Practical AI in Healthcare
AI promises to transform healthcare—but real, scalable impact remains rare. Practical AI in Healthcare cuts through the noise to showcase real-world use cases delivering business value today. Hosted by senior leaders—former VPs of life science technology groups, clinical informatics professionals from top-tier organizations, and a former Big Four consultant—each episode features candid conversations with the people making AI work inside the healthcare enterprise.
Episodes
S1, E51 - Reflections #7: When the Machine Is Almost Always Right, Who Is Still Thinking?
In their seventh Reflections episode, and their fifty-first overall, Steve and Leon look back across six conversations: Mika Newton on interoperability that finally started working, Peter Embi on monitoring clinical AI after deployment, Vimla Patel on how clinicians actually reason, Renee Deehan on an engine built so it can't hallucinate, Christine Dymek on AI literacy, and Jeremy Harper on an
S1, E50 - Jeremy Harper: The Broken Adoption Curve, Ambient Scribes Nobody Can Audit, and the Knowledge We Keep Paying For and Deleting
Every technology healthcare has adopted moved through the same curve: a bleeding-edge few went first and documented what broke, and the majority followed. Large language models skipped that entirely. Jeremy Harper, a biomedical informatician who has worked at Epic, Ohio State, and Regenstrief, and who wrote Large Language Models (LLMs) for Healthcare, explains what we gave up by going all at once.
S1, E49 - Chris Dymek: Healthcare AI Literacy
Chris Dymek came to healthcare informatics by way of philosophy, and she still thinks like a philosopher: the first question is what we actually mean. As Director of Digital Healthcare Research at AHRQ, she funded AI research, helped launch work on AI and patient safety, and wrote a request for information asking healthcare organizations how they thought about AI literacy. It was never published.
S1, E48 - Renee Deehan: Trustworthy AI for Consumer Health
The internet is full of wellness advice built on a single cherry-picked study. Renee Deehan, a molecular and cell biologist who leads science and AI at InsideTracker, spent two decades building the opposite. In this episode, she explains why the core of their recommendation engine is symbolic AI, knowledge representation and reasoning, rather than a large language model: it's deterministic, fu
S1, E47 - Vimla Patel: Cognitive Science of Clinical Reasoning
Dr. Vimla Patel has spent four decades studying how physicians actually reason, and what happens when technology ignores it. In this episode, she explains the difference between forward reasoning (the fast, pattern-driven hallmark of expertise) and backward reasoning (the slower, hypothesis-testing mode of novices), and why most clinical AI is built for the wrong one. Through two vivid cases, a te
S1, E46 - Peter Embi: The Doctor Who Diagnosed Himself
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 di
S1, E45 - Mika Newton, xCures: Intelligent Interoperability
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 o
S1, E44 - Reflections #6: After Five Episodes, What Still Has to Be Human?
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 CONC
S1, E43 - Isaac "Zak" Kohane, MD, PhD (Chair, Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School; founding Editor-in-Chief, NEJM AI)
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
S1, E42 - Live with Fred Bennett, Founder & CEO, PatientTalker
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 thre
S1, E41 - Hugo Campos: Patient-Directed AI
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 hi
S1, E40 - Jeff Smith — AI Regulation, Transparency & Innovation from the Government Perspective
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" wi
S1, E39 - Sarah Rossetti, RN, PhD: Nursing Informatics & the CONCERN Early Warning System
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 lo
S1, E38 - Reflections 5: How Specialized Does AI Have to Be to Actually Work?
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
S1, E37 - Danny van Leeuwen, MPH, RN, Health Hats: Patient's POV on AI Tools
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 encounter
S1, E36 - David Hidalgo-Gato, Founder & CEO, Cleo Health: Going a Mile Deep on Emergency Medicine — Specialization, Design Partnerships, and the Acute Care OS
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
S1, E35 - Barry P. Chaiken, MD, MPH: Physician-as-Patient Perspective on AI in Healthcare
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 failin
S1, E34 - Matt Truppo, PhD, Part 2: AI-Driven Drug Development at Sanofi: Clinical Trials, Regulatory, and Personal AI
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 predi
S1, E33 - Ted Shortliffe, MD, PhD: 50 Years of Clinical AI
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 con
S1, E32 - Matt Truppo, PhD: AI-Driven Drug Discovery at Sanofi
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
S1, E31 - Reflections 4: What Does the Infrastructure Actually Look Like?
