Even though our roles have changed over the years, our mission in healthcare innovation has not.
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Co-authored by Dr. Theresa Kepic
My wife Theresa and I just celebrated 50 years of marriage, and for most of them, we’ve built our careers around healthcare innovation together. Our stories began very differently: I arrived in the US from Iran in 1969, the same year as the moon landing. Theresa was born two months after her parents landed at Ellis Island, refugees from Slovenia after World War II.
By 1970, we were both students at Illinois State University. The first time I saw her, we were in the dishwashing room of our dorm’s cafeteria, working to help pay for school. While our hands were busy rinsing and loading dirty dishes, our mouths were busy talking.
I remember being struck by how impressive she was—an art major who was determined to become a doctor after having lost her brother, Yanko, to leukemia a few years earlier. During his illness, she had spent many nights at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago keeping him company and witnessed firsthand the dedication of his care team, an experience that influenced her deeply.
Her dream of going to medical school became a shared dream. I didn’t yet realize how much her career would end up shaping mine.
In Theresa’s Words: Learning the Importance of Timing
Early in my career, my academic research became a way for us to travel as a young couple with limited means. If a paper got accepted at a conference that paid for travel, Frank and the kids would come along. One paper, on the central nervous system of the rat, earned me a research trip to Hawaii that doubled as a family vacation.
That research also shaped Frank’s thinking about timing. My hypothesis was that disrupting certain brain regions would interfere with the female reproductive cycle. What I found was that the same hormone inhibitor, administered at a different point in the cycle, produced a completely different result. The when could be just as important as the what.
Frank took that idea and ran with it in his own work. Years later, building systems to track patient data over time, he came back to the importance of the “when.” His digital twin concept—a patient’s own past health serving as their baseline—is an extension of that same insight. Without that longitudinal baseline, you’re just looking at a snapshot, with no way of knowing whether it represents progress, decline, or normal variation.
In Frank’s Words: What Theresa’s Struggle Taught Me
Theresa’s medical career has always been an inspiration to me. She built a career as an OB/GYN, eventually treating patients across the VA and DOD health systems in North Chicago. It was her struggles with healthcare coding between those two systems that pushed me to focus on ontology and interface terminology in my own work as a computer scientist.
The VA and DOD used completely different EMRs, with terminology never built for the complexity of the cases she saw. Night after night, she’d come home exhausted: “I can’t find the right disease codes. How am I supposed to properly care for my patients when I can’t even document their conditions accurately?” Many physicians share that struggle and know how tiring it can be.
I couldn’t fix everything she was up against. But interface terminology was one problem I had the tools to solve. Theresa taught me that before computers—or now AI—can help clinicians, they first have to understand what the clinician means. Preserving the clinical intent became a central theme of my career. That idea led me to help build clinical terminology systems now used by the majority of physicians and nurses across the country.
Fifty Years Later: An American Dream in Healthcare Innovation
An immigrant from Iran and the American-born daughter of Slovenian refugees met washing dishes to pay for college. One became a physician; the other, a computer scientist. That is the American Dream as we lived it. Today, as AI enters the exam room, what Theresa taught me matters more than ever: AI cannot recover clinical intent, context, or timing that was never captured in the first place.
Our roles have changed, but our mission in healthcare innovation has not, and we’re passing what we learned to the next generation of clinicians, technologists, and our own grandchildren. Bridging worlds, it turns out, is a lifetime’s work.
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