Today we’d like to introduce you to Richard Jaenisch.
Hi Richard, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
When I was 12 I received some information that upended my and my family’s life. After a day at summer camp, I came home and peed a dark color, alarmed my family sprung into action and within weeks, tests, biopsies and appointments flew by, we learned the cause: I had chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV). Unusual at a young age my immediate family was tested, and my mom was determined to be the likely source, as within days we’d learn she too had HCV. This meant my high school experience would miss out on PE, but in its stead I took ROP classes that would have me start my Web Design and IT business at 17 shortly after earning my Eagle Scout —my project being for the San Dieguito River Park, a composting system to reduce fertilizer costs and reduce invasive species introduction. I was able to take these classes because the school was aware of my status, which negatively impacted my relationship with staff and parents alike. The next few years for me, were strange, watching the mirror of my future as my mom would try out different treatments, and experimental ones, two of which I would also do when the time came —Thankfully in 2011, she was cured on her third treatment, a grueling 48 weeks that required multiple blood infusions and had side effects too graphic to describe in polite company. — Walking at graduation in 2009 from CSUSM was a surreal experience, as that year my business would fall apart due to the recession, I would end an engagement, and my first treatment would fail, all within a month’s span. Rebuilding myself took time, but I knew that I would act on each treatment opportunity I could, so that I might have a chance to keep living. In 2012, when I tried the regimen that had worked for my mom, my now third treatment, it failed in spectacle worthy of a Quinten Tarantino film, as by this point, my liver had been in End Stage for around two years, veins in my throat burst, and I’d earned a quick trip through the ER as a result, my esophageal varices had bled out and lost me almost 2 liters of blood, and abruptly ended the treatment that had cured my mom. I’d begun blogging during this experience and felt compelled to share as much as I could with friends and family. But after comments from strangers, I’d realized that as my condition progressed, I should endeavor to do more. My blog shifted, my volunteer work changed, and I’d gone back to working full time at Poway Unified, where I’d established myself working in before school and afterschool organizations. Working with kids filled a hole in my heart that I knew I could only do for so long as my health declined. Prior to my coming back, I’d developed STEM workshops for professional development, led robotics clubs and other tech and survival-oriented activities leaning on my formative years in Scouting in San Diego. The work I’d come back to was full-circle but short lived, coming back to work at the elementary school where I grew up, whose principal was the principal who helped shield me from unfair criticism I’d received as a student trying to navigate school with a then terminal condition. While this role was short-lived, my health had declined to the state where management of my condition became my new full-time job as I was given disabled status. The timing was uncanny, as around this time new treatments came out which had none of the same side effects, were once a day pills, and had efficacy rates of 80%+. I would continue to learn more about my condition, reading New England Journal of Medicine, and Journal of American Medical Association, and anything HCV-related on PubMed I could get my hands on. My blogging and social media presence grew and I was approached by multiple websites to write for them on my experience with HCV. It was difficult to do, but it was also cathartic to know my path was not my own to bear. To know that while my family would pioneer treatments and I would log my descent into end stage liver disease, that it would help others more quickly adapt to the challenges that at times took months to find solutions for. Simple methods of living my life, that in my fourth year in end stage liver disease, were requirements for my survival, but also social realities, like dating, friendship, and how it had impacted my work. Thankfully in 2016, I received a life-saving liver transplant, which, after almost seven years on the waiting list, my family and friends were grateful as I was for. But while this stopped the constant ER trips, and weeks of hospitalization, while this would stop the symptoms like the bleeds, and Hepatic Encephalopathy which made it difficult to think, ascites which caused such swelling that at times I couldn’t walk, it felt like a moment before falling because my HCV wasn’t gone.
