Meet the Engineers at the Heart of Thyme Care: Alphan Kirayoglu
What does engineering look like at a company that’s connecting patients, caregivers, clinicians, and health plans to effectively coordinate cancer care?
With a background in both finance and healthcare technology, Head of Data Science Alphan Kirayoglu’s current project is building the foundation and technology that will better the cancer journey for patients, their caregivers, and providers. We sat down with him to learn why he joined the company, what’s so special about healthcare technology, and all of the cool things he’s currently working on.
How’d you end up at Thyme Care?
I decided to join Thyme Care because of something that happened in the fall of 2016—four years before the company was founded. I was sitting on a yoga mat next to my wife in a birthing class. To kick us off, the nurse leading the class asked everyone how much time they spent picking a stroller. There were different answers ranging from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks. Then she followed up by asking, “How much time have you spent understanding the potential medical interventions that could be performed during delivery?” There was a silence of reflection and self-consciousness. Even as someone who had been working in health tech, I had spent more time researching a stroller than the medical information I needed to know. It was a strange realization for me, that as soon as we transition from “consumers” to “patients,” we stop our research. We become passive participants in our own care.
Fast forward to the winter of 2021: I was waiting on Zoom to chat with Robin and expecting a somewhat traditional founder pitch to convince me to join Thyme Care. Robin pulled out his phone and showed me text messages from people reaching out because a loved one was recently diagnosed with cancer. After reading a few exchanges, he added, “I get a message almost every day. This is why I started Thyme Care.” All I could think of was how lost and unprepared I felt during that birthing class as I got ready to welcome my daughter into the world. And then I thought about the raw fear and anxiety of someone who just heard the words, “You might have cancer.”
I was in, I had to be.
What makes working in health tech interesting?
Health tech is an interesting space to be in for a lot of reasons. For starters, our work is impacting people’s quality of life when it’s most disrupted. It’s a refreshing change from the work I was doing in the financial industry. I’m using the same quantitative skills and methods, but I’m using it to help high-need individuals navigate their cancer diagnosis.
It’s also an industry that is fundamentally broken and highly regulated. We need to build technology and products that reflect empathy, security, and scalability, which is a really challenging task. It requires a deep understanding of how to deploy new technologies, with all of this in mind.
Over the last 8 years, I’ve come to see all of the difficulties of the health tech space as rewards and challenges. I’m an engineer, and I take pride in finding creative solutions in a space with such complex constraints and improving an individual’s life during a really hard time.
Tell us about Thyme Care’s approach to data science, engineering, product, design, and what you’ve learned
Health tech has traditionally tried to solve patient issues from a one dimensional approach, either through technology only or people only. At Thyme Care, our approach is to leverage both technology and people to be effective and scalable.
Empathy for our members is at the core of everything we do. We are constantly using insights at both the member level and the population level. In practice, this looks like a constant feedback loop. We analyze our data at the population level to measure the success of our interventions and make sure we’re improving outcomes from the perspective of our providers and health plans. On the flip side, our day-to-day is driven mostly around member-level data and the interventions for each individual member in our workflows because every individual’s cancer journey is unique, so their healthcare should be as well.
The close relationship we’ve built between the Engineering and our Care Teams only makes our products better and better. It’s awe inspiring to see the curiosity of our Care Team members when they want to know what “network calls” or “API endpoints” are. We are all learning from each other.
The symptom management workflow we are getting ready to roll out is a great example. Our Care Team suggested that we could play a huge role in avoiding ER visits and inpatient admissions by proactively collecting data around members through weekly assessments that measure a variety of potential symptoms. We’re able to identify members that are at a higher risk by using that population-level analysis, and applying those themes at a member level to prevent unnecessary admissions.
What does the future of the technology team look like at Thyme Care?
Our technology team consists of data scientists, software engineers, actuaries, product managers, and designers. We are looking to scale our team to support our growth and continue to find innovative solutions to the interesting challenges we are facing in three broad areas:
Our applications: Thyme Box, our care navigation application, is essential for the sustainable growth of our business. Thyme Box is designed to deliver interventions systematically and more importantly allow our care team to focus on building a deep empathic understanding of our members’ needs. In addition, we are exploring applications that are provider and member facing to increase communication and transparency to ensure patients receive high-value care from the day they first receive a cancer diagnosis.
Platform and infrastructure: Our team understands that high-quality products are built on top of solid foundations and the complexity of our systems will only increase as we scale our organization. We are looking to recruit engineers to manage added complexity without compromising our development experience as engineers, but more importantly, without compromising the quality of products for our users. We are excited about making investments in observability, managing serverless infrastructure, and building repeatable patterns to support our growth over the next few years.
Population health and outcomes: Understanding our member populations and the effectiveness of our interventions is paramount to our success as Thyme Care. That’s why we are going to continue to recruit individuals to support our complex modeling needs for study design and outcomes measurement. We are excited to be in a position to reshape how our patients access and receive cancer care, share our learnings with our partners and the broader oncology community, and lead the adoption of value-based oncology interventions.
Eng + Data Team Standup in October