NEJM AI Grand Rounds

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 adv...

Dr. Travis Zack , Chief Medical Officer of OpenEvidence, takes us behind the scenes of the start and growth of the company, and brings a clinician’s perspective to one of medicine’s hardest questions: how should artificial intelligence support decision-making? In this episode, he emphasizes that reasoning—not just correctness—defines good care, and that evidence must be contextual, accessible, and...

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, respo...

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 c...

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 re...

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 possib...

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...

As a cognitive psychologist, Dr. Laura Zwaan studies how humans make—and learn from—mistakes. In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds, she brings that lens to AI, showing how machines inherit our biases and why both need transparency and reflection. From the challenge of defining diagnostic error to the promise of “machine psychology,” Dr. Zwaan explores how human reasoning can inform safer algori...

In this episode, Dr. Jonathan Chen joins the hosts to discuss his path from teenage programmer to Stanford physician-informatician and why machine learning has both thrilled and unnerved him. From his 2017 NEJM essay warning about “inflated expectations” to his latest studies showing GPT‑4 outperforming doctors on diagnostic tasks, Dr. Chen describes a discipline learning humility at machine speed...

Dr. Karandeep Singh brings two worlds together: programming and medicine. In this conversation, he explains how early experiments with code led him to biomedical informatics, why gaps between paper performance and clinical reality must be confronted, and how governance committees weigh ethics and safety. Now serving as Chief Health AI Officer at UC San Diego Health, he reflects on lessons from dep...

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...

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 eval...

In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds, guests Drs. Alan Karthikesalingam and Anil Palepu of Google walk co-hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam through the making and evaluation of AMIE, an AI system designed to conduct clinical conversations with patients. Alan and Anil explain how AMIE was trained using synthetic doctor-patient interactions generated by LLMs playing multiple roles—doctor, patient, c...

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. F...

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 wha...

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 i...

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 explore...

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 pr...

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...

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 car...

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 clinica...

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 t...

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...

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...

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....