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.
S1, E30 - Amy Price: Patient Advocacy, Participatory Medicine, and AI Governance
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 m
S1, E29 - Shashi Shankar, Co-founder & CEO, Novellia, Inc.
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 c
S1, E28 - Adam Blum: AI-Powered Clinical Trial Matching
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 refin
S1, E27 - Charlie Harp, Healthcare Data Quality and the PIQI Framework
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
S1, E26 - Discharge Planning Translation Services with Giovanni Donatelli
Every day, patients leave US hospitals with discharge instructions they can't read. Giovanni Donatelli, CEO of The Language Group, built FETCH — a patented AI system embedded in Epic that translates discharge documents in 15 minutes with human review. He did it because he was the 8-year-old interpreting for his immigrant parents at doctor's appointments. Hosts Steve Labkoff and Leon Rozenb
S1, E25 - Reflections 3: What Happens When Principles Meet Reality
Steve and Leon have reviewed blocks of guest episodes twice before on Practical AI in Healthcare. Both times the themes snapped into place. This time they didn't -- and the disagreement between them became the episode. Across five recent conversations, they found stories that kept spilling past the edges of their framework: AI that works but can't get paid, laws that already apply but nobo
S1, E24 - Bob Wachter, MD | A Giant Leap: AI in Healthcare
Bob Wachter wrote the book on the EHR disaster. Now he's written one about AI.The UCSF Chair of Medicine joins hosts Steve Labkoff and Leon Rozenblit to discuss A Giant Leap, his argument that AI doesn't need to be perfect—it needs to beat a healthcare system already failing at scale. They cover Watson's $3B collapse, why ambient scribes became AI's first clinical success story, th
S1, E23 - CHiRP: AI-Enabled Early Detection of Psychosis Risk with Amar Mandavia, PhD & Enrique "Kike" Gutiérrez, PhD
What if early signs of psychosis could be detected from how patients speak—not what they say, but how they organize their thoughts?Amar Mandavia (VA Boston, Boston University) and Enrique "Kike" Gutiérrez (Polytechnic University of Madrid) join hosts Steve Labkoff and Leon Rozenblit to discuss CHiRP, an AI tool that identifies formal thought disorder from routine clinical conversations. They expla
S1, E22 - Aaron Kamauu, MD, MS, MPH | RWE Design in the Age of Data
Real-world evidence was supposed to accelerate drug development. Instead, we've created definitional chaos—over 100 data vendors, inconsistent definitions, and studies that can't be compared.Dr. Aaron Kamauu, CEO of Navidence and co-host of Real World Wednesday, explains why one missing diagnosis code can exclude 30% of your cohort, how GLP-1 eligibility criteria vary wildly between NHS and US gui
S1, E21 - Jeff Chuang, PhD, The Jackson Laboratory
In this episode of Practical AI in Healthcare, we sit down with Dr. Jeff Chuang, a computational biologist at The Jackson Laboratory, to explore how AI is reshaping cancer diagnostics, starting with pediatric sarcoma. Jeff shares his journey from physics and protein folding to computational pathology, where machine learning is being applied to standard H&E pathology slides to deliver faster, c
S1, E20 - Josh Geleris, MD, CPO, SmarterDx
In this episode of Practical AI in Healthcare, we sit down with physician–informaticist Josh Geleris, MD, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of SmarterDx, to unpack one of healthcare’s most overlooked AI opportunities: revenue cycle intelligence. Drawing on his clinical training, deep technical background, and firsthand experience inside large health systems, Josh explains how AI can bridge the
S1, E 19 - Dr. Alvin Liu and AI Diabetic Retinopathy Screening
In this episode of Practical AI in Healthcare, we sit down with Dr. Alvin Liu, retinal surgeon and Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins University, to explore one of the earliest and most successful real-world deployments of medical AI.Dr. Liu walks us through the evolution of autonomous AI for diabetic retinopathy screening, from FDA approval to large-scale clin
S1, E18 - Tiffany Leung, MD - Scientific Editorial Director, JMIR
In this episode of Practical AI in Healthcare, we sit down with Dr. Tiffany Leung, Scientific Editorial Director at JMIR Publications, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping scientific publishing from the inside out. As open access journals face unprecedented volumes of submissions, AI is simultaneously enabling faster discovery and creating new challenges around research integrity, p
