Maya R. Said, Sc.D. put together a lengthy and varied career in the two decades after earning her doctorate from MIT. There was biology and computing research, then health care R&D and consulting, and most recently an executive role at pharmaceutical company Novartis leading Global Market Access for oncology.

But in 2017, she left the pharmaceutical industry after her own personal health scare, and amid growing frustration that treatment innovations weren’t reaching patients.

“After working for 20 years in the health care industry and being focused on patients, I became a patient,” Said recalls. “That experience was overwhelming in ways I never anticipated.”

Across six months navigating her own care, Said realized just how disorienting the experience could be for patients. During this time, she reached out to Sami Shalabi, her former MIT classmate who had led the Google News team. Shalabi had helped his own family members navigate cancer care and access to doctors in Boston. As the two compared notes and expertise, they kept returning to a key question: could tech help people navigate difficult diagnoses, starting with cancer?

Nearly six years later, their answer is a resounding yes. The company they founded, Outcomes4Me, offers a free platform and app that leverages data, clinical guidelines, and AI to help cancer patients navigate their care. Patients can track their medications, view their medical records, and browse treatment options, among other features. By delivering relevant, understandable, and personalized information, Outcomes4Me aims to help patients make informed decisions with their providers and improve their health outcomes.

“We are on a mission to democratize health care by empowering patients,” enthuses Said, Outcomes4Me’s CEO. “It means providing the tools and the means for every one of us diagnosed with a disease to take a proactive approach to our care, to participate in treatment decisions, to manage our care, to access the latest treatments.”

To fuel that mission, the company has turned to Khoury College talent early and often, converting co-ops into post-graduation full-timers with striking regularity.

“The demand for software engineers is exploding, and supply cannot keep up with demand,” notes Shalabi, the company’s COO. “It’s important to build relationships with colleges that produce high-quality talent, and Khoury College has been a great feeder to our organization.”

Turn the whole thing upside down

“If a person is diagnosed with cancer, beyond the shock, they ultimately have two questions: what are my options, and how can I best manage my life,” Said explains. “They are not emotionally ready to consume all of the information being shared when they meet with their provider.”

And once they are?

“A typical consultation with a physician is 30 minutes, and that time is only shrinking,” Shalabi says. “It’s not enough to understand a complicated, life-altering disease.”

“It ends up being like a Google search where patients have to know what they’re looking for, and they have no clue what’s meaningful,” Said adds. “So personalized, evidence-based navigation with AI and machine learning — that’s what makes our platform special.”

When a patient signs up for Outcomes4Me, they answer questions about their diagnosis. Then the app presents relevant information about treatment options, clinical trials, and symptom management, which patients can discuss with their providers.

“We’re not here to replace providers; we’re here to augment that relationship so that it becomes more effective,” Said clarifies. “We as patients can improve things only by taking a more proactive role in our care.”

Because cancer patients deal with sky-high stakes, the platform has a similarly high bar for user experience, says Bill Desmarais, vice president of engineering. Outcomes4Me sources personalized treatment guidance from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, and the company’s clinical team answers questions in a streamlined way that hospitals and their portals often don’t.

“Medical data stored in hospital back-ends is very cluttered. A lot of relevant information in a cancer patient’s chart will be in unstructured fields in the doctor’s notes, handwritten or hand typed,” Desmarais explains. “Using AI and natural language processing, we can help to cover those gaps that are keeping people from understanding their treatment and what comes next.”

The company’s ultimate goal is to promote health equity in a country where access to new cancer drugs and treatments, medical records, and health care in general is far from equal. For Said, equity means meeting people where they are — geographically, psychologically, and emotionally — and getting the best health outcome possible for them.

“As an entrepreneur, you’re always looking for problems that touch you, that you can actually do something about,” Shalabi adds. “Computing is a powerful medium. With a small team and the right level of vision and ambition, you can do amazing things.”

When it came time to build that team, Said, familiar with Northeastern’s co-op program, began to tap it.

“The Khoury curriculum is clearly building the right foundations,” Shalabi says. “There is also a tremendous amount of diversity coming out of Khoury College, which is one of our core principles. A diverse team always results in better products and experiences.”

After hiring a few co-ops shortly after its 2017 founding, the company doubled and tripled down to the point that many full-time Outcomes4Me employees started as co-ops. The company likes that co-ops can accomplish in six months what would be nearly impossible in shorter internships; likewise, they can be folded into a team as full members, working on meaningful projects and expanding the team’s scope.

