Podcast · Health

Practical AI in Healthcare

by Steven Labkoff, MD and Leon Rozenblit, JD, PhD · English · Health

AI promises to transform healthcare—but real, scalable impact remains rare. Practical AI in Healthcare cuts through the noise to showcase real-world use cases delivering business value today. Hosted by senior leaders— former VPs of life science technology groups, clinical informatics professionals f

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 53 min
Latest: 11 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

11 Oct 2026 · 51 min

Latha Valluripalli Soorya & Erica Crawford: Smart Glasses in Autism Evaluation

Families who suspect autism can wait up to two years for an evaluation. Dr. Latha Valluripalli Soorya, a clinical psychologist at Rush University Medical Center and co-founder of Argus Cognitive, and Dr. Erica Crawford, Clinical Director at Autism Testing 4 Kids in Dallas–Fort Worth, join Steve Labkoff and Leon Rozenblit to discuss Neurora: smart glasses a clinician wears during a standard autism assessment, with software that measures a child's gaze, facial movement and speech. AT4K was a reimbursed site in its FDA study. They cover what the clinician gets back, the hard cases where the…

Play episodeWhatsApp Download

Earlier episodes 29 most recent

S2 · E5 · 4 Oct 2026 · 55 min
Sir Peter Donnelly of Genomics: Genetics as Nature's Drug Trial
Ninety-five percent of drug targets fail, and Professor Sir Peter Donnelly thinks the reason is simple: we can't run experiments on humans. Genetics is the next best thing. People who carry natural variants in a gene show what happens when that gene is dialed up or down over a lifetime. Peter, CEO and co-founder of Genomics, joins Steve Labkoff and Leon Rozenblit to explain how his company harmonized tens of thousands of genetic studies into one resource, what genetics revealed about "good" cholesterol, why the AI agent sits on top rather than at the core, and what genetics still can't tell…
S2 · E4 · 27 Sep 2026 · 55 min
Travis Zack: How OpenEvidence Picks and Grades the Evidence
Doctors hallucinate too. That's the provocation Travis Zack, MD, PhD, chief medical officer of OpenEvidence, brings to this conversation with Steve Labkoff and Leon Rozenblit. A physician with 20 patients and no time to look things up goes with their gut, and can get it wrong in the same ways a language model does. Travis explains why OpenEvidence was built on retrieving evidence rather than generating answers, what makes one set of references better than another, how it grades the strength of evidence behind an answer in real time, why health systems and EHR vendors act as gatekeepers, and…
S2 · E3 · 20 Sep 2026 · 54 min
Randi Seigel & Jared Augenstein: Healthcare AI Law
By Manatt’s count, more than 280 bills to regulate AI in healthcare were introduced in 2026, and almost none of the resulting law has been tested in court. Randi Seigel, a partner at Manatt who leads its health care regulatory practice, and Jared Augenstein, a senior managing director at Manatt Health, track every one of them. They join Steve Labkoff and Leon Rozenblit to map where the states are headed, explain why consent and disclosure rules often miss the mark, describe how regulation can penalize companies that tried to do the right thing, and offer practical advice on AI governance for…
S2 · E2 · 13 Sep 2026 · 55 min
Greg Raiz: Data-Driven Early-Stage Investing
Early-stage investing is one of the last places where big decisions get made on gut feel. Greg Raiz, co-founder and general partner of the pre-seed fund Founders Edge, is trying to change that with data: a survey of more than 3,000 entrepreneurs and a review of some 42 published studies on what predicts founder success. In a solo conversation with Leon Rozenblit, Greg explains why venture capital may be backing the wrong age group, why angel groups are structured to kill their best deals, who actually gets the leverage from AI coding tools, and why electronic medical records are ripe for…
S2 · E1 · 6 Sep 2026 · 49 min
Raihan Faroqui, MD: The Doctor at the Front Desk, AI on the Line
