In this episode, we talk to Cody Simmons, CEO at DermaSensor. DermaSensor achieved internet-fame in late Jan 2024, when it received FDA clearance for its approach using non-invasive spectroscopy for skin cancer and melanoma detection. According to Cody, there have been hundreds of researchers in both academia and industry, with the first research papers in the late 1980s. So why go after a novel hardware centric-approach? Hasn’t #machinevision already solved this? Not so fast. There is not a sin...
Feb 13, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 14
In this episode, we speak to Bagirathi Narayanan, Chief Architect at Teladoc Health. Bagirathi talks about her journey as an enterprise software architect in the finance-tech world, and what made her come to healthcare. While both are heavily regulated and have similar technology challenges; the complexity of the ecosystem in healthcare is remarkably high. Bagirathi talks about how these industries approached the cloud-first and mobile-first transformation; and what lessons apply to being an AI-...
Jan 16, 2024•35 min•Season 1Ep. 13
In this episode, we talk to Dr. Geeta Nayyar, healthcare executive and author. Dr. Nayyer joins us to talk about her recent WSJ bestseller, Dead Wrong, and the role of technology in misinformation. Dr. Nayyar picks up the conversation talking about her personal experiences with mis-information in healthcare; and what drives people to question the incentives of a healthcare provider - be it the AIDS epidemic, or the recent COVID pandemic. Poor access to information not only lets patients down; bu...
Dec 12, 2023•26 min•Season 1Ep. 12
In this episode, we speak to Dr. Arta Bakshandeh, Chief Medical Informatics Officer of Alignment Health. Dr. Bakshandeh talks about his journey as a physician, seeing the power of machine learning and AI, and its impact on health plan members. Alignment Health, a consumer brand name of Alignment Healthcare (NASDAQ: ALHC), offers benefit-rich Medicare Advantage plans across 6 states, designed around the idea of driving more personalized healthcare for seniors. We talk about the change in thinking...
Nov 28, 2023•34 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Health equity has been an important discussion in the last several years in the healthcare community. In this episode, we go deeper into the challenges in health equity with Stefany Goradia. We begin by talking about the current state of health inequity in the US healthcare system in both access to care, and clinical outcomes. We talk about how health equity is complementary to social determinants of health. Stefany provides examples of these that we see everyday in the US healthcare system, fro...
Nov 07, 2023•36 min•Season 1Ep. 10
What are the opportunities for AI in inpatient and home care? In this episode, we talk to Mike Wang and Jon Gips from Inspiren, whose AUGi platform leverages machine vision and AI to help nurses and providers be more productive with data, and detect and reduce harm. Nurses play such an important role in healthcare. Mike and Jon dive into the challenges in nursing today – specifically the burden and obstacles in current hospital settings. For context, a 2023 McKinsey study reported that 40% of nu...
Oct 17, 2023•36 min•Season 1Ep. 9
AI innovation is moving at a breakneck pace, and we’re just starting to understand the applications and impact on healthcare. In this episode, we take a moment to reflect on the need and broader vision for the autonomous health conversation. Our host, Anmol Madan, talks about the building blocks of making this vision real - both on the technology front (e.g. new types of data/signals, advances in recent models, and the impact they have on the care experience), and also the social elements (e.g. ...
Oct 03, 2023•19 min•Season 1Ep. 8
In this episode, we speak to a luminary in the field of mental health. Dr. Tom Insel is the executive chair at Vanna Health, former executive at Verily, and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Insel begins by putting the current AI revolution in context, calling this the fourth wave of mental health innovation – the previous waves being pharmaceuticals, followed by genomic advances, and (most recently) digital mental health technology innovations. According to Tom, th...
Sep 12, 2023•31 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Most of our guests at our Autonomous Health Podcast talk about novel insights about data, AI models, and applications. But in this episode, we’re going down a different path – learning about building high-performance AI teams in healthcare. Have you wanted to build a high-performing AI team? Are you thinking about roles in the field? In this episode, we speak to Peg Olson and Abbie Turek, experienced recruiters who have been building technology and executive teams in this space for over three de...
Aug 29, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 6
This episode of Autonomous Health takes a longer-term look at the future of sleep. What can we learn about sleep in extreme environments from astronauts, military pilots, and oil rig workers? Our guest this episode is Dr. Cassie Hilditch, a scientist in the field of sleep countermeasures. Sleep countermeasures, in simple terms, is discovering approaches to maximize the benefits of sleep in a continuous operating environment, such as military applications. In this episode, we discuss the role of ...
Aug 15, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) were first approved by the FDA nearly 25 years ago, but have seen widespread adoption in the last decade with popular CGM models from leading companies such as Dexcom and Abott. This has also led to discovering the everyday health insights that CGMs can inform beyond diabetes management. In this episode, we speak to data scientists RJ Elllis, PhD and Robbie Capps, PhD who have gone deep into understanding metabolic patterns in CGM data. RJ and Robbie talk about...
Jul 25, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Welcome back to the Autonomous Health podcast. AI conversational agents and natural language have existed well before the recent advances in large-language-models (LLMs). In this episode, we talk to John O’Donovan, PhD. John is a machine learning and AI innovator who serves as a research scientist at UC Santa Barbara and has authored 100+ scientific publications. He also leads AI teams at Teladoc Health. John has been working on conversational agents for the last several years, and has built and...
Jul 11, 2023•33 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Welcome back to the Autonomous Health podcast. Good sleep plays a pivotal role in mood, brain functioning, limiting stress, and overall health, including the management of chronic conditions. Yet over the past few decades, mobile devices and lifestyle changes have also adversely impacted good sleep. In this episode, we talk with Jeff Kahn and Leon Sasson, co-founders of Rise Sleep Science. Rise sleep is a leading health and wellness app globally, helping people better track and manage their slee...
Jun 27, 2023•37 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Welcome to Season 1 of the Autonomous Health podcast. The last six months have seen tremendous progress of generative AI, much of it in large language models like chat-GPT. But there are numerous questions about the risks of these AI applications. Recently, in a scene right out of science fiction, Open AI CEO Sam Altman met with the US Senate and made a compelling case for regulatory oversight of AI. The Center of AI Safety just published a statement of risk saying that AI could have extinction-...
Jun 14, 2023•34 min•Season 1Ep. 1