It would take one last precarious treatment, one which I’d suggested following my research, before I became too sick to treat in 2016, this combination would have me reach SVR24, 24 weeks Sustained Viral Response, the marker for Cured status of HCV, almost 18 years after my initial diagnosis. Being cured, having a new liver, meant a new lease on life in so many ways, within a month of being cured I would meet my now wife, and be named American Liver Foundation’s Patient Spotlight in their Annual Report. I went back to school, knowing that a Masters’ in Public Health would be my trajectory, and using multiple programs from the Department of Rehabilitation, I successfully got back into school, eventually began working for multiple HCV serving organizations, as an online moderator, a helpline for people who were diagnosed, and was their on-call person for folks who reached End Stage and needed guidance. My expanding work with nonprofits over the years in advocacy and volunteering had earned me awards from the ALF and recognition from local chapters, as well as Lifesharing and other liver and transplant focused organizations. My work had led me to an opportunity at Open Biopharma Research and Training Institute, a dream at that time, that its founder had to help reduce the cost of making biopharmaceuticals. Given my billto insurance total over my lifetime had topped six million, I wanted to help how I could help.
During my time here, I earned my MPH in Global Health from CSUSM, and relished my role as then Director of Education and Outreach. Over the last six years since joining, we’ve grown to nearly 40 staff and volunteers, we’ve helped facilitate hundreds of trainees, and held dozens of community events. It’s heartwarming, to see how we’re helping to impact patient safety and accessibility so far up in the supply chain. But where I am today, isn’t just with Open Biopharma, I’ve never stopped volunteering with local organizations, between the Parenteral Drug Association, International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineers, American Association for the Study of Liver Disease, Lifesharing San Diego, National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable and Liver Coalition of San Diego to name a few. In my time with these organizations, I’ve received honors, awards and recognition of my work from them. 2022 was another year of stark contrasts, in February, my partner and I got married in a small ceremony in Cardiff, and by November of 2022 two big things happened in my and my brother’s lives, our mother’s health was declining, and OpenAI launched GPT 3.5. Our mother, while able to be cured of HCV years before me, was also able to get back her health, however ovarian cancer would take her sooner than expected. Her passing was difficult for our family, but my brother and I had been working closer together, as he had been staying in San Diego more, so we had started working on ways to better use ChatGPT. Within two months of her passing, my brother and I began forming Prompting Integration and Consulting L.L.C. My brother had been away in the Pacific northwest, working for Amazon, helping create some of their earlier Generative AI based systems. Together we saw the potential of these tools, not only to help improve patient lives, but also that their potential needed to be guided ethically and importantly, that meant with humans in mind. We focused PICLLC on working with life sciences and healthcare organizations, but in truth, we find ourselves working often with other nonprofits and small local businesses as well. Over the last few years at Open Biopharma, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to create systems like Human-AI Training Parallelization, which had multiple cohorts of interns, apprentices and research assistants better learn how to use GenAI tools without deskilling and creating tools for their teams. Between both companies, we’ve built workshops, webinars and training courses that revolve around each trainee, personalized and designed for their AI Literacy growth. This past year working alongside another Carlsbad company Amsety, I was excited to fuse my experience with liver disease and generative AI to deliver highly attended presentations and award-winning posters at The Liver Meeting on their impact on patients and how patients are using them. And today, I sit excited for what next year may bring, and how I can continue to help my community grow and learn.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
When I think about the road that got me here, I think often to the Robert Frost Poem, although perhaps with a bit more urgency on the road less traveled by. As my will to live, in spite of my ill-timed pre-teen death sentence, urged me to relinquish caution that might trouble my peers. While my health challenges were unavoidable despite my best efforts to avoid them, routine and an amazing support system allowed me to carry on. To keep that support system though, required me to grow a kind of radical empathy that serves me well in my current roles. Overcoming the stigma of HCV remains difficult, whether it was in high school, college, at work, or in dating and friendship, it is unavoidable. The hypervigilance I’d developed trying to avoid transference —Even though it’s only transmitted blood to blood— can be used as a tool, but it remains a ringing in my ear and a tear in my eye when I witness othering in my community. In highschool it meant my grades would suffer, and I would routinely be punished or forced to continue my class by moving my desk outside, sometimes for the remainder of the semester. In college it meant navigating how I might leverage Disabled Student Services, without outing myself, for fear of having the conversation. At work it varied tremendously, as soon as it was known from coworkers writing letters of concern to superiors attempting to get me fired, from some supervisors leveraging my excused medical absences to align with mandatory meetings, to some urging me to take additional time off when obviously inappropriate. The stranger obstacles were quieter though, like being passed up for promotions because I was out too many days for treatment, or upon learning I was dying coworkers put me on a pedestal, until it was learned it was HCV, then it became a sin to come near me, only reverting again when they’d learned I’d gotten it at birth. But socially, I’ll admit the stigma had me jaded at times, even if my apparent optimism refuses me a moment of considering an alternative of not trying. Dating proved strange, but friendships, I found to be tested more in my latter years of End Stage, than anything else. Folks have trouble looking at death in the face. Seeing someone you know, actively, slowly dying is difficult, let alone when they’re 27. 