Transforming Nashville's Healthcare Technology Ecosystem Through Research
Growing up in the heart of Silicon Valley during the tech boom of the 1990s, Dr. Daniel Fabbri was immersed in an environment that would shape the trajectory of his future career. Fabbri's entrepreneurial spirit first manifested in his high school days, when he founded a startup which aimed to help other students secure internships in the Silicon Valley tech scene. “It didn't go very far,” Fabbri admits, “but it did prove that I could build something and use it as a demonstration of my capabilities, which helped me land my first internship at Yahoo.” From his early adulthood, Fabbri found himself drawn to the world of big data and machine learning, fueled by his early experiences as an intern at tech giants that would spark his passion for building the next generation through higher education.
From Project to Product: Maize Analytics
Dr. Daniel Fabbri completed his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, where he combined his interests in privacy and security with healthcare. “I often joke that my mother wanted me to be a ‘real doctor,’ so instead I married one; but when you explore the intersection of healthcare with privacy, security, big data, and machine learning, you end up focusing on how to secure electronic medical records,” Fabbri explained. His thesis work focused on building a system to monitor electronic medical record (EMR) access logs, similar in concept to credit card fraud monitoring, but to identify inappropriate use of patient data.
In 2013, Dr. Fabbri received an NSF Innovation Corps Award, which enabled him to venture out of the academic scene and engage with potential customers. This experience led Fabbri to found Maize Analytics to commercialize his thesis work.
"Entrepreneurship is the leg work that has to get done to get a project and convert it into a product," Fabbri stated.
Under Dr. Fabbri’s leadership, Maize Analytics was deployed to hundreds of hospitals in North America, monitoring billions of access events every month.
“I remember meeting Dan for the first time in 2014 when he was interviewing for a faculty position in DBMI,” recalls Alan Bentley, Director of CTTC. “The department chair asked me to meet with Dan, as Dan wanted to know how Vanderbilt would view his company Maize, and what avenues he had available to continue developing the company while working his day job at Vanderbilt. It took me less than 10 minutes speaking with Dan to know that he was a special kind of researcher. The way he thought about research, how results could be positioned to impact healthcare, the importance of productizing outcomes. He was impressive from day one,” reflected Alan.
Embracing Collaborations at Vanderbilt
In 2014, Fabbri's journey continued as he transitioned into a faculty role at Vanderbilt University, balancing his responsibilities as an assistant professor mentoring students, winning grants, and continuing his duties as the CEO of Maize Analytics. In 2021, Maize Analytics was acquired by SecureLink, Inc., a leading provider of third-party remote access and security based in Austin, Texas. A year later, SecureLink was bought by Imprivata, Inc., headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. Dr. Fabbri, who had moved into the role of Chief Data Scientist at Imprivata, remained in that position for a bit over a year at Imprivata before departing the company in July 2024 after his 10-year successful entrepreneurial journey.
Over the years, Dr. Fabbri’s research has spanned a wide range of areas, from sleep apnea analysis to adverse event prediction in oncology, all with a focus on applying big data and machine learning to healthcare challenges.
"I value Vanderbilt’s collaborative spirit because I have a particular set of skills that, when combined with other medical expertise, can solve impactful problems," said Fabbri.
He continued, “something great about Vanderbilt is that it's a small enough community that you can take someone from ENT surgery and mix them with a person in biomedical informatics or computer science, and that combination allows you to do some really interesting things.” Beyond Dr. Fabbri’s academic work, he focuses on medical information research, teaching courses, mentoring graduate students, and participating in entrepreneurship programs such as the Wond’ry’s Faculty Ideator Program.
As a Vanderbilt Innovation Ambassador and the director of the Catalyzing Informatics Innovation program, Dr. Fabbri is dedicated to guiding other researchers and aspiring inventors through the process of commercializing their work. “I've gone through this journey, and I know where a lot of the hiccups and bottlenecks are. I can help my peers navigate the world of translation from research to entrepreneurship and provide a sounding board to help them validate whether they have a commercial opportunity. An idea is only part of the journey that requires grit,” he mentioned. “Dan is a poster child for the Innovation Ambassador program,” points out Phil Swaney, the CTTC Ambassador Program Manager. “His deep entrepreneurial experience and his willingness to share such experiences to help colleagues have shown to be invaluable to our faculty outreach and support efforts.”
New Ventures: Brim Analytics
Dr. Fabbri's most recent venture, Brim Analytics, is a testament of his ability to adapt and leverage emerging technologies. Brim Analytics is an AI-powered platform that democratizes medical chart abstraction, allowing researchers and clinicians to quickly and accurately extract structured data from electronic medical records without the need for coding expertise. “We started building the core infrastructure for Brim years ago, with the idea of using crowdsourced medical students to do the chart abstraction,” Fabbri explained. “When the new wave of generative AI arrived, we realized we could repurpose that existing infrastructure to create an AI-driven solution that would be even more powerful and scalable,” he continued. By leveraging the best foundational language models, Brim Analytics provides an intuitive, collaborative tool that can be deployed across multiple institutions.
As a hub of medical research and innovation, Vanderbilt has been the perfect testbed for Brim’s development, providing Dr. Fabbri and his team with a wealth of real-world use cases and feedback, with nearly 30 teams at the university already using the free, in-house service. “We've had people use it for cancer progression, mental health, and even to identify pickleball injuries,” Fabbri said. This customer-centric approach has been crucial to Brim's evolution: “you often don't know what you're building until you actually have people using it,” Fabbri noted.
The Next Cure, Faster
As Dr. Fabbri continues to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare technology, his story serves as an inspiration to researchers and entrepreneurs, demonstrating the power of combining academic rigor with a relentless drive to turn ideas into real-world impact. Looking ahead, Dr. Fabbri envisions Brim Analytics facilitating clinical research by streamlining clinical trial matching, managing registries, and enabling consistent chart abstraction across multi-site studies. His vision is for Brim to be deployed across the US healthcare ecosystem, accelerating clinical research and drug discovery by removing a critical bottleneck. “It is amazing putting the tool in peoples’ hands and seeing what they do with it,” Fabbri said.
A key part of this expansion is ensuring that Brim Analytics is easily deployable, with a “bring your own language model” approach that allows sites to leverage their own approved LLM endpoints tools while still benefiting from Brim's capabilities and the privacy and security benefits.
"The thing that is important to me is getting software distributed across the country to impact and benefit patient care," said Fabbri.
At Vanderbilt, we have started this process and are already seeing some “wow” moments,” Fabbri stated. With Brim Analytics, Dr. Fabbri and his team are poised to transform the healthcare landscape, one chart abstraction at a time – and in doing so, they may just help unlock the next medical breakthrough.
Dr. Daniel Fabbri's journey from academic research to successful entrepreneurship serves as an inspiring example of the power of translating innovative ideas into impactful real-world solutions. Through his faculty role at Vanderbilt and his commitment to mentoring others, Fabbri has demonstrated the collaborative spirit that drives meaningful progress in healthcare technology.
Now, with his latest venture Brim Analytics, Fabbri is positioned to further transform the landscape of clinical research by democratizing medical chart abstraction through the power of AI. As Dr. Fabbri navigates the changing healthcare landscape, his journey highlights the significance of perseverance and determination to transform academic innovations into products that can expedite medical discoveries and enhance patient care. For more information, visit brimanalytics.com.