Practical AI in Healthcare

Επεισόδια

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  S1, E46 - Peter Embi: The Doctor Who Diagnosed Himself 19.07.2026 57λ

  Peter Embi has spent his career at the intersection of medicine and informatics: coining the term "algorithmovigilance," serving as the nation's first Chief Research Information Officer, and leading AI work at Vanderbilt. He is also a patient. A rare adrenal tumor took nearly 15 years and a self-diagnosis to catch, and it nearly killed him. In this conversation, Embi connects that diagnostic odyssey to the case for monitoring clinical AI the way we monitor drugs: continuously, in the real world, across a network of institutions. The discussion runs from zebras and missed diagnoses to VAMOS, the "air traffic control tower" his team built to keep deployed models honest.
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  S1, E45 - Mika Newton, xCures: Intelligent Interoperability 12.07.2026 53λ

  Interoperability has been healthcare's twenty-year broken promise, but something genuinely changed. Mika Newton, CEO of xCures, explains how provider data exchange jumped from roughly 30% to 85–90% in just two years, and why that's only half the story. Moving records, it turns out, was never the hard part. As Newton puts it, "records travel, but they don't translate" — most of a record arrives as duplicated notes and scanned images that still have to be made usable. Steve and Leon dig into the honest limits of AI parsing, the card-network model behind nationwide exchange, and why the patient is becoming the real access point to their own data.
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  S1, E44 - Reflections #6: After Five Episodes, What Still Has to Be Human? 05.07.2026 48λ

  In their sixth Reflections episode, Steve and Leon look back across five conversations (Sarah Rossetti, Jeff Smith of ONC, Hugo Campos, Fred Bennett, and Zak Kohane) and decide, deliberately, not to force a single grand theme. What surfaces anyway is one question asked five ways: as AI gets genuinely capable, what still has to be human, and what makes it trustworthy? They cover Rossetti's CONCERN system that models the nurse instead of the patient, ONC giving AI agents patient-like data rights, the tension between patient empowerment and black boxes you don't understand, the Minimum Trustable Product, and Kohane's method for measuring the values a healthcare AI actually acts on. A practical tour of where good is starting to look real.
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  S1, E43 - Isaac "Zak" Kohane, MD, PhD (Chair, Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School; founding Editor-in-Chief, NEJM AI) 28.06.2026 57λ

  A quiet war is underway over who controls your health data in the age of AI, and the front-runners aren't the usual suspects. Dr. Isaac "Zak" Kohane, Chair of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and founding editor of NEJM AI, traces the line from SMART on FHIR (the accidental standard he helped create in 2009) to today's battle for the doctor-facing AI layer, where companies like OpenEvidence are outrunning the EHR incumbents. He also unveils his Human Values Project, which measures the values embedded inside clinical AI models, and warns how easily payers and pharma could tune them. A two-act conversation about freeing data and guarding values.
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  S1, E42 - Live with Fred Bennett, Founder & CEO, PatientTalker 21.06.2026 58λ

  For its first-ever live episode, recorded before an audience at New York Tech Week, Practical AI in Healthcare sits down with Fred Bennett, founder and CEO of PatientTalker — an ambient-AI app built for the patient rather than the clinician. (Steve Labkoff is a disclosed advisor to the company.) Bennett traces the idea to his father's cardiology visit, where three family members left with three different memories of the same conversation. The discussion covers why patients are the forgotten end-user of clinical AI, how to build a "minimum trustable product," the honest question of who pays for patient-first tools, and why the technology is rarely the hard part.
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  S1, E41 - Hugo Campos: Patient-Directed AI 14.06.2026 51λ

  Patient advocate Hugo Campos spent more than a decade fighting for access to the data from his own implanted defibrillator. When the system wouldn't budge, he stopped trying to reform it and started building around it. In this episode, Hugo shows how he used agentic AI coding tools to create OpenKP, an open-source app that liberates his records from inside Kaiser Permanente, despite calling himself a non-coder. He and the hosts unpack the line between institutional AI and patient-directed AI, the discipline of having two AIs check each other, and why he believes "critical AI health literacy" now matters more than knowing how to code.https://practicalaiinhealthcare.com/
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  S1, E40 - Jeff Smith — AI Regulation, Transparency & Innovation from the Government Perspective 07.06.2026 43λ

  What happens when the rules for getting AI into clinical care are written by someone who has spent his career inside both the advocacy world and the government? In this episode, we talk with Jeff Smith of ONC at HHS, the first government official on Practical AI in Healthcare. Smith walks us through ONC's proposed HTI-5 rule, including a striking move to treat AI agents as "users" with the same data-access rights as clinicians, and a new question about whether blocking data from being written back into the EHR is itself information blocking. We also dig into the limits of what a regulator can actually do, and why the real work is coordination across agencies rather than control from any one of them.https://practicalaiinhealthcare.com/https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalAIinHealthcare
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  S1, E39 - Sarah Rossetti, RN, PhD: Nursing Informatics & the CONCERN Early Warning System 31.05.2026 53λ