Raihan Faroqui trained in internal medicine and then went to work on the front desk. As VP of partnerships at Confido Health, he puts AI agents on the phone lines of what he says are about 1,500 outpatient practice sites, handling appointments, refills, insurance checks, and billing questions in twenty languages. His framing is that healthcare never had a software problem so much as a system of record problem, and agents are the first tool that does not demand a migration. In this conversation, we get into the economics of the unanswered phone call, why the deployment model looks more like…
2 Sep 2026 · 53 min
S1, E50 - Jeremy Harper: The Broken Adoption Curve, Ambient Scribes Nobody Can Audit, and the Knowledge We Keep Paying For and Deleting
Every technology healthcare has adopted moved through the same curve: a bleeding-edge few went first and documented what broke, and the majority followed. Large language models skipped that entirely. Jeremy Harper, a biomedical informatician who has worked at Epic, Ohio State, and Regenstrief, and who wrote Large Language Models (LLMs) for Healthcare , explains what we gave up by going all at once. Ambient scribes are everywhere, and because most vendors discard the audio as soon as they transcribe it, nobody can say how often the notes are wrong. He offers a fix borrowed from…
30 Aug 2026 · 48 min
S1, E52 - Reflections #8: Year in Review
Steve and Leon close Season 1 by looking back across all fifty-two episodes. They start with what surprised them (how fast conservative institutions adopted, and how slowly AI literacy is moving), then work through five conclusions a year of guests kept reaching independently: the models are no longer the hard part, almost nobody monitors these systems after deployment, an interface built for a novice can degrade an expert, "compared to what" is the question everyone skips, and money is usually the real gate. They also notice the show has started talking to itself, with guests answering each…
23 Aug 2026 · 56 min
S1, E51 - Reflections #7: When the Machine Is Almost Always Right, Who Is Still Thinking?
In their seventh Reflections episode, and their fifty-first overall, Steve and Leon look back across six conversations: Mika Newton on interoperability that finally started working, Peter Embi on monitoring clinical AI after deployment, Vimla Patel on how clinicians actually reason, Renee Deehan on an engine built so it can't hallucinate, Christine Dymek on AI literacy, and Jeremy Harper on an adoption curve that broke. They decide against forcing a single grand lesson and find three threads anyway: keeping a human in the loop as a deliberate design decision, the national clearinghouse for…
9 Aug 2026 · 50 min
S1, E49 - Chris Dymek: Healthcare AI Literacy
Chris Dymek came to healthcare informatics by way of philosophy, and she still thinks like a philosopher: the first question is what we actually mean. As Director of Digital Healthcare Research at AHRQ, she funded AI research, helped launch work on AI and patient safety, and wrote a request for information asking healthcare organizations how they thought about AI literacy. It was never published. She left in May 2025 and carried the work into the DCI network instead. In this conversation, she lays out the distinction at the center of her framework, knowing-that versus knowing-how, the three…
2 Aug 2026 · 51 min
S1, E48 - Renee Deehan: Trustworthy AI for Consumer Health
The internet is full of wellness advice built on a single cherry-picked study. Renee Deehan, a molecular and cell biologist who leads science and AI at InsideTracker, spent two decades building the opposite. In this episode, she explains why the core of their recommendation engine is symbolic AI, knowledge representation and reasoning, rather than a large language model: it's deterministic, fully auditable, and by design cannot hallucinate. The LLMs are fenced off to chat and summaries, while humans still write and review every recommendation against convergent clinical evidence. She and the…
26 Jul 2026 · 54 min
S1, E47 - Vimla Patel: Cognitive Science of Clinical Reasoning
Dr. Vimla Patel has spent four decades studying how physicians actually reason, and what happens when technology ignores it. In this episode, she explains the difference between forward reasoning (the fast, pattern-driven hallmark of expertise) and backward reasoning (the slower, hypothesis-testing mode of novices), and why most clinical AI is built for the wrong one. Through two vivid cases, a textbook expert diagnosis and a near-fatal potassium overdose driven by a flawed order-entry system, she shows how good design preserves clinical judgment and bad design erodes it. She closes with a…
