Will Akers

After spending over a decade in Asia helping organizations adopt newer, more efficient technologies, Will moved back to the U.S. in 2022 and reconnected with his college roommate - an internal medicine physician and former CHIO of the Atlanta VA. His roommate was burned out, overwhelmed by the daily flood of patient messages that were pulling him further away from patient care and into administrative tasks like updating a pharmacy address or filling out forms for the DMV. That conversation sparked something bigger. Together with a group of healthcare experts, Will launched Switchboard MD to tackle one of the most overlooked causes of physician burnout: inbox overload and fragmented patient communications. Their mission is to restore the human connection to medicine by using intelligent automation to remove administrative noise from clinical and administrative workflows. Their first breakthrough: using a physician-trained small language model to automatically classify, prioritize, and route messages to the right place, reducing inbox workload by over 40% - without compromising patient care. Today, they're partnering with clinical leaders to scale this impact across health systems and physician owned practices, improving the patient communication experience. Will completed his MBA at the University of Hong Kong and has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Singapore and the US, studied in the US, Austria, Spain, Australia, Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai and has permanent residency in Hong Kong.