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AIRO
About
Contact
AIRO
About
Contact
About
Contact

What Problem AIRO Addresses

Across healthcare, risk is often:

  • Estimated once, early, using static scores

  • Fragmented across systems and care settings

  • Difficult to interpret in real time

  • Poorly aligned with day-to-day clinical decision-making

As a result, variation in care and delayed recognition of deterioration can persist, even in highly specialized environments.

AIRO is built to address this gap by making risk more visible, interpretable, and actionable—without replacing clinical judgment.

How AIRO Is Different

AIRO is deliberately designed to be:

  • Dynamic – Risk is updated over time, rather than fixed at a single point

  • Explainable – Outputs are transparent and interpretable, not black-box predictions

  • Clinician-led – Clinical oversight and governance are central to design and use

  • Workflow-aware – Insights are intended to align with real clinical processes

  • Supportive, not autonomous – AIRO informs decisions; it does not make them

This approach prioritizes trust, safety, and clinical relevance over automation or scale for its own sake.

What AIRO Is Not

AIRO is not:

  • An autonomous decision-making system

  • A replacement for clinical expertise

  • A generic alerting or early warning tool

  • A consumer-facing application

AIRO is intended to function as decision support infrastructure, embedded within existing clinical and digital environments.

Our Current Focus

AIRO is currently being developed and evaluated within cardiac surgery and perioperative care, in close collaboration with clinicians and health systems.

This domain provides:

  • High-acuity decision-making

  • Rich clinical data

  • Clear moments where risk context matters

Cardiac surgery serves as a validation and learning environment, with a governance and technical framework designed to support careful extension to other high-acuity clinical contexts over time.

Governance and Safety

AIRO is built with a governance-first philosophy.

This includes:

  • Clinician oversight of model development and use

  • Transparency around model assumptions and limitations

  • Ongoing performance monitoring and review

  • Clear boundaries between decision support and clinical responsibility

Our goal is to ensure that AIRO can be used responsibly, safely, and defensibly within real-world healthcare systems.

Meet the Team

AIRO is led by clinicians and researchers with experience in high-acuity care, health systems research, and the responsible translation of data-driven tools into clinical practice.

Clinical leadership guides the definition of use cases, integration into real-world workflows, and the governance of how AIRO is developed and used.

The project is supported by a multidisciplinary group of collaborators with expertise in clinical research, applied machine learning, and health system implementation.

AIRO is developed in close partnership with clinicians, academic institutions, and health system leaders to ensure it remains safe, practical, and clinically meaningful.

Pieter de Jager, MD, MSc, FRCPC

Pieter de Jager is a cardiac anesthesiologist and Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University, based at the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax. He has fellowship training in cardiovascular anesthesia and critical care, with additional postgraduate training in public health medicine and health economics. His research focuses on perioperative risk stratification, health system performance, and the responsible translation of data-driven tools into clinical practice. He leads multiple clinical and health systems research initiatives aimed at improving safety, efficiency, and equity in high-acuity surgical care

Jamie Dougherty, BMBS, FABA

Jamie Dougherty is a staff cardiac anesthesiologist with Nova Scotia Health and an Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University. He completed fellowship training in adult cardiothoracic anesthesiology at Stanford University Medical Center, following residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. His academic interests include perioperative communication, decision-making in high-risk clinical settings, and outcomes research in acute care. He brings frontline clinical insight and research experience to the development and evaluation of AIRO.