S1, E17: Kathy Roe & Kenny White: The Legal Realities of AI in Healthcare
In this episode, Steven Labkoff and Leon Rozenblit explore the legal, regulatory, and risk-management challenges introduced by AI with two top experts in the field: Kathy Roe, Principal at Health Law Consultancy, and Kenny White, Director of the Managed Care Industry Group at Alliant Insurance Services. Together, they unpack how AI intersects with medical malpractice, product liability, HIPAA priv
S1, E16: Reflections II - Episodes 9-15
In our second Reflections episode, Steve Labkoff and Leon Rozenblit synthesize the most meaningful insights from guests across Episodes 9–15. Drawing on conversations with Orr Inbar, Martin Leach, Ing Ho, Yuri Quintana, and patient advocate E-Patient Dave, this episode highlights the themes shaping practical AI adoption in today’s healthcare landscape.Key topics include the inflection point AI has
S1, E15 - Adam Rodman: Rethinking Clinical Reasoning in the Age of AI
We just released one of the most intellectually energizing conversations we’ve had on Practical AI in Healthcare. Our guest this week is Dr. Adam Rodman, physician, informatician, historian of medicine, and one of the most original thinkers at the intersection of AI and clinical reasoning.Adam brings a rare perspective to the field: before becoming an AI researcher, he spent years studying how hum
S1, E14 - Orr Inbar, CEO Quant Health - AI Simulations of Clinical Trials
Practical AI in Healthcare just released one of our most eye-opening conversations yet, featuring Orr Inbar, CEO & Co-Founder of QuantHealth.QuantHealth is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in clinical development with AI-driven clinical trial simulation. Orr walked us through how modern deep learning, massive biological knowledge graphs, and patient-level real-world data can now simul
S1, E13 - Part 2 of 2: Dr. Yin Ho's discussion of her new book, Rushing Headlong: Health IT’s Legacy and the Road to Responsible AI
In the conclusion of our two-part conversation with Dr. Yin Ho, author of Rushing Headlong: Health IT’s Legacy and the Road to Responsible AI, we explore how healthcare can avoid repeating its digital past. Dr. Ho and hosts Dr. Steven Labkoff and Dr. Leon Rozenblit dive into small language models, decision support vs. decision control, the pitfalls of ambient scribing, and why “rage-building” the
S1, E12: Part 1 of 2: Dr. S. Yin Ho discusses her new book
The newest episode of Practical AI in Healthcare features Dr. Yin Ho—physician, entrepreneur, and author of Rushing Headlong: Health IT's Legacy and the Road to Responsible AI.In Part 1 of our two-part conversation, Dr. Ho joins Dr. Steven Labkoff and Dr. Leon Rozenblit to unpack 25 years of digital health transformation—from the dawn of electronic medical records to the market and policy forces t
S1, E11: Dr. Yuri Quintana from the DCI Network reviews our latest Meeting
Dr. Yuri Quintana, Director of the Division of Clinical Informatics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, joins us this week to discuss the DCI Network’s mission: turning AI in healthcare from theory into practice.The conversation traces DCI’s evolution as a multi-stakeholder “action tank” focused on collaboration, transparency, and patient safety. Quintana recounts the success of the Signal Th
S1, E10: AI in Healthcare: A Patient's Perspective with ePatient Dave
In this episode of Practical AI in Healthcare, Dr. Steven Labkoff and Dr. Leon Rozenblit speak with ePatient Dave DeBronkart, a globally recognized advocate for patient empowerment. Dave shares his journey from a life-threatening kidney cancer diagnosis in 2007 to becoming one of the earliest champions of open data, patient access to medical records, and of late, patient use of AI tools to help em
S1, E9: Martin Leach, PhD, MBA, CDO of Black Canyon Consulting
This week’s episode of Practical AI in Healthcare dives into AI, truth, and the future of data in the government with Dr. Martin Leach, Chief Data Officer at Black Canyon Consulting. Dr. Martin Leach, PhD, is a data, science, and technology leader with a career spanning some of the most innovative organizations in life sciences and academia. A self-described “data geek,” Martin began his career as
S1, E8: Reflections on Our First 7 Episodes
In this week's episode, Leon and Steve unpack and digest the various pearls provided by our first 7 podcasts. From frameworks to consider concerning AI in the business and healthcare setting to AI Literacy, we highlight the various lessons learned as we move into our third month of the Podcast.