19 Jul 2026 · 58 min
S1, E46 - Peter Embi: The Doctor Who Diagnosed Himself
Peter Embi has spent his career at the intersection of medicine and informatics: coining the term "algorithmovigilance," serving as the nation's first Chief Research Information Officer, and leading AI work at Vanderbilt. He is also a patient. A rare adrenal tumor took nearly 15 years and a self-diagnosis to catch, and it nearly killed him. In this conversation, Embi connects that diagnostic odyssey to the case for monitoring clinical AI the way we monitor drugs: continuously, in the real world, across a network of institutions. The discussion runs from zebras and missed diagnoses to VAMOS,…
12 Jul 2026 · 54 min
S1, E45 - Mika Newton, xCures: Intelligent Interoperability
Interoperability has been healthcare's twenty-year broken promise, but something genuinely changed. Mika Newton, CEO of xCures, explains how provider data exchange jumped from roughly 30% to 85–90% in just two years, and why that's only half the story. Moving records, it turns out, was never the hard part. As Newton puts it, "records travel, but they don't translate" — most of a record arrives as duplicated notes and scanned images that still have to be made usable. Steve and Leon dig into the honest limits of AI parsing, the card-network model behind nationwide exchange, and why the patient…
5 Jul 2026 · 49 min
S1, E44 - Reflections #6: After Five Episodes, What Still Has to Be Human?
In their sixth Reflections episode, Steve and Leon look back across five conversations (Sarah Rossetti, Jeff Smith of ONC, Hugo Campos, Fred Bennett, and Zak Kohane) and decide, deliberately, not to force a single grand theme. What surfaces anyway is one question asked five ways: as AI gets genuinely capable, what still has to be human, and what makes it trustworthy? They cover Rossetti's CONCERN system that models the nurse instead of the patient, ONC giving AI agents patient-like data rights, the tension between patient empowerment and black boxes you don't understand, the Minimum…
28 Jun 2026 · 58 min
S1, E43 - Isaac "Zak" Kohane, MD, PhD (Chair, Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School; founding Editor-in-Chief, NEJM AI)
A quiet war is underway over who controls your health data in the age of AI, and the front-runners aren't the usual suspects. Dr. Isaac "Zak" Kohane, Chair of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and founding editor of NEJM AI, traces the line from SMART on FHIR (the accidental standard he helped create in 2009) to today's battle for the doctor-facing AI layer, where companies like OpenEvidence are outrunning the EHR incumbents. He also unveils his Human Values Project, which measures the values embedded inside clinical AI models, and warns how easily payers and pharma could tune…
21 Jun 2026 · 59 min
S1, E42 - Live with Fred Bennett, Founder & CEO, PatientTalker
For its first-ever live episode, recorded before an audience at New York Tech Week, Practical AI in Healthcare sits down with Fred Bennett, founder and CEO of PatientTalker — an ambient-AI app built for the patient rather than the clinician. (Steve Labkoff is a disclosed advisor to the company.) Bennett traces the idea to his father's cardiology visit, where three family members left with three different memories of the same conversation. The discussion covers why patients are the forgotten end-user of clinical AI, how to build a "minimum trustable product," the honest question of who pays…
14 Jun 2026 · 52 min
S1, E41 - Hugo Campos: Patient-Directed AI
Patient advocate Hugo Campos spent more than a decade fighting for access to the data from his own implanted defibrillator. When the system wouldn't budge, he stopped trying to reform it and started building around it. In this episode, Hugo shows how he used agentic AI coding tools to create OpenKP, an open-source app that liberates his records from inside Kaiser Permanente, despite calling himself a non-coder. He and the hosts unpack the line between institutional AI and patient-directed AI, the discipline of having two AIs check each other, and why he believes "critical AI health literacy"…
7 Jun 2026 · 44 min
S1, E40 - Jeff Smith — AI Regulation, Transparency & Innovation from the Government Perspective
