The Future Is Now: Dr Rami Hashish Of pareIT On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Don’t be shy to reach out to people of influence. I always thought that certain people are ‘untouchable’ or at least ‘unreachable’ whether that’s the billionaire CEO or the author of the New York Times best seller. Turns out, people are nice! Sometimes, really important people are willing to help, just for the sake of helping. I still ‘cold email’ different people I admire just to seek advice, and the help received has been invaluable.

As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Rami Hashish.

Dr. Rami Hashish is the Founder of pareIT, an artificial intelligence platform that interprets medical records. Dr. Rami is a serial entrepreneur having also founded the National Biomechanics Institute (NBI), a national consulting firm that examines the causes of accidents and injuries for legal disputes. While still active in NBI, Dr. Rami is currently focused on pareIT, which is in partnership with Amazon, and launched to the public in June 2022. pareIT is set to disrupt the industry by being the first automated process for medical record summaries. pareIT’s process is 10X the speed and about a 1/3 of the costs compared to traditional, manual services. It stands as the only technological solution to a 70-billion-dollar industry and with the use of AI, will continue to improve overtime, continuously resetting the bar for accuracy and efficiency. Holding two doctorate degrees (a PhD in Biomechanics and a Doctorate of Physical Therapy), Dr. Rami is of the most retained biomechanics experts in the country, having been retained as an expert witness on more than 1,000 occasions.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

While working on my PhD, there was this major shoe company that was facing a lawsuit for false claims. People were wearing these shoes based in part on the premise that it could help them physically, but some experienced injuries. I was contacted to examine the claims, and to determine whether the shoes in fact caused the injuries in question. My exposure to this case introduced me to the idea of working as an expert witness, and the intersection between medicine, science, and the law. A few years later, I founded the National Biomechanics Institute, which focuses on utilizing science to address legal questions and issues. The more ingrained I got in the industry, the more I realized it was fraught with inefficiencies that could be solved with technology, leading to the development of pareIT.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

During the pandemic, we globalized some of our operations, transitioning some of our workforce to the Philippines and Ukraine. A month or so before our intended launch, a massive typhoon hit the Philippines, displacing 90% of the team. Still reeling, about 2 months later, Russia invaded Ukraine, displacing and endangering our Ukrainian team. Here we are, just coming off a pandemic, and now having to deal with a natural disaster and a war! Thank God, everyone (thus far) has come out unscathed, but, particularly with the war, it’s something we are still dealing with. The silver lining is that these situations forced us to adapt, address inefficiencies and to improve our processes, ultimately making us far more resilient.

Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?

We’ve developed an artificial intelligence platform that summarizes medical records upwards of 10–20x faster than what could be done by a human. Doctors have only so much time to review a patient record, so by improving the speed, we will help eliminate potential oversights that sometimes lead to poor care and medical malpractice. Similarly, lawyers and insurance companies will now be able review and analyze cases more thoroughly, ensuring nothing is lost in analysis and justice is ultimately served.

How do you think this might change the world?

Saving time, saves lives — both figuratively and literally. pareIT can automate medical record summaries oftentimes upwards of 10–20x faster than what can be done by hand. This is a clear benefit to the medicolegal industry: reducing time and resources of lawyers and insurance companies limits the potential for human error and optimizes potential for achieving justice. Arguably, the greater benefit, however, is to doctors and their patients. Doctors can more efficiently gain a complete understanding of the patient record, which in turn, can help maximize care and limit potential malpractice.

Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

I think people have this inherent fear that teaching machines to teach themselves can result in a situation where basically the train moves off the tracks and we can’t control what happens. But that situation is totally contingent upon what you’re building and how you build it. With pareIT, there’s not really a doomsday scenario as the machine learning will simply lead to improvements in accuracy and speed of medical and medicolegal data processing.

Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?

I founded a national firm that provides expert witness services in the legal field. In doing so, I became one of the most retained biomechanics experts in the country. Organizing and extracting information from medical records was a pain point I had, and I quickly realized it was a pain point for others, including the lawyers and insurance companies that would retain me, as well as the doctors whom I would work with. To address this issue, they would be relegated to either outsourcing medical summaries abroad, which would be time consuming and expensive, or in the case of insurance companies and attorneys, having their in­house legal teams (e.g., associates, paralegals, legal assistants) summarize the records, which would not only be time consuming and expensive, but also be fraught with inaccuracies due to a lack of domain expertise. There was an obvious problem that was not only affecting my own productivity, but that of the entire industry. A solution was needed, and I thought I was the best person to figure it out.

What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?

