{"slug": "this-student-is-using-ai-to-give-doctors-more-time-with-their-patients", "title": "This student is using AI to give doctors more time with their patients", "summary": "Northeastern University data analytics engineering master's student Sai Anish Sreeramagiri, an AI engineer intern at Penguin AI, is using generative AI to reduce administrative burdens in hospitals, such as medical coding and prior authorization, aiming to give doctors and nurses more time for patient care. His work includes creating an agent that ensures patient data complies with HIPAA before processing, and he previously won a 2024 Northeastern hackathon with a computer vision tool to detect bird strikes on aircraft.", "body_md": "# This student is using AI to give doctors more time with their patients\n\nHis co-op work reduces labor-intensive hospital procedures with the goal of giving doctors and nurses more time for care-giving.\n\nSai Anish Sreeramagiri’s introduction to Northeastern University was a smash hit – or rather, a successful near miss.\n\nA data analytics engineering master’s student, Sreeramagiri used his background in AI and machine learning to take first prize along with his teammate and fellow Northeastern student Vivek Dhir in a hackathon hosted on Northeastern’s Boston campus in 2024. Tasked with creating a tool that included elements of nature and computer vision, the pair created an alarm mechanism that accurately detects flocks of birds on collision courses with aircraft. In just four hours, he and Dhir submitted a fine-tuned visual tool that is trained to [track birds’ flight direction](https://github.com/vivekdhir77/Fly-high) in real time and alerts authorities when one appears likely to strike a plane, he said.\n\n“It was huge, I mean there were 50 or 60 people competing,” said Sarah Ostadabbas, professor of computer engineering and director of Northeastern’s Augmented Cognition lab. “It was a big deal for them.”\n\nAt that point, Ostadabbas only knew Sreeramagiri from his involvement at the hackathon, which she organized. It wasn’t long after that when he inquired about joining her lab and began regularly attending her weekly meetings as a volunteer. She said his commitment showed that he could persevere within [her competitive lab environment](https://ostadabbas.sites.northeastern.edu/), and she gladly accepted him into the fold.\n\nThat grit and consistency is now also on display in Sreeramagiri’s role as an AI engineer intern at Penguin AI, [an agentic AI platform](https://www.penguinai.co/) that serves hospitals in streamlining their financial workflows and medical coding. Founded in 2024, Penguin AI uses generative AI to reduce inefficiencies in the healthcare industry that can hamper doctors’ time with their patients. These professionals are often involved in claims and billing, tasked with summarizing patients’ medical charts and can be slowed down by medical coding – the process of converting doctors’ notes, lab results and patient charts into alphanumeric codes, which are then sent to insurance providers and used to bill patients.\n\nAt his co-op assignment, Sreeramagiri harnesses AI to reduce a number of these labor-intensive workplace procedures, he said, with the ultimate goal of giving doctors and nurses more time to focus on caregiving.\n\n## Editor’s Picks\n\n“A lot of workflows are very manual-oriented work and are done by nurses and doctors,” Sreeramagiri said, who interned remotely at the Bay Area company. “These take up a lot of time, and using AI really helps nurses and doctors tend to their patients more, instead of putting more focus on administrative burden.”\n\nOne of Sreeramagiri’s projects involved prior authorization, the rule from healthcare insurers that requires doctors to get approval from the insurance companies before prescribing or administering certain treatments. The current workflow was ripe for assistance from AI, he said.\n\nTo help, he created an agent that ensured all of the patients’ personal and medical details were compliant with the standards of the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) before being sent to another algorithm that would compile and deliver those details to the proper team, masking or redacting the information for additional safety. HIPAA serves to protect private patient medical data, among other things, and applies to healthcare providers and their business partners.\n\nThe project forced him to consider new questions about producing AI agents and the hurdles that can arise, things that he said are not usually taught in school.\n\nIt also expanded on skills he picked up during his master’s studies at Northeastern itself, Sreeramagiri said, challenging him with applying his technical knowledge to the healthcare industry. The task exposed him to the kind of cross-team collaboration that he said excites him as he thinks about the future direction of his career.\n\n“I was talking to a lot of people in the product team, the engineering team, the AI team, and also the medical team … and acted like a bridge to fix issues and communicate with [all] sides,” he said. “Helping them understand what was going on in the AI workflow, what the problems were, and then how I could improve them.”\n\nOstadabbas said Sreeramagiri’s work exemplifies the power of real-world AI applications across any domain, even the healthcare industry, that she hopes to convey in her lab and classes at Northeastern.\n\nHis co-op let him “shine and show that he is not afraid of thinking out of the box and solving through AI,” she said. “I’m glad that he’s also enjoying the new applied domain.”\n\nSreeramagiri credited his Northeastern education for providing him the project-based, teamwork-oriented environment that allowed him to succeed at Penguin AI.\n\n“It really pushed me to do well in my co-op,” he said. “I would like to use this specific domain knowledge that I gained and see where it leads.”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-student-is-using-ai-to-give-doctors-more-time-with-their-patients", "canonical_source": "https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/08/10/ai-for-doctors-schedules/", "published_at": "2026-08-10 20:03:20+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-10 20:11:04.070628+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "ai-agents", "computer-vision"], "entities": ["Sai Anish Sreeramagiri", "Northeastern University", "Penguin AI", "Vivek Dhir", "Sarah Ostadabbas", "HIPAA"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-student-is-using-ai-to-give-doctors-more-time-with-their-patients", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-student-is-using-ai-to-give-doctors-more-time-with-their-patients.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-student-is-using-ai-to-give-doctors-more-time-with-their-patients.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-student-is-using-ai-to-give-doctors-more-time-with-their-patients.jsonld"}}