Novorol believes symptom assessment can help people reach appropriate care earlier and give clinicians useful information before a consultation.
Claire Novorol is a British-trained doctor and the co-founder and chief medical officer of Ada Health. Her path from pediatrics and clinical genetics into software grew out of an interest in using medical knowledge to help more people than she could see in clinical practice.
Medicine in Bristol and Cambridge
She studied pathology and medicine at the University of Bristol, worked in pediatrics in London, England, and specialized in clinical genetics. She then completed a neuroscience PhD at the University of Cambridge. Ada’s medical biography says she oversees medical quality and its medical teams.
In a Big Picture Medicine interview, Novorol described attending business and entrepreneurship events while at Cambridge. Meeting scientists and engineers who were forming companies gave her a different view of how she could use her clinical background.
Medical biography or interview
Doctorpreneurs and the Ada Founders
Novorol created Doctorpreneurs, a network where she interviewed doctors who had started companies and organized events. Through that wider community she met Ada’s other founders and joined as the medical co-founder.
The early software focused on decision support for specialists, including vertigo. She pushed for assessment earlier in the patient journey and for collecting information directly from patients, because clinicians had little time to enter additional data during an appointment.
Medical biography or interview
Designing Around Patients and Clinicians
“The patient has the time; they want to share this information,” Novorol explained in the podcast. Her view was that information gathered before a consultation could help a clinician prepare and support decisions about the appropriate service.
She also described learning to lead without trying to become an extrovert. She prefers hiring people with deeper expertise in their own fields, giving them responsibility, and using writing and smaller conversations to communicate. Those choices followed a transition from doing many early tasks herself to leading a larger medical organization.
Medical biography or interview