All Episodes

May 6, 2024 25 mins

This episode’s Community Champion Sponsor is Ossur. To learn more about their ‘Responsible for Tomorrow’ Sustainability Campaign, and how you can get involved: CLICK HERE

---

Episode Overview: 

Clinicians are drowning in a deluge of unstructured medical data, struggling to efficiently extract critical insights that could improve patient care and outcomes. Our next guest, Dr. Tim O'Connell, is taking on this monumental challenge as the co-founder and CEO of emtelligent.

With a unique background spanning IT, radiology, and medical informatics, Tim experienced firsthand the limitations of existing natural language processing tools in healthcare settings. Driven to develop a powerful solution, he founded emtelligent to harness cutting-edge AI and language models.

While together, Tim shares his pioneering journey building emtelligent's innovative technology that structures overwhelming volumes of unstructured patient data and how he and his colleagues are empowering healthcare organizations to operate more efficiently, reduce physician burnout, and unlock data-driven insights to transform care quality.

Join us to learn from Tim and how the emtelligent team is unlocking healthcare's unstructured data troves. Let’s go! 

Episode Highlights:

  • Tim's advice: Get out and make a change, find a business partner with complementary skills ("your Anoop", his co-founder)
  • Origin story: Seeing limitations of existing NLP tools, partnering with NLP expert Dr. Anoop Sarkar
  • Cutting-edge technology: Structuring massive volumes of unstructured medical data with advanced language AI
  • Powerful use cases: Transforming needle-in-a-haystack data challenges, drastically reducing manual chart review workloads
  • Future vision: AI-augmented healthcare teams over next 2-5 years, reducing burnout by automating drudgery tasks

About our Guest: 

Dr. Tim O’Connell is a practicing radiologist in Vancouver and cofounded emtelligent in 2016. He has served as vice chair of medical informatics in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Radiology since 2017. Prior to his clinical and entrepreneurial careers, Dr. O’Connell worked as an IT professional for Nortel Networks and Bell, where he was director of engineering for the Bank of Montreal account.

Early in his career, Dr. O’Connell realized that radiologists were often tasked with a volume of work that didn’t afford them the time needed to carefully review and understand each patient's clinical history. In 2015, he met Dr. Anoop Sarkar, a widely published Ph.D. and full professor of natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence. Dr. Sarkar shared Tim’s interest in medical language processing and desire to develop meaningful solutions that would have a positive impact on the lives of patients and care providers. It quickly became obvious to both that they were perfectly matched to solve the problem Tim had identified, together bringing a powerful combination of deep clinical and data science expertise. 

emtelligent was officially formed when Drs. O’Connell and Sarkar joined forces with Jeff O'Connell, an experienced technology operations management leader; and Dan Carriere, a seasoned expert in building and scaling biomedical startup ventures, adding experienced entrepreneurship and business leadership to the team. Collectively, the team successfully built and launched emtelliPro®, one of the industry's first deep-learning-based Medical Language Understanding engines.


Links Supporting This Episode:

  • emtelligent Website: CLICK HERE
  • Dr. Tim O’Connell...
Mark as Played

Advertise With Us

Popular Podcasts

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.

Crime Junkie

Crime Junkie

Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.

The Brothers Ortiz

The Brothers Ortiz

The Brothers Ortiz is the story of two brothers–both successful, but in very different ways. Gabe Ortiz becomes a third-highest ranking officer in all of Texas while his younger brother Larry climbs the ranks in Puro Tango Blast, a notorious Texas Prison gang. Gabe doesn’t know all the details of his brother’s nefarious dealings, and he’s made a point not to ask, to protect their relationship. But when Larry is murdered during a home invasion in a rented beach house, Gabe has no choice but to look into what happened that night. To solve Larry’s murder, Gabe, and the whole Ortiz family, must ask each other tough questions.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.