What happens when the rules for getting AI into clinical care are written by someone who has spent his career inside both the advocacy world and the government? In this episode, we talk with Jeff Smith of ONC at HHS, the first government official on Practical AI in Healthcare. Smith walks us through ONC's proposed HTI-5 rule, including a striking move to treat AI agents as "users" with the same data-access rights as clinicians, and a new question about whether blocking data from being written back into the EHR is itself information blocking. We also dig into the limits of what a regulator…
31 May 2026 · 53 min
S1, E39 - Sarah Rossetti, RN, PhD: Nursing Informatics & the CONCERN Early Warning System
On National Nurses Day, Practical AI in Healthcare welcomes its first nurse: Sarah Rossetti, RN, PhD, of Columbia University. Her CONCERN early warning system takes an unusual approach to predicting patient deterioration. Instead of modeling a patient's vital signs and labs, it models the nurse's documentation behavior, since the frequency and timing of charting reflect clinical concern long before the numbers move. In a 74-unit randomized trial of more than 60,000 patients, published in Nature Medicine, CONCERN was associated with a 35.6% reduction in instantaneous mortality risk. Rossetti…
24 May 2026 · 35 min
S1, E38 - Reflections 5: How Specialized Does AI Have to Be to Actually Work?
In their fifth Reflections episode, Steve and Leon look back across six conversations (Matt Truppo at Sanofi, Ted Shortliffe, Barry Chaiken, David Hidalgo-Gato, and Danny van Leeuwen) to ask a sharper question: how specialized does AI have to be to actually work? The throughline is depth. The LLM is a commodity, and so, increasingly, is the generalist agent. What stays scarce is specialization in a workflow, the revival of symbolic methods like knowledge graphs, the literacy that separates an AI's ~95% solo accuracy from the under-35% people get using it themselves, and leaders willing to…
17 May 2026 · 42 min
S1, E37 - Danny van Leeuwen, MPH, RN, Health Hats: Patient's POV on AI Tools
Danny van Leeuwen is a nurse of 50 years, a multiple sclerosis patient, host of the Health Hats podcast, and a serial member of national outcomes panels at CMS, AHRQ, PCORI, and the National Academy of Medicine. He has tried more than 100 health apps and uses five. In this episode, he explains how he uses AI to interrogate his own chart, surface symptom patterns, and prepare for clinical encounters, and he shares his Three T's and Two C's framework for evaluating any digital health technology: Time, Trust, Talk, Control, Connection. The conversation covers what patients want from AI, what…
10 May 2026 · 50 min
S1, E36 - David Hidalgo-Gato, Founder & CEO, Cleo Health: Going a Mile Deep on Emergency Medicine — Specialization, Design Partnerships, and the Acute Care OS
David Hidalgo-Gato is the founder and CEO of Cleo Health. While more than 100 competitors were building generic ambient AI scribes, David's team chose emergency medicine and stayed with one design partner for nine months and roughly 50 product iterations before launching. The result: an average 54-minute time savings per shift, a patient-assignment tool that turned a four-hour process into 15 to 20 minutes, and use across 400+ hospitals nationwide. The conversation covers why ED workflow breaks generic ambient scribes, why generative AI fits patient assignment specifically, and David's…
3 May 2026 · 54 min
S1, E35 - Barry P. Chaiken, MD, MPH: Physician-as-Patient Perspective on AI in Healthcare
When physician Barry Chaiken was diagnosed with prostate cancer, his clinical training gave way to fear. It took a friend asking, "What are you doing?" to snap him back into doctor-mode thinking. That experience reshaped how he sees AI in healthcare. In this episode, Chaiken draws on his dual perspective as physician and two-time cancer survivor to argue that consumer health AI is failing patients, not because the models are bad, but because patients don't know how to use them. He shares a practical framework for AI-assisted patient education, makes the case for an aviation-style safety…
26 Apr 2026 · 57 min
S1, E34 - Matt Truppo, PhD, Part 2: AI-Driven Drug Development at Sanofi: Clinical Trials, Regulatory, and Personal AI
