High Dimensional Health Data

David Sontag, AI researcher and CEO of Layer Health, joins hosts Phil Ballentine and Aaron Neiderhiser to discuss how AI can meaningfully transform healthcare. From his formative years at Google and MIT to founding Layer Health, David shares what it takes to build AI that truly understands clinical data and improves care. We cover the evolution of machine learning, reasoning in large language mode...

In this episode, we chat with Alyssa Antonopoulos, a bioinformatician at Natera who spends her days wrangling some of the messiest data in healthcare. We get into the chaos of clinical abstraction, why large language models are exciting (but not magic), and how a single phrase like “last day of therapy” can derail an analysis. Alyssa walks us through Natera’s journey from prenatal testing to cance...

EP 03: Mara Alexeev on Messy Clinical Data, the Limit of EHRs, and the Future of Clinical Informatics In this episode, we chat with Mara Alexeev, a pediatrician-turned-clinical informaticist with a knack for turning medical chaos into clean, usable data. We talk EHR chaos, learning R on maternity leave, and why smelling liver failure is a real diagnostic skill. TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Meet Mara (04:00)...

In this episode, we chat with Vera M., a cancer researcher-turned-chief scientific officer-turned-biotech founder. We dive into what makes healthcare data “good,” the challenges of connecting siloed clinical trial data to the real world, and the evolving infrastructure powering data-driven medicine. Vera shares her journey from the lab to consulting to startups, and we explore the current and futu...

In our pilot episode, we dive into how large language models are being used to clean up messy healthcare data—plus what that means for the future of clinical workflows. Phil shares details on a tool he built and evaluated at Atropos Health to map medication descriptions to RxNorm, and we unpack where AI is actually working in healthcare data (and where it's not working quite yet). (00:00) Ente...