Empower Hope enables patients to forge a personalized path through our complex healthcare system…

Services we offer

1. Digital Advance Care Planning with with engaging media to support high-quality decision making. 

a. Advance Directives with electronic signatures and notarization
b. POLST: Portable Medical Orders
c. ePOLST State Registry Vendor

2. Patient Risk Stratification through artificial intelligence.
3. Intervention via strategic integration with EMR, Clinical Decision Support tools, and provider pathways.
4. Advisory services-programmatic, operational, and technical to support goal concordant care and serious illness programs.
5. Speaking engagements regarding Goal Concordant Care, Use of AI in Serious Illness, Palliative Care & Hospice, Advance Care Planning, and more!

Visions of the Future

The aging population of the United States is propelling the nation toward a milestone: A historic increase in deaths yearly.
Deaths are projected to reach more than 3.6 million in 2037, 1 million more than in 2015. As the nation’s baby boomer cohort ages (the youngest will be 60 by the end of 2024), the number and percentage of people who die will increase dramatically every year, peaking in 2055 before leveling off gradually.

This creates a crisis for healthcare payors, providers, health systems, and society because:

• • Patient preferences for end-of-life care are not commonly known, discussed, or actualized
  • Significant waste exists in the over 300 billion dollars spent annually in the last 12 months of life
  • Most patients have comfort-oriented end of life preferences, and yet too many spend time in the ICU and are hospitalized in the last 6 months of life
  • Lack of alignment with patient preferences leads to decreased quality and unwanted care (over and under-utilization)
  • The resultant over and under-utilization represents billions of dollars wasted in the US healthcare system annually.

Behind the Tech: Compassionate Artificial Intelligence

We continue to build and introduce new sets of features to push and redefine the boundaries of this self-learning conversational AI solution. With advanced conversation flows that connect the information and self-service solutions, patients need to be increasingly empowered for decision makin.

The system learns and adapts to the patient’s motivations using Empower Hope’s proprietary software, as well as algorithms, statistical models, and automated A/B testing to analyze and draw inferences from patterns in the patient’s data.

Using automation to improve patient outcomes, Empower Hope receives continuous predictive model training to improve their ability to influence patients’ compliance and behaviors using operant conditioning, social learning theory, and other human persuasion techniques.

With all these capabilities, Empower Hope increases capacity and replaces legacy appointment reminders, follow-ups, and collections systems.

Imagine thousands of individual data scientists helping healthcare systems get ahead of the value-based care curve.

Meet the Founders

Finly Zachariah, MD FAAFP FAAHPM FAMIA

Dr. Zachariah is recognized as a compassionate and highly skilled supportive medicine physician providing symptom management, pain control, and palliative care for adult and pediatric patients.  

He is board certified in Family Medicine, Hospice & Palliative Medicine, and Clinical Informatics. After earning his medical degree from Chicago Medical School, he completed a Family Medicine/Tropical Medicine residency in Whittier at Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital, followed by a fellowship in Hospice & Palliative Medicine at Kaiser in Los Angeles. Combining his training in tropical medicine with his humanitarian values, Dr. Zachariah has volunteered significant time in underserved parts of the world, teaching palliative care and helping patients in Cameroon, Zambia, India, and Ethiopia.

He also serves as an Associate Chief Medical Information Officer, supporting his colleagues in adopting clinical technologies and refining the Electronic Health Record System to improve care delivery. His programmatic and academic focus includes tailoring patient care to individual values and goals, advance care planning, and leveraging technology to enhance the coordination and delivery of patient-centered medical care in serious illnesses. 

He co-founded Empower Hope in 2022 to accelerate the delivery of goal-concordant care for patients with serious illness.

Chris Halsema

Chris, an Entrepreneur, Engineer, and Data Scientist became passionate about working with healthcare institutions after seeing the difficulties and costs associated with implementing communication tools.

In 2008, he pivoted his focus from enterprise companies to healthcare to empower patient-centric healthcare solutions to provide the highest level of care and streamline the flow of engagement between patients and their providers.

In 2022, he launched Empower Hope to improve support across a patient’s journey, driving connection and more significant outcomes.

With more than 20 years of experience envisioning and creating integrated solutions in healthcare, fintech, ERP, private cloud, and software development, Chris is known for his work and contributions to the creation of Application Service Providers (now known as clouds) in its early days.

Chris has worked alongside notable companies like IBM and Citrix, and his leadership in the CEO role of PrudentConnect grew to become one of the first cloud ERP and CRM providers.

Publications and Presentations

Prospective comparison of medical oncologists and a machine learning model to predict 3-month mortality in patients with metastatic solid tumors Zachariah, F, Rossi, L, Roberts, L, Bosserman, L

EHR integration and evaluation of clinical decision support workflows driven by a mortality prediction model to promote goal concordant care. Paper presented at AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference; May 23-26, 2022; Houston, TX. Roberts, L, Zachariah F, Rossi, L. Design,

Prospective evaluation of a 90-day mortality prediction model: From silent pilots to real-time deployment in the EHR. Paper presented at AMIA Informatics Summit; Mar 21-24, 2022; Chicago, IL. Rossi, L, Roberts L, Zachariah F.

Nudges to improve ambulatory do-not-resuscitate documentation at a comprehensive cancer center Nudges in Healthcare Symposium webinar; May 20, 2021. Roberts L, Zachariah F.

Advance care planning to support transplant patients Epic XGM; Apr 29 – May 10, 2019; Verona, WI. Roberts L, Zachariah F.

Clinical Program: Preparing patients for advance care planning. Epic Systems Corporation; 2018. Zachariah F, Roberts L.