2016 was a unique year for everyone, but it was also the year I spent the most time in the hospital, having near-death incidents, and having reached the threshold of being unable to receive treatment as I was too sick. It was a year of overwhelming extremes, where in January I was shortlisting hospices, then December I was attempting to navigate renewed life thanks to liver transplantation. That next year I’d faced systems’ hurdles, like my final life-saving treatment being cut-off halfway through likely because it was costly and fighting those denials only to be denied to the point of futility forcing me to rely on hope that it was enough. I’m grateful that it was, but my well-documented experience had predicated my medical and legal teams’ concerns. Then when applying for my MPH, I was taking the prerequisite courses I was missing, but I was denied entry in to program. The way the school had read my GPA reflected poorly on my actual academic performance. Following graduation, I worked 39 hours per week at my main job, and the ACA was not yet a thing, so I had to be a student to maintain health insurance as I had a preexisting condition especially so, as I pursued grueling 48-week treatment. Naturally these courses brought down my GPA, and all the professors who I had these classes with had left in the last 10 years, so I used Palomar’s academic renewal to correct this. I hadn’t come this far, to stop now, so I used my time to prepare taking more classes that would help me prepare for my eventual MPH. With a 3.5 GPA achieved, I reapplied and joined an MPH cohort I couldn’t have been happier learning beside. In truth, this was also a check for myself, to see if I was ready, after everything that had happened, after spending so much time house-bound, chronically online and in ways that are only relatable to folks, post-pandemic. Going to school for my MPH, working full time and volunteering took up all my time, but I had the energy to do it and besides a semester extension to help with the health challenges in my family, I’d accomplished it. Another compelling challenge hit everyone at the same time, in December of 2019, Open Biopharma opened its doors as an in-person hands-on training center, which required lots of creative pivots. While we were pivoting, we were looking for ways to help, we’d entertained hosting test manufacturing, manufacturing special blood filters that reduced lung damage caused by COVID, and importantly we found alignment with area colleges and universities needing hands-on training while their hands were tied. No stranger to a good challenge, even PICLLC has had to find ways to overcome a saturated AI market filled with beginner-experts, hype overload, and get-rich-quick schemes. While it was still 2023, we realized that offering ethical training, and custom tools on Generative AI for Healthcare and Life Sciences was being drowned by the hype, confusion and the immaturity of the market. So we created some basic tools that folks could customize or fit to their needs, we fitted the training courses to become more modular, and now deliver them alongside Open Biopharma in workshops and webinars.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Prompting Integration and Consulting L.L.C. (PICLLC although we often pronounce it like the word Pickle.) is an organization dedicated to developing and integrating Applied Generative AI solutions in ways that empower stakeholders in Life Sciences and Healthcare. We specialize in solutions that fit the unique needs of Life Sciences and Healthcare regarding everything from patient safety to personalized training. PICLLC was formed by my brother and I, him having developed early GenAI systems at Amazon in 2017 as well as what are essentially quality systems for Whole Foods and their COVID unit during the pandemic, and myself, being an established trainer and educator with Open Biopharma Research and Training Institute, as well as active community and board member in local and larger chapters of the Parenteral Drug Association and International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineers, Liver Coalition of San Diego, and others. We’re known for our ability to deliver unique solutions that often clean up what other AI companies couldn’t deliver on, alongside training and tools that are designed to be accessible at any level or ability. So first let’s touch on one of our unique solutions, then we’ll circle back to our cognitive defense-oriented training courses.
We’re very excited about some of our latest tools that are being deployed at Open Biopharma available with any training or event beginning 2026; Digitally Interactive Standard Operating Procedures ( DISOPs is an SOP-focused life science-oriented version of our tool: Parallel Education Assistance Resource aka PEAR) and our new GenAI based Survey tool called CommPEAR. Like others, I was concerned about how ChatGPT would impact cheating and plagiarism, but my more recent experience at Open Biopharma, working with educators, and industry trainers alike, the value of tests seemed to be a weak indicator of understanding.
