Who Owns Your Health Data? LLMs, Data Access & Venture Capital with Dr. Timothy Martens (Part 2)
15 years ago, getting your medical records meant visiting the hospital, signing forms, and walking out with a photocopied stack of 5,000 pages. Today you can import the same data into an LLM and ask it what's wrong with you. That shift — and everything in between — is what Part 2 of this conversation is about.
In this episode, IDAAHub Podcast host Deepti continues her conversation with Dr. Timothy Martens — congenital heart surgeon at Northwell Health, Director of Data Strategy & Innovation at Cohen Children's Medical Center, PhD in Biomedical Engineering, and General Partner at Picap Fund — picking up at the question of patient data ownership and utility.
Dr. Martens explains what patients can realistically do with their health data today: how LLMs are replacing the photocopied records stack with an instant, queryable medical history, why EMRs are caught between federal mandates to open their data and the disruption that follows when they do, and what it means to build a true "living health record" that updates dynamically alongside a patient's care journey.
The second half of the episode traces a 25-year arc of healthcare data evolution that Dr. Martens experienced directly — from manually copying blood pressure readings row-by-row into Excel spreadsheets, to building relational databases and using HL7 for data transfer, to the emergence of data lakes and Tableau dashboards inside systems like Epic, and finally to today's AI-native stack. His core observation: the tools have changed dramatically, but the fundamental challenges of normalization, deduplication, and fuzzy matching across siloed systems remain structurally the same.
🧠 What you'll learn in Part 2:
→ What patients can realistically do with their health data right now — and where it still falls short
→ How LLMs are turning a 5,000-page records request into an instant, queryable health profile
→ Why EMRs are now in a difficult spot: penalized if they don't open up data, disrupted when they do
→ The 25-year arc of healthcare data: from copying blood pressures row-by-row into Excel, to HL7, to data lakes, Tableau, and AI — and why the core problems of normalization and deduplication never actually went away
→ How Dr. Martens built Mark Ventures as a venture studio, evolved it into an investing syndicate, and joined Picap Fund as General Partner
→ Why having a clinician on a VC investment committee changes which bets get made — and which ones don't
The episode closes with Dr. Martens' transition from clinician to investor: founding Mark Ventures as a venture studio to build and advise healthcare technology companies, evolving it into an investing syndicate as founder demand for capital outpaced demand for advice, and ultimately joining Phycap Fund as General Partner — where his clinical domain expertise directly shapes the fund's investment decisions.
Guest: Dr. Timothy Martens — Congenital Heart Surgeon, Northwell Health | Director of Data Strategy & Innovation, Cohen Children's Medical Center | General Partner, Phycap Fund
Host: Deepti — Founder, IDAAHub | IDAAHub Podcast: AI in Finance & Healthcare
[Part 1 available in the previous episode]
