Alumni profile: Kimon-Aristotelis Vogt, S.M. '23

Ask someone why they became a doctor, and you might get a range of answers. Perhaps they wanted to help people live healthier lives, or find cures and treatments for diseases. Maybe they wanted to address a need in an underserved population, or prevent others from experiencing the emotional trauma of a lost loved one.

You probably won’t find a doctor who would say that clicking through electronic health records was their motivation for joining the profession. Yet studies suggest that’s exactly what doctors do constantly in their daily shifts, averaging more than 4,000 clicks per day as they review patient charts, past visits and test results. So many clicks significantly reduce the amount of time they have to actually interact with patients, leading to high rates of burnout.

“More than 75% of physicians who struggle with burnout say dealing with electronic health records is one of the main causes,” said Kimon-Aristotelis Vogt, S.M. '23. “I’ve shadowed physicians in different hospitals and medical practices. Initially I thought it was just clicks, just data entry. But standing behind them and seeing how frustrated they were trying to find information, I realized how annoying it was.”

Vogt, a former data science master’s student at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), thinks artificial intelligence (AI) could be the solution to all those annoying, frustrating, demotivating clicks. His start-up, Sporo Health, is developing AI tools that can quickly scan and extract data from thousands of electronic records, making it far easier and faster for physicians to find the information they need, review patient histories, and generate new clinical notes. Sporo, which comes from the Greek word for “seed,” finished its pre-seed fundraising and is now actively developing its products for market deployment.

“We hope to reduce the rates of physicians leaving their jobs, while motivating new ones to join because they’ll be able to focus on the parts of their work they most enjoy,” he said. “We’re part of a new generation that’s more tech savvy and comfortable with AI, so we really think this is the best time to try to improve the hard part of the job. All of our features are purely for support. We’re not trying to supplant a physician’s ability to do their job or make a diagnosis – we just want to make it easier for them.”

Growing up in Greece, Vogt was always interested in math and the sciences, winning medals in math and physics competitions while in high school. He went on to study electrical engineering as an undergraduate at Texas Christian University, and did a summer internship in AI research at Carnegie Mellon University.

“At my summer internship, we started applying AI to neuroscience, healthcare, the brain, topics like that, and I really became fascinated by how much math was behind it,” he said. “There was a point where I realized that this was what I wanted to do, because it had the math I’d loved studying since a young age, and I felt like I could use it with this new technology to make a real impact.”

Vogt knew that summer research and an electrical engineering degree wouldn’t be enough to really tap into AI’s potential, so he began looking for graduate programs to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. That brought him to SEAS, where he was able to explore data science and its relationship to AI. As a two-semester capstone project, he worked with Microsoft to develop AI algorithms that could generate data sets from satellite imaging. Vogt so enjoyed his time at SEAS that he became a teaching fellow for an advanced data science class. 

“The SEAS program allowed me to make sure I got a holistic view all the way from big data and data science down to my exact focus,” he said. “If you were interested in computer vision, there’d be opportunities to focus on taking computer vision classes. If you were interested in specific types of neural networks, you could take classes only related to them or their intersection with, for example, healthcare.”

Along with an education in AI and data, SEAS also exposed Vogt to an entirely new idea: entrepreneurship. He pursued multiple potential start-up ideas before devising Sporo, even receiving a Spark Grant from the Harvard Innovation Labs while here.

“Since I was young, people told me that since I was good at math, I’d become an engineer, and then go work as a product manager at a big company,” he said. “When I first came to Harvard, the interactions I had with my cohort and all these different events made me understand that people can have an idea, execute it and do something more than work for a huge corporation.”

Entrepreneurship has since become such an essential part of Vogt’s identity that he recently spoke to Greece’s Hellenic Parliament on the topic.

“We’re trying to build better innovation hubs, and we’re trying to figure out why all of our amazing scientists are leaving the country, and how we can get them to come back,” Vogt said. “I talked about this exact topic of diaspora, how people were leaving to find better futures, and how we could improve access to entrepreneurship for young people and create more start-ups in Greece.”

Vogt co-founded Sporo together with Chanseo Lee and Sonu Kumar in March 2024, and as CEO has spent this first year continuing to develop both his company’s technology and its product-market fit. Finding the right team and executing the technology has proven to be more straightforward, while all the other elements of starting a company have provided more unexpected challenges.

“I didn’t realize how many aspects of a company there are besides building the product,” he said. “You have to find the right business strategy, incorporate, open a bank account, pay taxes, interview staff, talk to customers and maintain connections. There’s so much that at some point as a CEO, you have to spend the majority of your time on those other elements. That was really hard for me, because I’d been developing algorithms for six years, only to realize that everything else was my responsibility as well. I’d never have learned this much in such a short period of time if I’d done anything other than start a company.”