So we developed DISOPs/PEAR to help solve a few problems at once. The tool is a competency assessment tool that maintains learning fidelity over time and produces a traceable practical skills matrix and competency assessment. The tool itself empowers trainers/educators (we call them proctors) by allowing them to upload or connect any existing materials and have it automatically generate questions, answers, difficulty level and skill tags, then the proctor can modify any aspect of these elements to fit the need of their competency assessment. The proctor can generate up to hundreds of potential questions in dozens of categories with dozens of skill tags and can limit the number the trainee might interact with as well as validation criteria to establish baseline importance. Each evaluation is adaptive to the trainee taking it. To ensure that anyone can easily use and learn with the tool, there is a growing list of adaptive functions helping folks with different levels of initial experience, learning ability, and neurodivergence. The evaluation begins at a competency level of 3, and as a trainee answers poorly, the next questions get easier, as the answers show more understanding, the next questions get more difficult. This application of Item-Response theory produces a report upon completion, with optional comments that the trainee can directly contest or amend their responses. This report when done at the end of workshop, course or other period allows for more accurate competency assessments of skills and abilities. Additionally, cheating is built in, an assistant that has access to all the questions and correct answers will provide assistance to the trainee at any time, noting that each use marginally impacts competency to reflect additional support needed. Materials can be allowed for open-book evaluations, and copy/paste is disabled to help trainees learn when using the assistant, by having them read, and then write their answer in their own words. The tool helps organizations weigh risk, better align teams, and maintain assessment with continuous learning, there’s more that the tool can do, but you’ll have to check it out to see.
CommPEAR uses a similar framework, only instead of evaluations it creates surveys and adapts the questions provided to the person taking the survey, reducing the likelihood the survey taker abandons the survey for lack of relevance/time. It also encourages use of free response questions that are adaptive to the user, where instead of comparing questions to questions, the report looks at answers for sentiment, concern, opportunities and perceptions among other elements that the survey maker has indicated are important. Both tools will be available for use at Open Biopharma, and PICLLC will make custom versions available for organizations that might want them. We have even more tools in the works for our Tool Jar 2.0 coming out next March.
We’ve also developed training modules, webinars and workshops in alignment with Open Biopharma, as well as independently. Many of our modules focus on practical applied Generative AI, where we will assist a user to gaining competency in AI literacy and development of basic tools that most Gen AI platforms provide like Assistants. But the modules we encourage everyone to take advantage of, are on cognitive defenses, and red teaming. An unfortunate side effect of GenAI use without proper training, can range from deskilling, to AI Psychosis, and without an understanding of privacy and security that red teaming allows for, folks might provide platforms with Personal Identifiable Information, Personal Health Information, or proprietary information that puts them at risk for violating everything from NDAs to professional policies. While many of the individuals I’ve spoken with have expressed disappointment with the depth or usefulness of the training provided by major platforms often through their employers, I ask them a simple question, who would you rather take a driving class from, A car maker or parcel delivery service? —We’re a lot like a last mile Applied Generative AI organization. — Our Training courses are designed to empower everyday users, professional users, and patients navigating this new internet architecture.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
Growing up my mom, working in HR, often worked long hours while my dad spent a lot of time focused on his business doing recruiting, managing stock portfolios and giving guest lectures, so our family schedules did not align well. But a moment stands out, we would find time to go camping, preferring Palomar Mountain to other campgrounds. The trees, rocks, views and mountain air were a draw for us all. My mom would insist on bringing a vhs camera to record moments of the experience, but the most memorable parts were by the fireside while my dad would grill up dinner. My mom liked to tell us scary stories and improvised fantasies about the woods around us. They would often reflect the adventures my brother and I would explain we’d had to them earlier, enriching our experience in ways that felt like we weren’t at a campground, but experiencing an adventure out the in the woods. These improvised collective tales remain an inspiration for my storytelling today, albeit now they’re more of a commercial or educational nature.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://promptingsolutions.org/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/promptingsolutions
- Other: https://beacon.promptingsolutions.org/
Image Credits
Aaron Gilliam, AG Images