  On National Nurses Day, Practical AI in Healthcare welcomes its first nurse: Sarah Rossetti, RN, PhD, of Columbia University. Her CONCERN early warning system takes an unusual approach to predicting patient deterioration. Instead of modeling a patient's vital signs and labs, it models the nurse's documentation behavior, since the frequency and timing of charting reflect clinical concern long before the numbers move. In a 74-unit randomized trial of more than 60,000 patients, published in Nature Medicine, CONCERN was associated with a 35.6% reduction in instantaneous mortality risk. Rossetti and the hosts unpack the method, the counterintuitive rise in ICU transfers, equity safeguards, and what ambient AI means for the signal.https://practicalaiinhealthcare.com/episodes/#S1E39More on Sarah Rossetti's work: https://www.dbmi.columbia.edu/profile/sarah-collins-rossetti/
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  S1, E38 - Reflections 5: How Specialized Does AI Have to Be to Actually Work? 24.05.2026 34λ

  In their fifth Reflections episode, Steve and Leon look back across six conversations (Matt Truppo at Sanofi, Ted Shortliffe, Barry Chaiken, David Hidalgo-Gato, and Danny van Leeuwen) to ask a sharper question: how specialized does AI have to be to actually work? The throughline is depth. The LLM is a commodity, and so, increasingly, is the generalist agent. What stays scarce is specialization in a workflow, the revival of symbolic methods like knowledge graphs, the literacy that separates an AI's ~95% solo accuracy from the under-35% people get using it themselves, and leaders willing to use themselves as the test rig. After 37 episodes, the technology is no longer the question. The specificity of the work around it is.
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  S1, E37 - Danny van Leeuwen, MPH, RN, Health Hats: Patient's POV on AI Tools 17.05.2026 42λ

  Danny van Leeuwen is a nurse of 50 years, a multiple sclerosis patient, host of the Health Hats podcast, and a serial member of national outcomes panels at CMS, AHRQ, PCORI, and the National Academy of Medicine. He has tried more than 100 health apps and uses five. In this episode, he explains how he uses AI to interrogate his own chart, surface symptom patterns, and prepare for clinical encounters, and he shares his Three T's and Two C's framework for evaluating any digital health technology: Time, Trust, Talk, Control, Connection. The conversation covers what patients want from AI, what they do not, and why pain, fear, and cognition still escape the data.
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  S1, E36 - David Hidalgo-Gato, Founder & CEO, Cleo Health: Going a Mile Deep on Emergency Medicine — Specialization, Design Partnerships, and the Acute Care OS 10.05.2026 49λ

  David Hidalgo-Gato is the founder and CEO of Cleo Health. While more than 100 competitors were building generic ambient AI scribes, David's team chose emergency medicine and stayed with one design partner for nine months and roughly 50 product iterations before launching. The result: an average 54-minute time savings per shift, a patient-assignment tool that turned a four-hour process into 15 to 20 minutes, and use across 400+ hospitals nationwide. The conversation covers why ED workflow breaks generic ambient scribes, why generative AI fits patient assignment specifically, and David's argument that workflow understanding is the moat AI cannot commoditize.https://practicalaiinhealthcare.com/
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  S1, E35 - Barry P. Chaiken, MD, MPH: Physician-as-Patient Perspective on AI in Healthcare 03.05.2026 53λ

  When physician Barry Chaiken was diagnosed with prostate cancer, his clinical training gave way to fear. It took a friend asking, "What are you doing?" to snap him back into doctor-mode thinking. That experience reshaped how he sees AI in healthcare. In this episode, Chaiken draws on his dual perspective as physician and two-time cancer survivor to argue that consumer health AI is failing patients, not because the models are bad, but because patients don't know how to use them. He shares a practical framework for AI-assisted patient education, makes the case for an aviation-style safety reporting system for healthcare AI, and explains why interoperability is an incentive problem, not a technology problem.
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  S1, E34 - Matt Truppo, PhD, Part 2: AI-Driven Drug Development at Sanofi: Clinical Trials, Regulatory, and Personal AI 26.04.2026 56λ

  In Part 2 of our conversation with Matt Truppo, Global Head of Research Platforms and Computational R&D at Sanofi, we move from discovery to development, where the real stakes begin. Matt unpacks the promise and limitations of “digital patient twins,” a concept often described as the holy grail of drug development. With nearly 90% of drugs failing in clinical trials, even modest gains in predicting efficacy or patient response could transform the industry. Through real-world examples, including Dupixent and rare disease therapies, Matt shows how quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) and AI-driven simulations are already shortening timelines, reducing patient burden, and, in some cases, eliminating the need for entire trials.But the story doesn’t stop at modeling. We explore how AI is reshaping clinical operations, from Sanofi’s “clinical control tower” that integrates trial data across 4,000 users, to generative AI tools that are cutting regulatory document creation time by more than a third. Matt also shares a personal experiment, building a network of AI agents modeled on his own workflow, reclaiming 30% of his time and offering a glimpse into a more “agentic” future of work. The throughline is clear: AI is not replacing human expertise, but amplifying it, helping the industry finally bend the cost and time curve of drug development.
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  S1, E33 - Ted Shortliffe, MD, PhD: 50 Years of Clinical AI 19.04.2026 48λ

