Behind the Scalpel and the Screen: A Day in the Life at Aidify
Team: Evan Bloom (NYU Langone), Matt Causey, Scott Tenenbaum
About the Venture: Aidify provides a multilingual AI Care Aid that delivers personalized, always-on guidance based on each clinic’s specific protocols and instructions. The platform extends care beyond visits by helping patients get consistent answers and follow-through support at home.
Building a health tech startup isn’t glamorous. It’s 5 a.m. alarm clocks, scrubbing into the OR, and somehow also finding time to read conversation logs, answer investor emails, and debug AI agents, sometimes all before noon. Welcome to Aidify.
Aidify is building AI powered care agents called Care Aids that give patients 24/7 access to personalized guidance tailored to their doctor’s specific instructions and protocols. What started as a focus on perioperative care has grown into something broader: any clinical scenario where a patient needs reliable, physician specific support between appointments. We’re a lean team with a big mission, and the NYU Entrepreneurs Challenge has been the perfect proving ground for us to sharpen our thinking, stress test our model, and connect with the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Here’s a window into what a typical day actually looks like for the three of us.
Evan: From the OR to the Analytics Dashboard
My mornings usually start in the hospital. As an orthopedic surgery resident at NYU Langone, I spend a significant portion of my day in the operating room, scrubbing in on total knee replacements, ACL reconstructions, hip arthroplasties, the works. It’s intense, focused, and all consuming in the best way.
But the moment I step out of the OR, my brain shifts gears. One of the things I do religiously is read through our Care Aid conversation logs. Patients are talking to our AI agents at all hours, asking about pain medication, what to expect at their two week follow up, whether a symptom is normal. I go through those logs not just to monitor quality but to learn. Every conversation is a data point telling me what patients are actually worried about, what our agents nail, and where we have room to improve.
That clinical perspective is something no purely technical team can replicate. When I see a patient ask a question that our Care Aid answers ambiguously, I know exactly how a surgeon would want that communicated, because I am that surgeon. It keeps the product grounded in real clinical reality.
The late evenings are for everything else: product decisions, architecture reviews, investor updates, legal and compliance work, partnership strategy. My co founders joke that I never sleep. They’re not entirely wrong.
Scott: Building the Machine
If Aidify has a heartbeat, it’s Scott’s keyboard. As our technical co founder, Scott is heads down in code from the moment he wakes up until well past when most people are in bed. He’s the architect behind the Care Aid infrastructure, the voice agents, the webhook systems, the workflow definitions, the conversation logging pipelines, all of it.
What makes Scott exceptional isn’t just that he can build. It’s that he’s constantly asking what should be built better. He doesn’t wait for someone to flag a problem. If he spots an inefficiency, a reliability issue, or an architectural limitation, he’s already three steps into the solution before the rest of us have finished our coffee.
A recent example: we were running into reliability issues with deterministic patient identification tasks inside our voice agent workflows. Scott diagnosed the root cause, designed a hybrid backend webhook architecture to fix it, and had a working implementation running within days. That kind of speed and precision is what keeps Aidify moving.
Matt: On the Ground, In the Room (Sometimes With a Baby)
Matt is our go getter in the truest sense. While Evan is in the OR and Scott is in the codebase, Matt is out in the field, meeting with orthopedic surgeons, cardiologists, gastroenterologists, hospital system administrators, the works, building the relationships that turn Aidify from a compelling pitch into a signed contract.
On any given day, Matt might have three meetings with different clinical stakeholders: an independent orthopedic group in the morning, a health system VP of Surgery in the afternoon, a device company partnership conversation in the evening. He navigates each of these with an instinctive read of the room and a genuine ability to translate Aidify’s clinical and technical value into language that resonates with whoever is sitting across the table.
Oh, and Matt recently became a dad. His daughter arrived just weeks ago, which means that some of those calls with hospital executives happen with a newborn cradled in one arm. To his credit, she has yet to derail a single pitch. If anything, we think it humanizes him. Nothing says “trustworthy partner” quite like a man who can close a deal while also doing a passable job at a burp pat.
Matt also serves as an invaluable feedback loop for the whole team. The conversations he’s having in the field directly shape product decisions, pricing conversations, and our understanding of what different market segments actually need. In a startup, the best business development people make the whole company smarter, and Matt absolutely does that.
The Chaos, the Laughs, and the Unexpected Moments
There’s no shortage of humbling moments when you’re building something this ambitious with a small team. Early on, we built out patient facing content using the word “surgery” across the board, which felt perfectly reasonable coming from an orthopedic surgeon. Then we started working with other specialties. Gastroenterologists were quick to point out that what they do are procedures, not surgeries, and the distinction matters to their patients. Lesson learned, and the product is better for it.
Then there was the autocorrect incident. One of us sent a message to a physician partner where autocorrect swapped out a perfectly standard medical term for something completely nonsensical. The physician responded with a very polite, very confused follow up question. It took a moment to even realize what had happened. We’ve since made proofreading outbound messages a unofficial team policy, and the original exchange lives rent free in our group chat as a reminder that spell check is not your friend in healthcare.
There have been late nights coordinating across time zones, scrambling to get a pilot live before a surgeon’s patient list rolled over, and more than a few moments where the three of us had to be remarkably creative under pressure. That’s startup life. And honestly, we wouldn’t trade it.
The NYU Entrepreneurs Challenge has been a great structure in the midst of all that chaos. Our coaches have pushed us to think more rigorously, our cohort has kept us energized, and the process of having to articulate our work, like this very blog post, forces a useful kind of reflection that’s easy to skip when you’re moving fast.
Why We’re Doing This
Every time I review a conversation log and see a patient who messaged our Care Aid at 11 p.m., scared about pain after their knee replacement, not sure what to do, and got a clear, calm, accurate answer that helped them feel better and stay the course of their recovery plan, I remember why Aidify exists.
Patients deserve better support than the current system provides. Surgeons are stretched thin. The perioperative window is critically underserved. We’re building something that genuinely helps, and the journey to get there, with all its chaos and cafeteria meals and late night deploys, is one we’re proud to be on.
Thanks for following along. More to come.