I don’t mean for this to come across brash, but I believe the only limiting factor in pareIT achieving widespread adoption is our ability to keep up with demand. In the medicolegal space, medical summaries are an inefficient, highly time consuming and expensive process. It would be prudent of any law firm or medical practitioner to use pareIT as it automates an otherwise manual process in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. So ultimately, widespread adoption really comes down to our ability to scale with the demand.

What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?

I think of the medicolegal industry like high school: if the popular kids like something, the rest of the kids will at least take notice. Having already achieved success in this space, we are simply leveraging our current clients and relationships. Specifically, we are going to some of our larger clients and asking them to use pareIT and to provide us with any feedback they may have. If we get their buy in, then others will follow. In the meantime, we use their suggestions to continuously improve.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My parents are the two people who I am most grateful for. Now that may sound cliché, but I am not just grateful for their love and how they raised my brother and I, but also for how they guided my education and career. See, there’s this stereotype that ‘brown’ parents tell their children that they can be whatever they want to be — as long as it’s a doctor, engineer, or lawyer. My parents never said that to me, even though I am ironically now involved in all three disciplines. Rather, they told me to find what I love and do it with passion. They realized that if you do something you love, you’ll put in the time to excel. Even now, I ask my parents their advice before I make any major decision, most recently, as to whether I should step away from NBI to start pareIT. Their response was that if it would make me happy, and that if it could change the world, then to go for it. So that’s what I did.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Initially I felt I was doing my part by allocating a portion of NBI’s net revenue to charity. I started to feel this wasn’t enough, which is one of the reasons I decided to start pareIT. I wanted to build a company that I had expertise in but could also have a lasting impact. Yes, like any company, we want to make money, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to use technology to make work more efficient for doctors and lawyers, leading to better patient care and helping the achievement of justice. So, whereas before, ‘bringing goodness’ was a byproduct, now it’s the mission, and money is the byproduct.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why.

1. Education is cool, but grit is what matters. When hiring employees, it’s important to make sure they have the requisite education and skills to succeed at a job. But ultimately, what dictates success is grit.
2. Talk less, listen more. People think effective leadership is the ability to control those around you. Nothing could be further from the truth. The best way to lead, is to understand people so well, that you put them in the best position to be successful. The only way to know how to do so, is to listen to them.
3. Don’t be shy to reach out to people of influence. I always thought that certain people are ‘untouchable’ or at least ‘unreachable’ whether that’s the billionaire CEO or the author of the New York Times best seller. Turns out, people are nice! Sometimes, really important people are willing to help, just for the sake of helping. I still ‘cold email’ different people I admire just to seek advice, and the help received has been invaluable.
4. Value vacation. There’s that adage that an entrepreneur is the only person who’s willing to work 80 hours, so they don’t have to work 40. Well, sometimes getting away from it all provides mental clarity that may help propel your business. So be sure to give your mind a break.
5. Empower your employees. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that we should value our happiness and people are more productive if they’re happy. So don’t be so rigid with what you think is best. Rather, listen to your employees and see what makes them tick. If they are happier and more productive working from home, let them do so. If they prefer to be in the office, allow them to do that. Let smart people make decisions for themselves.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

The movement that I would love to see is forced exposure. Our country has become increasingly more divisive on various social and political topics. With social media leading to confirmation bias, it doesn’t seem like there’s an end in sight and the divide is only widening. It’s imperative we address this before we become more divided as a society. So, what I would like to see is that for every political or social follow someone has on social media, they force themselves to follow an individual or association on the opposing side. We don’t all need to agree, but we should all consider being empathetic and understanding of the opposing side.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“The only people who can pull you down, are beneath you.”

Unfortunately, there will always be people who have something negative or pessimistic to say about you personally, or about your goals and aspirations. It’s important to have a filter and consider the thoughts of those who matter. If someone has experience and your best interest in mind, listen to them, otherwise, don’t give it any weight.

Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

pareIT uses AI to summarize medical and medicolegal records.

The initial target market is lawyers and insurance companies. See, in medicolegal cases, legal teams sort through sometimes thousands of pages of medical records to get an understanding of the patient case. Because it’s all done by hand, a thousand pages, may take a few days to summarize, and cost more than $1000 dollars.

pareIT, on the other hand, uses machine learning and can do that same 1,000 pages in less than a couple of hours for a fraction of the cost. We were able to do this by training pareIT on over a million data points utilizing our patent-pending processes and algorithms. As a result, we have already begun to disrupt the 70-billion-dollar medicolegal market, with some of the highest volume law firms and esteemed medical practitioners in the country having already adopted our technology.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

• Twitter: @RamiHashish
• Instagram: @dr.ramihashish
• TikTok: @injuryexpert

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.