S1, E7: Brendan Arbuckle, CIO, The Jackson Laboratory
This episode of Practical AI in Healthcare features Brendan Arbuckle, CIO of The Jackson Laboratory (JAX). Brendan shares how a world-leading genetics institute is deploying AI to advance research, streamline operations, and raise AI literacy across its organization. From ethical sandboxes to research breakthroughs and “everyday AI” that saves clinicians time, he offers a refreshingly grounded tak
S1, E6: John Glaser: Lessons from a Healthcare IT Pioneer on the Future of AI
Season 1, Episode 6 welcomes John Glaser—executive in residence at Harvard Medical School, former SVP at Cerner, past CEO of Siemens Health Services, and a pioneer in healthcare IT. Join hosts Dr. Steve Labkoff and Dr. Leon Rozenblit as they explore Glaser’s unique perspective on the trajectory of AI in healthcare, drawing lessons from over 40 years of industry transformation. Find out:Why every b
S1, E5: Yair Saperstein, MD - CEO of AVO
Yair Saperstein, MD, MPH, is CEO and Co-Founder of Avo, the AI engine used by healthcare organizations to improve care and operational outcomes in a way clinicians love. He is a hospitalist at Mount Sinai Hospital. Dr. Saperstein graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine with distinction in research in global health and from SUNY Downstate with a Master's in Public Health in hospital poli
S1, E8: Reflections on our first 7 Episodes
This week, Leon Rozenblit and I digest the wonderful wisdom we've heard over the first two months of the podcast. We try to distill all the various pearls that were dropped by our guest speakers. If you missed the first series of episodes, this will help you both catch up and speed through the learnings that came out of these discussions.
S1, E4: Author, Professor, and Healthcare Executive Scott Snyder
Scott Snyder is many things: a part-time professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, an author on AI, and the Chief Digital Officer of Eversana. In this episode we will explore Scott's various pursuits, his new book, and his view on where AI an Healthcare are intersecting.
S1, E3: Dr. Dereck Paul and Glass Health
One of the most underserved communities in the world of AI is that of clinicians. But Dr. Dereck Paul of Glass Health is trying to change that. Being a clinician himself, he's bringing a new approach to something that's the bane of a clinician's existence - creating and documenting interactions with patients. Listen in to this young entrepreneur as he unpacks his vision for clinical medicine and h
S1, E2: John Apathy and XponenL's Perspectives on AI
This week we hear from someone in the thick of the AI game, John Apathy from XponenL.AI. John's the Chief Solution's Officer for this recently acquired AI firm that focuses in on the pharmaceutical R&D space. John explains his perspectives as well as some of the work being done by his firm for some of their largest customers.
Practical AI in Healthcare: Leon Rozenblit of the QED Institute (S1, E1)
When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, it marked a turning point in the global conversation around artificial intelligence. Virtually overnight, industries across the board began exploring how Generative AI could transform the way we work, think, and solve problems. Healthcare was no exception. From improving clinical workflows and accelerating research, to empowering patients and supporti
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