Fireside Chat: Advancing Clinical Trial Recruitment with AI @ HealthKey (YC W25)

​Join us for a fireside chat with Dr. Adeesh Parvathaneni, Chief Medical Officer of HealthKey (YC W25), exploring how AI is transforming clinical trial enrollment.

​Identifying eligible patients remains one of the biggest bottlenecks in clinical research. Research teams often spend enormous amounts of time manually reviewing charts and matching patient data, spread across multiple formats, to complex trial eligibility criteria. These inefficiencies slow down enrollment and delay potentially life-saving treatments from reaching patients.

​HealthKey is tackling this challenge with AI. The platform prescreens a clinic’s existing patient population against clinical trial eligibility criteria, allowing research teams to identify qualified participants in minutes rather than weeks. By replacing manual chart review with AI-driven analysis, HealthKey helps research sites generate more revenue, accelerate trial enrollment, and connect at-risk patients with cutting-edge therapies.

​In this session, we’ll discuss how AI and large language models are being applied to real-world EHR data, what it takes to build reliable clinical AI systems, and how startups like HealthKey are reshaping the infrastructure of clinical research.

​About the Speaker Adeesh Parvathaneni, MD is the Chief Medical Officer of HealthKey, a Y Combinator-backed clinical trial AI company. He leads clinical strategy and product operations for the company’s AI-powered patient eligibility platform, designing LLM pipelines and clinical validation frameworks that reduce manual chart review and improve patient-trial matching accuracy. Clinically, he is also an Internal Medicine resident at Tulane Medical Center, bringing frontline experience in complex patient care to the design of AI systems that must operate reliably on real-world clinical data.