Practical AI in Healthcare

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 Trustable Product, and Kohane's method for measuring the values a healthcare AI actually acts on. A practical tour of where good is starting to look real.

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 them. A two-act conversation about freeing data and guarding values.

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 for patient-first tools, and why the technology is rarely the hard part.

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" now matters more than knowing how to code. https://practicalaiinhealthcare.com/ [https://practicalaiinhealthcare.com/]

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 can actually do, and why the real work is coordination across agencies rather than control from any one of them. https://practicalaiinhealthcare.com/ [https://practicalaiinhealthcare.com/] https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalAIinHealthcare [https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalAIinHealthcare]