November 1, 2023

Headed to the Plug and Play and EY Healthcare Innovation Showcase downtown Boston this week – thanks to Nathan Sundheimer for the invite.  Here are my abridged takeaways in the vein for ‘I went to this conference, and here’s what it inspired…

Interesting to learn more about Plug and Play, which supports corporate innovation programs, venture incubation and is a an early stage VC. Co-hosted by EY (Parthenon) venture practice.  Gave me flashbacks to B-School interviews in the old Parthenon offices, circa 2004.

Subha Madhavan from Pfizer, talked about 2023-24 being the AI efficiency time, whereas In Silico and Mutli-omics AI will be 25+   Need data sharks, can’t model without data – AI needs well curated, annotated data, as well as federated learning models to open walled gardens. 

Zen Chu from MIT Hacking Medicine, used some expletives entreating the group to change healthcare, with vitriol paid to PBMs (he worked with Pillpak) and hospitals data walled gardens (new AI transcription start-up, Abridge).  Seemed like he’d be an amusing professor.  Says to join a start up to fix healthcare, and that HHS needs our help to craft good policy and regulation (plug for White House Innovation Fellow program). 

Jonathan Ng from Iterative Health, interesting use case of AI colonoscopy/computer vision software for better detection and clinical enablement, with additional value providing a network of practices/data to support clinical research within gastroenterology. Interesting pattern for other AI diagnostic companies for building out core AI application but also wrap around services.  

Heather Renzi from Healthcare Gorilla, great chat afterwards about opportunities in interoperability within the pharmacy space. First QHINs (targeted) to launch in December!  First treatment, then patient access planned.

Segun Idowu from Boston’s Economic Opportunity and Inclusion office reminded us that having a diverse work force can support more diverse AI.  Also, this week there was a great article on women in AI in the Boston Globe, including Northeastern’s Center for Inclusive Programming https://cic.northeastern.edu/

Ricardo Vilanova from EY, spoke about key AI Principles to get rate before you scale: Governance/Ownership, Bias, Fairness and Transparency. FDA AI Discussion paper, and European regulation phasing in, in the next two years: 

Nov 2: UK AI Summit: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/at-artificial-intelligence-summit-a-u-k-official-warns-take-science-fiction-seriously-b3f31608?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=1

Oct 25: AI National Security https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/biden-moves-to-embrace-ai-as-national-security-tool-in-executive-order-d6172746?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=1

EU AI Regulatory Framwork: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai

Recommended reading list post event:

Peter Lee, AI Innovation in Medicine

Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality