Faces of Digital Health

AI couldn't cure his mother's stage 4 cancer. It caught three near-fatal errors, found a same-day appointment, and helped her leave on her own terms. When Pratik Desai's mother was diagnosed with stage four duodenal adenocarcinoma — a rare cancer with roughly 3,000 US cases a year — she was nearly discharged without an oncology appointment. Over the next 76 days, Desai used AI at her bedside, from...

AI ethicist Jess Morley: these chatbots are giving medical advice — so regulate them as medical devices. Part of The Agentic Patient, a Faces of Digital Health series on how patients actually use AI — which tools, which prompts, which safeguards. In this episode, host Tjaša Zajc sits down with Dr Jess Morley, Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Digital Ethics Center and a former AI subject-ma...

98% of patients welcome AI in their care — and still want a human in charge. That tension ran through the OECD and Spanish Ministry of Health conference on scaling AI in health (Madrid, late May 2026), and it frames this episode of Faces of Digital Health. Out of 38 OECD countries, only seven have a formal AI strategy and just over a tenth run workforce upskilling programmes — the ambition is outr...

Doctors are using ChatGPT in clinic right now — and some of them don't care about privacy. Three operators on what that means for healthcare AI. Recorded live at health.tech in Basel, this panel from Faces of Digital Health unpacks the convergence reshaping clinical software: ambient AI scribes, agentic AI in healthcare, on-device LLMs, and the regulatory drag (MDR, EU AI Act, EHDS) that is wideni...

Most conversations about agentic AI in healthcare get stuck on capability. This one is about the gap between capability and deployment — and what closes it. Aashima Gupta, Global Director of Healthcare Strategy and Solutions at Google Cloud, argues that healthcare's bottleneck isn't vision; it's courage. The processes are documented poorly or not at all, AI fluency programs reach a fraction of emp...

The Agentic Patient is here — and most healthcare systems don't have a plan for it. In this special reverse-role episode of Faces of Digital Health, Eric Sutherland interviews host Tjaša Zajc about what a year of using AI through her own chronic illness has actually taught her about patients, doctors, and the future of healthcare AI. 200 million people will ask ChatGPT a health question this week....

When Demetri Giannikopoulos was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, his community neurologist handed him a sheet with fifty medication options and told him to pick one. That was a long time ago. Today he's the Chief Innovation Officer at RadAI, overseeing how artificial intelligence gets deployed in radiology across US health systems — and he's spent two decades learning how to navigate a healthcar...

Diana Ferro works at a major pediatric hospital in Italy, working on AI infrastructure, rare diseases, and — importantly — the International Alliance of Pediatric Centers on AI. Unlike the patient voices earlier in the Agentic Patient series, she sits on the other side of the consulting-room door. Her concerns are sharper, more specific, and more uncomfortable. She is not against patient AI use. S...

Russ was diagnosed with bowel cancer in late 2021 and simultaneously with smoldering myeloma, aged 40. The smoldering myeloma has been inactive; the bowel cancer has progressed through multiple surgeries (bowel, liver, lung) and is now stage 4, on active chemotherapy. He runs AI for the business he works for, so his day job is adjacent to the technology. He blogs publicly about his disease at fcan...

This is the first episode of a special series called The Agentic Patient, which is a series about how real patients are using AI to navigate their health. We go into details, how do patients make AI help them do better, not worse, and what should we all be mindful of along the way? Which tools do they use? Which prompts? What's working, what isn't? It is not just patients on the series, it's also...

This episode explores how Denmark’s 2024 health reform is accelerating an already mature digital health ecosystem, with a special focus on Copenhagen’s municipality-led elderly and community care services. Speakers Anders Elken Sønderby and Rikke Saltoft Andersen from City of Copenhagen, explain how the reform responds to demographic pressures: a growing elderly population, increasing chronic dise...

In this episode of Faces of Digital Health, host Tjasa Zajc sits down with Marc D. Ritter, CEO of AWE Digital Wellness, to explore the science behind digital addiction and the growing impact of social media, smartphones, and AI on mental health—especially in children and teenagers. From dopamine-driven engagement to AI companions replacing human relationships, this conversation dives deep into wha...

In this episode of Faces of Digital Health, host Tjasa Zajc sits down with Nasser Arif, a Cybersecurity Manager for two NHS Trusts in Northwest London. The conversation moves beyond the technical "bits and bytes" to explore the human element of security. Nasser explains his daily routine of balancing urgent patient-care fixes with long-term strategy and emphasizes that effective cybersecurity in a...

1 view Mar 19, 2026 In-person video interviewsThe European Health Data Space (EHDS) isn't just a new regulation—it’s a "Magna Carta" for healthcare innovation. In this interview from the Smart Bridges Event, we sit down with industry expert Dennis Geisthardt, Head of digital.lab, to break down the implementation timeline (2025–2031) and what it means for the pharmaceutical industry, medtech, and p...

Are we overhyping AI in healthcare before building the foundations? In this interview from the HIMSS Global Conference, Anne Snowden (Chief Scientific Research Officer, HIMSS) breaks down the latest data on global digital health maturity. We discuss why "Person-Enabled Health" is lagging, how countries like Germany are using data to transform their hospital systems, and why the shift from disease...

How is AI actually changing the day-to-day life of a clinician? In this episode, we sit down at the Smart Bridges GmbH Digital Health Excellence Forum in Frankfurt with Dimitri Varsamis PhD, Senior Programme Manager, Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust and Georgi Nalbantov, PhD, Chief AI Officer at Hospital Zdraveto. They covered the impact of AI on the clinical workforce: 🎯 The Adminis...

Denmark has been a digital health frontrunner for over two decades. In this episode, recorded live in Barcelona, Morten Elbæk Petersen, CEO of sundhed.dk, shares how Denmark launched its national patient portal in 2002 — long before most European countries began digitizing patient access. Now, as Denmark prepares for a major health reform culminating in the establishment of Digital Health Denmark...

In this episode of Faces of Digital Health, Tjaša Zajc speaks with Dale Atkinson, a stage 4 oesophageal cancer patient who was told he had 11.5 months to live—and who is still alive today. Dale shares how he applied his compliance and investigation skills to healthcare: reading thousands of research papers, building a research-grounded AI workflow to sense-check drug interactions and pathways, and...

In this episode of Faces of Digital Health, host Tjasa Zajc sits down with Bart de Witte for a candid conversation on what agent-based AI really means for healthcare. Recorded during a car ride in Ljubljana, the discussion explores why healthcare needs an operating system for AI agents, the risks of agent autonomy, privacy-by-design through on-device AI, and why monolithic EHRs struggle with the n...

As artificial intelligence rapidly enters healthcare, bold claims about replacing doctors dominate headlines. But on the clinical frontline, the reality is far more complex. In this episode of Faces of Digital Health, oncologist Dr. Derrick Khor shares an unfiltered view from inside the NHS, unpacking what AI actually changes — and what it doesn’t. Rather than framing AI as a threat, the conversat...

Ambient documentation is becoming normal in clinics. But the most interesting “voice” capability may not be transcription at all. In the latest episode of Faces of Digital Health, Henry O'Connell (Canary Speech) explains why voice biomarkers stalled for decades: the field analyzed words, not the neurological signal behind speech production. Canary’s approach focuses on the “primary data layer”—how...

The conversation explores the impact of robots on mental health and their role in healthcare. Anthropologist Tanja Ahlin and Faces of digital health host Tjasa Zajc discuss the fascination with robots, the ambiguous identity of robots, their use in elder care, the challenges of integrating robots, the global perspective on robots, and the misconceptions and realities of robots. The conversation ex...

In this episode, Dipak Kalra, President of the European Institute for Innovation through Health Data, joins Faces of Digital Health to break down the real progress (and real gaps) in European health data, from legacy “hybrid” paper/digital workflows to the underused potential of clinical decision support that depends on structured data. We explore what EHDS changes—especially the promise of a stan...

Ali Parsa is a serial entrepreneur known for founding companies that challenge traditional models of healthcare delivery. Over two decades, he has built organizations at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and systems redesign—each shaped by an ambition to make care more efficient, accessible, and equitable. In this episode, Tjasa Zajc and Ali Parsa explore how agentic AI is redefining hea...

In this episode of Faces of Digital Health, we sit down with Anne Forsyth, Hospital leader in clinical applications from Women's College Hospital in Canada, to explore how AI — especially generative AI — is reshaping daily clinical practice. Over the past two years, enthusiasm for AI has skyrocketed inside hospitals, with clinicians themselves requesting new tools rather than resisting them. We di...