The Data Frontier Podcast

70% of patients think they know where to go for care. They're wrong. That's one of the surprising findings from Clearstep, which built its AI triage engine not on a general purpose LLM, but on the same nurse protocols that triage call centers have trusted for decades, the Schmitt Thompson guidelines, turned into knowledge graphs with rigorous unit testing baked in. In this episode, Clearst...

Most healthcare AI tools get built and then don't get used. Why? Because they weren't built around how clinicians actually work. In this episode, Patricia Thaine sits down with Dr. Travis Bias, a family medicine physician and Deputy Chief Medical Officer at Solventum, to get the practitioner's perspective on what's working, what's falling flat, and what builders need to underst...

What does it actually take to build AI systems inside a major cancer center? In this episode, Dr. Anyi Li, Attending Physicist and Chief of Computer Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, pulls back the curtain on the messy, complex reality of working with clinical data and deploying AI where it matters most. We dig into Woollie, an LLM trained on nearly 40,000 radiology notes to detec...

What if patients could complete their medical history before ever walking into the exam room, and actually enjoy doing it? Dr. Chris O'Connor is the CEO of FirstHx and a practicing internal medicine and critical care physician. In this episode, he walks us through how his company built an adaptive interview system that asks patients the right questions, in the right order, based on their answe...

When Unity Health Toronto migrated to Epic, Dr. Derek Beaton's team faced a familiar challenge: the same measures now had different names, technical feeds changed, and every tool they'd built needed to be reconnected to the new system. Derek Beaton, Director of Advanced Analytics at Unity Health Toronto (UHN), joins Patricia Thaine to talk about what that transition actually looked like. The UHN t...

Can AI improve healthcare in resource-limited settings without massive budgets or billion-parameter models? Patricia Thaine sits down with Chenjerai Sisimayi, a clinical epidemiologist and data scientist based in Zimbabwe, and Tariq Khokhar, Head of Data for Science and Health at the Wellcome Trust. Together, they explore what it actually takes to build and deploy AI tools in healthcare systems ac...

Who Owns Your Health Data? The answer depends on where you live, and it's rarely the patient. Jim St. Clair and Eric Sutherland join Patricia to unpack the legal gray areas, competing infrastructure models, and policy shifts shaping how health data flows (or doesn't). Jim is a leader at the intersection of public health and technology, with over 25 years of experience in digital transformation. As...

Ashley Girgis (Digital Health Program Manager, Terry Fox Research Institute) and Vinod Subramanian (Chief Operating & AI Officer, MedAdvisor Solutions) join host Patricia Thaine to explore the complex journey of healthcare data from research to real-world patient care. Ashley shares insights from building Canada's $49M Digital Health and Discovery Platform, designed to break down data silo...

What if we could rebuild primary care from scratch – knowing what we know now about AI, robotics, and the lessons from eHealth Ontario? Patricia Thaine sits down with Adam Cole (Senior Solutions Architect, Smile CDR) and George Smitherman (former Ontario Deputy Premier and Minister of Health) to explore the gap between healthcare's $100 billion budget in Ontario and its struggling digital tran...

Healthcare moves at the speed of trust – and right now, trust is the bottleneck. Patricia Thaine sits down with Michael Lynch (Product Manager, Providence Health) and Sam Schifman (Innovation Architect, Vantiq) to talk through what it actually takes to build AI infrastructure that works in healthcare. They cover the messy reality: sparse data, 40+ ways to encode "negative" in a single CO...