  Ted Shortliffe built MYCIN at Stanford in the 1970s, one of the first medical AI systems ever deployed in a clinical setting. Five decades later, he joins Steve and Leon to examine what has persisted in clinical decision support — above all, the demand for explainability — what has changed (computational power finally caught up to the ideas), and what the field may have lost along the way. The conversation includes a direct response to Bob Wachter's claim from S1E24 that AI in healthcare decision support was "too hard a problem to start with," and a case for why structured knowledge representation deserves a second look in the age of LLMs. For anyone tracing the arc of medical AI history, this episode is a rare primary source.
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  S1, E32 - Matt Truppo, PhD: AI-Driven Drug Discovery at Sanofi 12.04.2026 52λ

  AI in drug discovery has been long on promise and short on delivery. Matt Truppo, Global Head of Research Platforms and Computational R&D at Sanofi, presents a different picture. His team used AI to identify 10+ novel drug targets in 12 months, screen 30 million target combinations in days, and produce AI-designed compounds with 75% synthesizability. But Truppo is equally candid about the gaps: data integration, explainability, and change management remain real barriers. In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, hosts Steve Labkoff and Leon Rozenblit explore what happens when AI moves past pilot projects into core pharmaceutical science.
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  S1, E31 - Reflections 4: What Does the Infrastructure Actually Look Like? 05.04.2026 51λ

  Every five episodes, Steve and Leon step back to examine what picture forms when you put their guest conversations side by side. This time, five guests from completely different healthcare domains -- data quality, clinical trials, medical translation, patient data, participatory medicine -- independently converged on the same conclusion: the AI works; the infrastructure around it doesn't yet. From Charlie Harp's data quality metrics to Adam Blum's 60-to-90% scaffolding story to Amy Price's reframing of healthcare AI as "unfinished, not broken," Block 4 reveals what industry maturation actually looks like -- not a breakthrough, but a quiet shift in what the conversation is about.
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  S1, E30 - Amy Price: Patient Advocacy, Participatory Medicine, and AI Governance 29.03.2026 58λ

  Amy Price survived a car accident that left her with a broken neck, severe brain injury, and $4 million in medical bills. She was told she'd need to be institutionalized. Instead, she earned a DPhil at Oxford and became Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Participatory Medicine. In this episode, Amy sits down with Leon to discuss why patients belong inside the AI design process, what it really means to have a "knowledgeable human who cares" in the loop, and why healthcare AI is an unfinished system worth building on, not a broken one worth scrapping. She also shares how she uses AI tools for her own health decisions and what she's learned about closing the patient AI literacy gap.
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  S1, E29 - Shashi Shankar, Co-founder & CEO, Novellia, Inc. 22.03.2026 53λ

  Shashi Shankar spent nearly a decade at Genentech before a family cancer journey and a broken data landscape pushed him to build something different. His company Novellia works directly with patients — not data brokers — to collect and consolidate health records across multiple providers using SMART on FHIR. The result: longitudinal, patient-authorized real-world data that fills the gaps left by claims databases, single-site EMRs, and health information exchanges. We explore why previous PHR companies failed, how AI catches clinical data errors that humans miss, and whether Big Tech should be trusted with patient data.
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  S1, E28 - Adam Blum: AI-Powered Clinical Trial Matching 15.03.2026 50λ

  When Adam Blum was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma, he tried over a dozen commercial trial matchers. None returned actual matches. So the serial AI entrepreneur built CancerBot, a free precision-matching service that assesses 100% of eligibility criteria — not the five surface-level attributes most matchers use. On this episode, Blum explains the Prompt Workbench (where biomedical experts refine extraction prompts to above 90% accuracy), how conjunctive normal form makes complex eligibility logic tractable, and why "best trial" means something different for every patient. A masterclass in AI scaffolding for healthcare.
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  S1, E27 - Charlie Harp, Healthcare Data Quality and the PIQI Framework 08.03.2026 48λ

  For 37 years, Charlie Harp heard the same thing from healthcare organizations: "Our data quality is fine." They were right — for billing and scheduling. But AI changed the equation. Harp, founder of Clinical Architecture, built the PIQI framework to measure patient data quality across four dimensions: availability, accuracy, conformance, and plausibility. His PIQXL Gateway scores data on a 1-100 scale before it enters your systems — not after. Early deployments reveal uncomfortable truths: lab data averages 70% quality against USCDI standards, and one facility coded every blood test to a single LOINC code. The framework is now going through HL7 balloting as an open national standard.