From a young age, Edozie Ezeanolue was exposed to careers in medicine through members of his family – his father is a physical medicine and rehabilitation doctor, his mother is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, an uncle who is an infectious pediatrics disease doctor, and another uncle who is a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) doctor. Now a member of the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV Class of 2026, he says becoming a doctor was actually not his first choice when thinking about his future career.
“I actually got interested in medicine, not because of my parents, not because of what they told me. I actually feel like it was the opposite,” Ezeanolue says. “At first I was like … I don't really want to do something my parents do. I want to sort of do my own thing.”
At his core, Ezeanolue had “more of an entrepreneurial mindset.” He spent a lot of his time in high school doing various side projects, such as starting random clothing companies, creating YouTube videos, and writing sneaker reviews with friends. Along with this, he had a love for technology and was also learning how to code.
It wasn’t until Ezeanolue began volunteering at clinics and shadowing doctors that he even considered a career in medicine. One aspect that he really liked about working in healthcare was that it was a much more intimate and real experience – something that he thought technology and entrepreneurship could often times lack.
“Being able to talk to people, being able to see and help people in their most vulnerable moments and actually form a connection with them while they trust you in these transient little interactions, I feel like [that] was something that stood out to me,” Ezeanolue says. “I just thought it was really cool and gave me a completely different feeling than any of the stuff that I've been doing up until that point.”
From then on, Ezeanolue knew he wanted to go to medical school and become a doctor. He attended the University of Notre Dame, where he committed to his career decision and majored in science preprofessional studies. While there, Ezeanolue gained startup experience by working in the startup incubator and even starting his own company with a fellow classmate.
After graduating college, Ezeanolue made the choice to return to Las Vegas and began attending the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine in 2022. Not only did this allow him to receive support from his family, but it also gave him the opportunity to be around while his youngest brother, who just turned 14 years old, grew up.
Just a year later, in 2023, Ezeanolue’s mother introduced him to a start-up company that everyone in her Facebook nursing group was raving about. Freed AI is an artificial intelligence (AI) medical scribe that listens to doctors during patient visits and by the end of it, would have a full chart created.
“It was nothing like I've ever seen before. It was nothing like she's ever seen before or her nursing group friends,” says Ezeanolue. “I thought it was really cool because that interest in technology and AI never left me … This is a company that's using AI in a way that's directly impacting me, and I can see it directly impacting thousands of other clinicians just by making their lives easier. Having my dad or mom finish charting earlier, being able to come home earlier, hang out, things like that. It was a very tangible impact.”
Wanting the opportunity to be involved in something like this, Ezeanolue reached out to the company’s founder and told him about his interest in the company and various startup experiences. From there, Ezeanolue became an employee of the company and used his expertise to automate certain tasks at the company.
The company founder "brought the work on to me and then I brought the work on to automation. I think that became a common theme where the more I automated, the more I was able to build these different dashboards and analytics and really provide some sort of structure and automation to the company,” Ezeanolue says. “I think they started valuing that more, and my role slowly grew.”
Ezeanolue’s role grew from head of customer operations to head of business and AI operations. The company has just hit over 20,000 clinicians using the AI scribe, with more than two million patient visits being logged a month. At the time, Ezeanolue was not thinking about where this would all lead to, but he’s happy to have done this while still being in medical school.
“It's been really fun … it's been really rewarding. It's definitely been really challenging, but I also feel like I've gotten a lot out of it,” he says.
As for what he hopes to see in the future of medicine, Ezeanolue wants to see technology make healthcare better as a whole.
“I think it's very easy for technology to, if it gets in the hands of the wrong people, to further corrupt it [healthcare]. I think the one thing that I hope for the future is that people make initiatives to just have technology overall … [be] a net benefit to healthcare, especially as these rapid progressions are being made in AI and adjacent industries,” he says. “I just hope that it makes healthcare more equitable instead of the other way around."
