Autonomous Health Podcast

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...

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 industrie...

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 AI...

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 aroun...

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 determinant...

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 an...

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...

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 gen...

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, experien...

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 cont...

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...

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...

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 sl...

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...