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.
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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 advocate for themselves more effectively. Through HealthBench and ChatGPT for Clinicians, his team is e...
Dr. Travis Zack, CMO of OpenEvidence, provides an in-depth look at how the company's AI supports clinical decision-making by prioritizing relevant, contextual evidence over mere answers. He shares OpenEvidence's unique growth strategy, focusing on direct clinician feedback and responsible content partnerships to combat AI hallucinations. The conversation also explores the evolving role of AI in medical education and the enduring importance of human judgment in navigating complex medical literature.
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, responsibility, and patient engagement. Crowe emphasizes that the goal is not automation for its own sake...
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 care run better. After years of work at NYU Langone, he reframed AI in medicine from solving rare dia...
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 reframes AI not as disruption, but as infrastructure for safer, more reliable care. Transcript....
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 possibilities. She also highlights a structural issue that has limited impact: machine learning and biolog...
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 mistakes for different reasons — and understanding those differences is essential for safe deployme...
Dr. Laura Zwaan explores the fascinating intersection of human and machine psychology, examining how AI inherits cognitive biases and the complexities of defining medical errors. She highlights the critical need for transparency, reflection, and careful human-AI collaboration to improve diagnostic safety and foster better patient care, emphasizing that understanding ourselves is key to trustworthy AI.
Dr. Jonathan Chen, a physician-informatician at Stanford, explores his journey from early programmer to medical AI expert, reflecting on his 2017 NEJM warning about "inflated expectations" for machine learning. He delves into recent studies showing GPT-4's diagnostic capabilities, which challenge the established belief that human-computer collaboration always yields superior results. The conversation also covers the implications for medical education, automation anxiety, and the evolving essential skills for future clinicians.
Dr. Karandeep Singh, Chief Health AI Officer, shares his unique career path integrating programming with medicine, highlighting the critical need for deep domain expertise in AI development. He discusses challenges in evaluating AI models like sepsis prediction tools in real-world clinical settings, the complexities of AI governance, and the crucial role of data privacy. Singh offers insights into the future of healthcare AI, expressing concerns about funding models but optimism for technological integrations.
Dr. Jeremy Friese knows medicine from both sides. A practicing radiologist and technology executive, he’s seen firsthand how administrative burden undermines care. In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds , he walks through the origins of prior authorization, explains why he believes artificial intelligence can close the gap between patients and payers, and argues that real reform means showing your work—just like in math class. At Humata, he’s combining human oversight, LLMs, and interoperabilit...
Dr. Andy Beam has trained models, mentored scientists, and used data to quantify the value of treatments. In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds , Raj Manrai turns the table on his co-host, reflecting on how Andy’s childhood misdiagnosis, and the failure of human recall, revealed the diagnostic promise of machine learning. As a Harvard professor, he mentored hybrid thinkers and built tools to evaluate safety, not just performance. Now CTO of Lila Sciences, he’s building an experimental AI syste...
This episode features Drs. Alan Karthikesalingam and Anil Palepu of Google discussing AMIE, an AI system designed for patient-facing clinical conversations. They delve into AMIE's innovative training using synthetic doctor-patient interactions, guided by an LLM critic and grounded in search, which proved more effective than noisy real-world data. The discussion also covers the "long tail" of medicine's demands for robust AI and AMIE's potential to augment clinical workflows. Alan reflects on the rapid evolution of AI and the slower pace of ecosystem development.
Dr. Shiv Rao , cardiologist and CEO of Abridge, joins hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam on NEJM AI Grand Rounds for an inspiring conversation at the intersection of medicine, technology, and meaning. Shiv shares the origin story of Abridge, reflecting on how a deeply human encounter in clinic sparked the idea for a company now transforming clinical documentation across more than 100 health systems. From his early days programming electronic music to navigating LLM deployment at scale, Shiv offers a...
Dr. Faisal Mahmood , Associate Professor of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, joins hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam on NEJM AI Grand Rounds to explore the frontier of computational pathology. From pioneering foundational models for whole slide imaging to commercializing a multimodal generative AI copilot for pathology, Faisal shares how his team is redefining what’s possible in digital diagnostics. He discusses the power of open-source culture in accelerating i...
Morgan Cheatham joins hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam on NEJM AI Grand Rounds to discuss the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence in health care, from its role in automating clinical documentation to its transformative potential in genomic medicine. A venture capitalist and future physician, Morgan shares how his background in computational decision sciences led him to medical school and investing, offering insights into how AI is reshaping everything from disease phenotyping and clinica...
Dr. Emily Alsentzer joins hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam on NEJM AI Grand Rounds to discuss the evolution of natural language processing (NLP) in medicine. A Stanford faculty member and expert in clinical AI, Emily shares her journey from pre-med to biomedical AI, the role of language models in medical decision-making, and the ethical considerations surrounding bias in AI. The conversation explores everything from the early days of rule-based NLP to the modern era of large language models, the c...