In Part 2 of our conversation with Matt Truppo, Global Head of Research Platforms and Computational R&D at Sanofi, we move from discovery to development, where the real stakes begin. Matt unpacks the promise and limitations of “digital patient twins,” a concept often described as the holy grail of drug development. With nearly 90% of drugs failing in clinical trials, even modest gains in predicting efficacy or patient response could transform the industry. Through real-world examples, including Dupixent and rare disease therapies, Matt shows how quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) and…
19 Apr 2026 · 48 min
S1, E33 - Ted Shortliffe, MD, PhD: 50 Years of Clinical AI
Ted Shortliffe built MYCIN at Stanford in the 1970s, one of the first medical AI systems ever deployed in a clinical setting. Five decades later, he joins Steve and Leon to examine what has persisted in clinical decision support — above all, the demand for explainability — what has changed (computational power finally caught up to the ideas), and what the field may have lost along the way. The conversation includes a direct response to Bob Wachter's claim from S1E24 that AI in healthcare decision support was "too hard a problem to start with," and a case for why structured knowledge…
12 Apr 2026 · 53 min
S1, E32 - Matt Truppo, PhD: AI-Driven Drug Discovery at Sanofi
AI in drug discovery has been long on promise and short on delivery. Matt Truppo, Global Head of Research Platforms and Computational R&D at Sanofi, presents a different picture. His team used AI to identify 10+ novel drug targets in 12 months, screen 30 million target combinations in days, and produce AI-designed compounds with 75% synthesizability. But Truppo is equally candid about the gaps: data integration, explainability, and change management remain real barriers. In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, hosts Steve Labkoff and Leon Rozenblit explore what happens when AI moves past…
5 Apr 2026 · 52 min
S1, E31 - Reflections 4: What Does the Infrastructure Actually Look Like?
Every five episodes, Steve and Leon step back to examine what picture forms when you put their guest conversations side by side. This time, five guests from completely different healthcare domains -- data quality, clinical trials, medical translation, patient data, participatory medicine -- independently converged on the same conclusion: the AI works; the infrastructure around it doesn't yet. From Charlie Harp's data quality metrics to Adam Blum's 60-to-90% scaffolding story to Amy Price's reframing of healthcare AI as "unfinished, not broken," Block 4 reveals what industry maturation…
29 Mar 2026 · 59 min
S1, E30 - Amy Price: Patient Advocacy, Participatory Medicine, and AI Governance
Amy Price survived a car accident that left her with a broken neck, severe brain injury, and $4 million in medical bills. She was told she'd need to be institutionalized. Instead, she earned a DPhil at Oxford and became Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Participatory Medicine. In this episode, Amy sits down with Leon to discuss why patients belong inside the AI design process, what it really means to have a "knowledgeable human who cares" in the loop, and why healthcare AI is an unfinished system worth building on, not a broken one worth scrapping. She also shares how she uses AI tools for…
22 Mar 2026 · 54 min
S1, E29 - Shashi Shankar, Co-founder & CEO, Novellia, Inc.
Shashi Shankar spent nearly a decade at Genentech before a family cancer journey and a broken data landscape pushed him to build something different. His company Novellia works directly with patients — not data brokers — to collect and consolidate health records across multiple providers using SMART on FHIR. The result: longitudinal, patient-authorized real-world data that fills the gaps left by claims databases, single-site EMRs, and health information exchanges. We explore why previous PHR companies failed, how AI catches clinical data errors that humans miss, and whether Big Tech should…

About Practical AI in Healthcare

Practical AI in Healthcare is a English health podcast from Steven Labkoff, MD and Leon Rozenblit, JD, PhD. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Steven Labkoff, MD and Leon Rozenblit, JD, PhD
Language: English
Category: Health
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 53 min
Latest episode: 11 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1837172964
Rights: Steven Labkoff, MD and Leon Rozenblit, JD, PhD

RSS feed Apple Podcasts

More English health

Take it with you

The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.