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Our Team

A physician and an engineer who built the service, advised by three leaders in geriatrics and palliative care.

Our Team

A service built for you

With Copilots, you have your own counselor dedicated to helping you communicate your wishes.

The company was co-founded by a physician who had sat beside too many families guessing at what a patient wanted, and an engineer who had watched his own family struggle with the same conversation.

A conversation, documented.

Founders

Why they built it

Co-founder and CEO

David Atashroo, MD

David has always had a passion for fixing broken systems. As a medical student at the University of Missouri, he noticed that too many of the poor in his community suffered from an inability to access basic medical care. So he won a grant from the American Association of Medical Colleges, and founded Med-Zou: a 100% free health clinic staffed by volunteer physicians that continues to serve thousands of patients today.

Then, as a surgical resident at the University of Kentucky and later as a physician, he cared for hundreds of patients facing the end of life. Time and again, he sat beside distraught families in sterile waiting rooms guessing at desired wishes for care. Quickly he realized he could no longer tolerate a broken end of life system that perpetrated so much needless suffering, yet offered so little proactive guidance.

Taking a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, David built relationships with the leading academic and industry experts working to fix the system. With the help of these mentors, he took a step away from clinical medicine and co-founded Copilots in Care as the first technology-enabled, comprehensive health care service solution to advanced care planning.

Co-founder and COO

Eric Reuland

Eric is passionate about leaving this world a better place. Through experiences with his own family members he saw a need to improve communication near the end of life, and has dedicated himself to building a solution.

Eric was trained as a mechanical engineer at MIT and has a talent for solving complex problems by breaking them down into simple processes. After graduating he led a cross-functional team at Edwards Lifescience through the design and development process, culminating in a pilot clinical study.

With a drive to bring ideas to reality and the opportunity to study at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Eric developed the skills to build a scalable, mission-driven company with the potential to create lasting value. While working on an end-of-life storytelling project he met David, and together they founded Copilots in Care.

About the portraits. The original site carried photographs of both founders. Those image files were never archived — the site’s images were lost when it went offline — so this rebuild shows no portraits rather than substituting photographs of other people. See Sources.

Scientific Advisory Board

Three leaders in geriatrics and palliative care

Their credentials are reproduced as the site listed them.

Director of Palliative Care, Stanford

VJ Periyakoil, MD

A nationally recognized leader in geriatrics and palliative care. VJ founded and directs Stanford eCampus, the Ethno-geriatrics and Successful Aging Project, and Stanford Palliative Care.

  • Young investigator award, American Association of Hospice and Palliative Medicine
  • Plenary research paper award, American Geriatrics Society (2014 and 2015)
  • Research award, American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (2015)
  • Associate Director of Palliative Care Services, VA Palo Alto Health Care Center

Social Worker, LCSW, ASW-G, C-SWHC

Mary Hulme

Founder of Moonstone Geriatrics, with almost 20 years working in geriatrics, dementia and healthcare advocacy. Master’s in Social Welfare from the University of California, Berkeley; clinical license in 2004, with specialised certifications in gerontology and healthcare.

  • Founder of Moonstone Geriatrics
  • Mental health consultant, SteppingStones Adult Day Health Care
  • Geriatric consultant, Tech-enhanced Life

Professor of Medicine, Palo Alto VA

Karl Lorenz, MD, MSHS

An affiliated adjunct staff member at the RAND Corporation, a general practitioner and palliative consultant at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

  • Director, VA Quality Improvement Resource Center’s Comprehensive End-of-Life Care initiative
  • Develops provider-facing software tools for the VA electronic medical record
  • Former VA Health Services Research and Development career development awardee
  • Commonwealth Packer Health Policy Fellow, 2007–2008

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