In this return appearance on NEJM AI Grand Rounds , Dr. Zak Kohane joins hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam to discuss the evolving landscape of AI in medicine. As the first repeat guest on the show, Dr. Kohane shares insights on health care system challenges, the Human Values Project, and his perspectives on the most significant AI developments of 2024. The conversation explores everything from the practical applications of AI in health care to philosophical discussions about machine psychology and...
In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds , hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam interview Larry Summers about artificial intelligence’s transformative potential and its implications for society. The conversation explores Summers’ perspective on AI as potentially the most significant technology ever invented, his role on OpenAI’s board following the November 2023 leadership transition, and his thoughts on how AI will reshape economics and human society. The episode provides unique insights into AI’s dev...
In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds , hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam interview Courtney Hofmann , a mother whose use of ChatGPT led to her son’s diagnosis of tethered cord syndrome after seeing 17 doctors over three years, and Dr. Holly Gilmer , the pediatric neurosurgeon who confirmed and treated the condition. The conversation explores how AI helped bridge diagnostic gaps, systemic health care challenges that led to missed diagnoses, and the evolving role of AI in patient advocacy and medi...
In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds , hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam interview Dr. David Ouyang , a cardiologist and AI researcher at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The conversation explores Ouyang’s journey from medical training to AI research and entrepreneurship, his groundbreaking work in applying AI to cardiology imaging, and the challenges of bringing AI innovations from academia to clinical practice. Ouyang discusses his experience conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) for AI a...
In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds , hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam interview Dr. Noa Dagan and Dr. Ran Balicer from the Clalit Research Institute in Israel. The conversation explores Clalit’s groundbreaking work in implementing predictive models at the point of care, their contributions to COVID-19 research, and the potential of AI in revolutionizing public health. Dagan and Balicer discuss the unique data set spanning more than half of Israel’s population, their approach to integrating AI...
In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds , hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam interview Dr. Vijay Pande, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) where he leads investments in health care and life sciences. The conversation explores Pande’s journey from academia to venture capital, his views on the future of AI in health care and biomedicine, and insights into the investment landscape for biotech and health tech companies. Pande discusses the challenges and opportunities in integrating AI into...
In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds , hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam interview Dr. Rohaid Ali and Dr. Fatima Mirza , a married couple and chief residents at Brown University. The conversation explores their innovative work applying AI to health care, focusing on two major projects: Using ChatGPT to simplify surgical consent forms, making them more accessible to patients. This initiative led to widespread adoption within their healthcare system and inspired similar changes in other medical do...
In this episode of the AI Grand Rounds podcast, Dr. Adam Rodman shares his unique journey from a historian to a physician deeply interested in the intersection of medicine and artificial intelligence. He highlights his unconventional path, driven by an obsession with epistemology and nosology, and his early exposure to AI through historical references and personal experiences with language models. Rodman discusses the evolution of clinical reasoning, the importance of probabilistic models, the i...
In this episode of the NEJM AI Grand Rounds podcast, Dr. Nigam Shah , a distinguished Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and inaugural Chief Data Scientist for Stanford Health Care, shares his journey from training as a doctor in India to becoming a leading figure in biomedical informatics in the United States. He discusses the transformative impact of computational tools in understanding complex biological systems and the pivotal role of AI in advancing health care delivery, particula...
In this episode of the AI Grand Rounds podcast, Dr. Daphne Koller charts her professional trajectory, tracing her early fascination with computers to her influential role in AI and health care. Initially intrigued by the capacity of computers for decision-making based on theoretical principles, Koller witnessed her niche area — once considered peripheral to AI — grow to dominate the field. Her curiosity led her from abstract theory to practical machine learning applications and eventually to the...
In this episode of the AI Grand Rounds podcast, Dr. Eric Horvitz describes his career evolution from an interest in neurobiology to significant contributions in AI, particularly in understanding complex systems and applying AI in medicine. He discusses the shift from studying neurobiology to embracing AI and computational methods as tools for unraveling the complexities of the human mind and broader decision-making processes. Horvitz emphasizes the importance of probabilistic models and decision...
In this episode of the AI Grand Rounds podcast, Dr. James Zou shares his personal journey to discovering machine learning during his graduate studies at Harvard. Fascinated by the potential of AI and its application to genomics and medicine, Dr. Zou embarked on a journey that took him from journalism to the forefront of AI research. He has been instrumental at Stanford in translating machine learning advancements into clinical settings, particularly through genomics. The discussion also delves i...
In this episode of the AI Grand Rounds podcast, Dr. Roxana Daneshjou shares her journey from a childhood influenced by early exposure to science to her current role as an assistant professor at Stanford. Her path includes a critical shift during medical school, where her interest in computational methods and human genomics led her to pursue both an M.D. and a Ph.D. Her specialization in dermatology was driven by its visual nature and the opportunity to form long-term relationships with patients....
