In a month, Patrick Countryman will begin his master’s program at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. This summer, he built AI-powered forecasting tools, developed user interfaces, automated clinic-hour allocations across our network, and contributed to a range of finance and operational initiatives.

A biochemistry major with a math minor from Wabash College, Patrick originally expected to pursue medicine. But internships, research, and conversations with healthcare executives shifted his focus toward the business that supports healthcare rather than the practice of it—a realization that led him to Kellogg’s Master’s in Management program.

His path to Tx:Team started with a conversation, too. Through the Wabash alumni network, fraternity brothers connected him with Scott Benedict, CEO of Tx:Team. A networking call turned into an internship offer that same afternoon.

Patrick arrived hoping for hands-on experience with financial modeling and spreadsheets. He will leave having rebuilt a significant piece of our forecasting infrastructure.

Working with Spencer Sheridan, Director of Finance, Patrick streamlined a lot of the coding behind allocating clinic hours across the organization. His Python scripts now extract the hours and apply the allocations across clinics automatically, handling the distribution without manual intervention. He automated several related processes too, from making sure charges are entered correctly to recording hours and generating logs throughout the workflow.

The most impressive piece is a platform he built called Watchdog, a monitoring and logging system that tracks all of those processes to confirm they’re running successfully. If something fails, Watchdog pinpoints exactly where and why, continuously monitoring the systems for changes and flagging errors the moment they occur.

That phase of the work is essentially done—the team has maximized what it can leverage out of Access—and Patrick has since moved on to the next phase: work focused on building out the user interface. The longer-term vision is layering AI on top so leaders can ask plain-language questions about the data.

What makes that more impressive: Patrick started the summer with almost no programming experience. Learning by doing meant making mistakes, including the script that erased a clinic’s year-to-date hours and cost the team several hours to recover. He tells it with a laugh now, but it also reflects the kind of internship it was: real ownership of real systems, not busywork.

“His ability to dive in and learn these things really quickly, and work independently, has been really amazing,” Spencer said. “He just graduated from undergrad, and his ability to take on some of these bigger projects and work autonomously is pretty impressive.”

Spencer’s advice heading into Kellogg: keep networking—already Patrick’s instinct—and build a career that balances ambition with the life he actually wants to lead.

Patrick’s own sights are set on healthcare consulting or life sciences investment banking, work that would combine the science that first drew him toward medicine with the business perspective that ultimately won him over.