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NEJM AI Grand Rounds

NEJM AI Grand Rounds

NEJM Group 43 Episodes Sep 16, 2026

NEJM AI Grand Rounds, hosted by Arjun (Raj) Manrai, Ph.D. and Andrew Beam, Ph.D., features informal conversations with a variety of unique experts exploring the deep issues at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and medicine. You’ll learn how AI will change clinical practice and healthcare, how it will impact the patient experience, and about the people who are pushing for innovation. Whether you are an AI researcher or a practicing clinician, these conversations will enlighten and surprise you as we journey through this very exciting field. Produced by NEJM Group.

Episodes

Beyond the Hype: Dr. Xiao Liu on Evaluating Medical AI
Beyond the Hype: Dr. Xiao Liu on Evaluating Medical AI Sep 16, 2026 2630 The promise of medical AI is not simply better performance — it is better care grounded in evidence patients and clinicians can trust. Dr. Xiao Liu, a clinician and medical AI researcher affiliated with the University of Birmingham and Microsoft AI, has spent her career asking what rigorous evaluation should look like as new technologies move from publications into practice. She describes reportin
Dr. Suchi Saria on Building AI That Changes Care
Dr. Suchi Saria on Building AI That Changes Care Aug 19, 2026 3544 A patient can deteriorate while the warning signs remain buried in a noisy electronic record. Dr. Suchi Saria, Founder and CEO of Bayesian Health and a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, has spent her career trying to surface those signals sooner. She explains why a strong retrospective model is only the starting point — and why prospective validation, workflow integration, physician adop
Weave’s Brandon Rice on Rebuilding Drug Regulation with AI
Weave’s Brandon Rice on Rebuilding Drug Regulation with AI Jul 15, 2026 2704 Brandon Rice believes that improving health care sometimes means improving the systems behind it. Through his work at Weave, he focuses on modernizing the regulatory infrastructure that helps bring new medicines to market. He discusses the challenge of organizing scientific knowledge, communicating with regulators, and navigating processes that can span more than a decade. His vision is that AI ca
OpenAI’s Karan Singal on HealthBench and the Future of Medical AI
OpenAI’s Karan Singal on HealthBench and the Future of Medical AI Jun 17, 2026 2744 Medical expertise has always been scarce. Dr. Karan Singal believes AI can help change that. Drawing on his work at OpenAI and earlier efforts behind Med‑PaLM, he discusses how clinicians and patients are already using AI to answer questions, support decisions, and navigate care. He argues that the future of health AI is not only about improving model performance, but also about helping people adv
The OpenEvidence Episode: Dr. Travis Zack on the Future of Clinical Evidence
The OpenEvidence Episode: Dr. Travis Zack on the Future of Clinical Evidence May 20, 2026 3954 Dr. Travis Zack, Chief Medical Officer of OpenEvidence, takes us behind the scenes of the start and growth of the company, and brings a clinician’s perspective to one of medicine’s hardest questions: how should artificial intelligence support decision-making? In this episode, he emphasizes that reasoning—not just correctness—defines good care, and that evidence must be contextual, accessible, and
Doctronic’s Autonomous AI with Dr. Byron Crowe
Doctronic’s Autonomous AI with Dr. Byron Crowe Apr 15, 2026 3067 Doctronic CMO Dr. Byron Crowe describes how administrative complexity can interfere with timely, effective treatment, and how AI may help address those challenges. Crowe discusses Doctronic’s use of autonomous AI to renew prescriptions, arguing that this application can streamline care while maintaining clinical oversight. For physicians, this shift raises important questions about workflow, respo
AI’s Next Frontier with Dr. Kyunghyun Cho
AI’s Next Frontier with Dr. Kyunghyun Cho Mar 18, 2026 4036 Dr. Kyunghyun Cho is a leading AI researcher best known for co-authoring a landmark 2014 paper that introduced neural machine translation. In this episode, he discusses his wide-ranging career spanning fundamental AI research, co-founding Prescient Design (acquired by Genentech), and driving applications of AI in health care. For clinicians, Cho’s core message is pragmatic: AI should help health c
Epic’s Approach to AI with Seth Hain
Epic’s Approach to AI with Seth Hain Feb 18, 2026 3181 Clinical AI only helps patients if clinicians and health systems trust it. Seth Hain describes how Epic is building foundation models that respect institutional autonomy, minimize burden, and prioritize safety. He discusses scaling laws in structured medical data, cautious deployment for clinical interventions, and why understanding causality—not just correlation—is essential. This conversation re
Bridging AI and Biology to Tackle Medicine’s Hardest Problems with Dr. Marinka Zitnik
Bridging AI and Biology to Tackle Medicine’s Hardest Problems with Dr. Marinka Zitnik Jan 21, 2026 3267 For Dr. Marinka Zitnik, the promise of AI in medicine begins with acknowledging the scale of the problem. Most patients with rare diseases have no approved treatments, and traditional drug development timelines make progress painfully slow. In this conversation, she describes how AI-driven drug repurposing offers a way to work within existing constraints while still opening new therapeutic possibi
What Values are in AI? A Conversation with Dr. Zak Kohane
What Values are in AI? A Conversation with Dr. Zak Kohane Dec 17, 2025 4693 For Dr. Zak Kohane, this year’s advances in AI weren’t abstract. They were personal, practical, and deeply tied to care. After decades studying clinical data and diagnostic uncertainty, he finds himself building his own EHR, reviewing his child’s imaging with AI, and re-thinking the balance between incidental and missed findings. Across each story is the same insight: clinicians and machines make
From Hindsight Bias to Machine Bias: Dr. Laura Zwaan on Learning from Mistakes
From Hindsight Bias to Machine Bias: Dr. Laura Zwaan on Learning from Mistakes Nov 19, 2025 2289 As a cognitive psychologist, Dr. Laura Zwaan studies how humans make—and learn from—mistakes. In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds, she brings that lens to AI, showing how machines inherit our biases and why both need transparency and reflection. From the challenge of defining diagnostic error to the promise of “machine psychology,” Dr. Zwaan explores how human reasoning can inform safer algori
Medicine, Machines, and Magic: Dr. Jonathan Chen on Medical AI
Medicine, Machines, and Magic: Dr. Jonathan Chen on Medical AI Oct 15, 2025 2897 In this episode, Dr. Jonathan Chen joins the hosts to discuss his path from teenage programmer to Stanford physician-informatician and why machine learning has both thrilled and unnerved him. From his 2017 NEJM essay warning about “inflated expectations” to his latest studies showing GPT‑4 outperforming doctors on diagnostic tasks, Dr. Chen describes a discipline learning humility at machine speed

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