From the founding team to the first pilot
As CTO and co-founder, I helped recruit the founding engineering team and worked on-site with nursing home clinicians to get our first pilot into their hands. I built Yumi’s first iOS clinical copilot around live voice and the patient chart. It could prepare draft orders, notes, and assessments and ask for missing details before a clinician reviewed what to save.
Co-founding Yumi has meant connecting product direction with hands-on engineering. Working alongside clinicians shaped how I built admission assessments, order sets, and care planning into the platform. Those workflows gave the agent both the clinical context to reason with and a place for clinicians to review its work.
That approach carried into our MDS work. A Minimum Data Set assessment asks clinicians to code a resident’s condition and care from records that may be spread across nursing notes, evaluations, diagnoses, and treatment documentation. I worked on both sides of the agent, from retrieving source records for individual questions to putting the supporting records alongside suggestions in the assessment workflow.
How our home-built retrieval pipeline works
Each MDS question asks about a specific clinical fact and may have its own observation period. The pipeline handles those boundaries before it turns chart material into a suggested answer.
- Set the window. Start with the resident, the MDS question, and the Assessment Reference Date, which anchors the question’s observation period.
- Find relevant records. Combine clinician tags, rule-based links from structured chart fields, and keyword retrieval over notes. Keep each result linked to its original record.
- Work out what the chart supports. Use rules for structured facts and a language model to interpret narrative. Check the proposed answer against the item’s allowed values and show gaps or conflicting records for review.
- Show the answer with its source. Present a suggested answer, an explanation, and a link to the chart as Evidence. Relevant material that needs further review appears as a Reference. Clinicians decide what to apply to the assessment.
Why an order and an administration need separate treatment
Consider an oxygen order. It helps the agent find a record relevant to an oxygen-therapy question. For a question about care actually delivered, a dated administration record can support an answer when it falls within the observation period. The order remains available as a Reference. The distinction makes it possible for a reviewer to see which fact supports the suggestion and where documentation is still needed.
The same review workflow lets clinicians inspect how selected answers affect a Medicare case-mix preview before they apply any changes to the assessment.