“If I hire a former co-op for full-time work post-college, it’s because I know they’re a cultural and technological fit. They’ve worked wonderfully with us for six months, so it’s always a slam dunk,” Desmarais explains, pointing out that an afternoon-long job interview doesn’t provide that same certainty. “Stepping in here and seeing that we already had a Northeastern program in place was wonderful. It meant I didn’t have to invent one.”

Mission control

When Desmarais interviews prospective co-ops, he tries to get a feel for whether they value the company’s mission. It’s no surprise, then, that Outcomes4Me has attracted students who have taken Khoury College’s “CS for Everyone” mission to heart.

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“In the software industry, we’re fortunate that it’s pretty easy for us to find jobs right now, but it’s a lot harder to find meaningful work,” says Samuel Wu-Ochs, who completed a co-op at Outcomes4Me in 2021, then worked on the web app for eight months as a full-timer after graduation. “What made me pursue this company was the fact that it was working on a product I could feel invested in … You’ll always have times when you struggle a bit at your job, so when that struggle comes, I want to know it’s for something I believe in.”

Most Outcomes4Me co-ops are, like Wu-Ochs, drawn in by their connection to the mission. For 2021 Northeastern grad and senior software engineer Marvin Sagastume, it was losing his grandfather to cancer. For Tyler Hallada, a 2016 grad and the tech lead for the web team, it was a desire to improve the broken health care system.

“I’ve struggled to find jobs that have a mission, like Outcomes4Me does. You usually have to find a nonprofit,” Hallada says. “I really like the mission, coming into work and helping people with real problems. I like being in the health care space, where there’s a big need for improvement. I can’t imagine myself at an ad tech company that makes people’s internet experiences worse just to make money for a few people.”

It’s not just the company’s mission that enlivens the day-to-day work; it’s that the engineers feel connected to the platform’s users, who the company often invites to share their stories with the team in person. For instance, in high school, Victoria Bowen — now a fourth-year computer science student — participated in a program that identified community needs and designed apps to help, a program that sparked her love for computer science. When she found Outcomes4Me, she also found the ingredient that had been missing in her first forays into the workplace.

“We’re such a small company, so we get to see firsthand where our changes go. Even if I’m working on a back-end feature, I can see how that impacts our users,” she says. “All you need is your computer and brain power.”

Christina Rong feels the same. Outcomes4Me was her third and final co-op at Khoury College; she joined full-time after graduation and now works as a software engineer on the mobile team.

“There’s a lot of emphasis on understanding why we create new features. Having that direct focus on actual people gave me a clear vision of what kind of software I was creating,” she explains. “And I’m not only working with software engineers. We have great medical experts on our team, so getting their perspective on how users will use the app and what kinks to solve gives me an underlying idea about how all of this ties together.”

Rong also notes that although many of Outcomes4Me’s engineers are men, the fact that the company is woman-led means she doesn’t feel as alienated as she might at a different workplace.

“I’ve noticed the minority of women in my CS classes and in the workplace,” Bowen adds. “It excites me to be in a place where I can advocate for girls to learn computer science, broaden their exposure to it, and see it as a possible career path.”

This supportive ethos also manifests in the company’s workflows and culture, which Khoury alumni say have remained supportive and collaborative as the company has grown.

“Every time we bring someone in, they join a culture that they can immediately feel supporting them,” says Wu-Ochs, who has worked with Sagastume to hire co-ops. “They won’t be blamed for making a mistake or feel stupid for asking questions. It encourages them to further that culture.”

Company meetings, morning standups, collaborative coding and problem-solving sessions — it all creates a culture conducive to contributions from new employees. Desmarais notes that while some recent grads have a gap between classroom and workplace software knowledge, the Khoury alumni have had exposure to real company teams, and have an easier time putting computation knowledge into practice.

“We constantly have new directions we’d like to go in, and that usually ends up growing the team,” Desmarais says. “So augmenting Outcomes4Me with active co-ops and having a pipeline of former co-ops in your network makes that piece much easier to manage.”

And as the company pushes beyond its initial focus on breast cancer to include other cancer types, those co-ops will keep coming, inspired — as Sagastume was — by a larger mission.

“I always wanted to make an impact in people’s lives,” Sagastume says. “I come from a family that’s less fortunate, that suffered a lot when I was growing up. I think a lot of people forget how blessed we are with where we live and everything we have. I love that every day when I come to work, I’m proud of what I’m doing. It touches my heart when we get reviews for the app saying, ‘Hey, you’re giving me hope.’”

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