Jonathan Hirsch Founded Syapse to Address Untapped Health IT Potential

Jonathan Hirsch, founder and president of Syapse, was working to earn a PhD at Stanford when he noticed that physicians needed better software systems in order to successfully implement precision medicine. He then dropped out of graduate school to found Syapse, a health information technology company that provides physician-friendly software.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What was your vision when founding Syapse?

I founded Syapse a number of years ago. I actually dropped out of grad school at Stanford, out of a PhD, to do so. The original vision of the company was really the intersection of 2 forces. One was the rise of molecular medicine, or what we today call precision medicine, and then the other force was me as the young naïve Silicon Valley person noticing just how bad the software systems that physicians deal with are.

Many times physicians get a bit of a bad rap for not wanting to use software but, you know, if you look at the software that they have to use, I wouldn’t use it either! So I looked at that and said, on the one hand you have this explosion of information—molecular data, genomic data, clinical information, real-world evidence databases—and on the other hand you basically just have digitization of paper as your software systems for the clinical workflow. And I thought, something’s gotta give.

If we’re really going to implement molecular medicine, or precision medicine, you actually have to have a software system that helps the physician rather than just gets in their way. So I decided to drop out of grad school and start Syapse, and the rest is history.