans, including active proposals with ORD and the Department of Defense. Dr. Schaefer serves on the VA Data Governance Technical Sub-council. Given his experience, he serves as a subject matter expert on VHA data and cloud computing on a national level.

About CalmWave

CalmWave is focused on improving the lives of patients and providers. Our mission is to address alarm fatigue and eliminate non-actionable alarms, bringing us to more stable and quieter ICUs. Alarm fatigue, which is endemic in the modern healthcare system, causes great stress for providers, their patients, and their families, ultimately impacting patient outcomes and staff retention. The CalmWave platform remediates alarm fatigue, improves staff retention, and transforms Operations Health through data science and AI. CalmWave is the fastest company to go from inception to funding at the AI2 Incubator, a startup incubator at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). Headquartered in Seattle, CalmWave has raised a pre-seed round led by Bonfire Ventures with participation from Tau Ventures, AI2 Incubator, Seachange Ventures, Hike Ventures, and the co-founders of PagerDuty. Visit CalmWave.ai or email hello@calmwave.ai for more information and partnership opportunities. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.