Hegarty is trying to make nutrition findings visible during hospital care so clinicians can recognize malnutrition and act on it sooner.
Molly Hegarty is the founder and CEO of Junum, the developer of MalnutritionCDS for hospital nutrition teams and physicians. A registered dietitian and former Intel engineer originally from Connecticut, she combines clinical nutrition experience with software and engineering skills.
From Engineering to Clinical Nutrition
She earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering and a master’s degree at Bastyr University’s School of Nutrition and Exercise Science. She later moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, for a dietetic internship at Tulane University, according to a 2017 Biz New Orleans profile.
By 2014, she was working as a nutritionist for offshore oilfield workers in the Gulf of Mexico. That work prompted her to combine her engineering background with nutrition practice in a digital-health business.
Starting RDnote in New Orleans
The business was then called RDnote and was based at the New Orleans BioInnovation Center. It developed software that brought patient records and clinical information into decision support for nutrition care.
“We’re trying to change healthcare through nutrition and technology,” she told Biz New Orleans in 2017. In that interview, she described giving physicians information when it could affect a patient’s treatment, while reducing time spent charting.
Developing Junum’s Hospital Workflow
Junum now develops MalnutritionCDS, which helps dietitians document clinical nutrition findings and helps physicians use them in diagnosis. The company identifies Hegarty as founder and CEO, with a team spanning nutrition, product, operations, and applications.
The Midland Health partnership describes the software integrated into the hospital’s Cerner record. It is a concrete expression of the direction she described early in the business: make nutrition information usable within the care team’s existing clinical workflow.