The Beat

HLTH

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Medicine
Weekly

The Beat, powered by HLTH, is a weekly interview series dedicated to paving a better path forward for the future of health. Each week a variety of hosts bring you authentic conversations with prominent thought leaders. Through these interviews with people at the forefront of change in healthcare, we hope to spark new ideas and encourage new collaborations among listeners.

21h ago

How Healthcare Moves From AI Insights to Connected Action

Healthcare has made enormous strides in using AI to generate better data, predictions and insights. But generating intelligence is only part of the equation. How do healthcare organizations turn that intelligence into meaningful, coordinated action? In this episode of Health's Beat, host Sandy Vance sits down with Sundar Subramanian, CEO of Zyter, to explore why much of today's healthcare AI transformation may still be functioning as a "Band-Aid" layered over outdated systems and workflows. Sundar explains why organizations need to move beyond isolated AI pilots and rethink processes from end to end. He introduces the idea of "connected action," where AI agents, people, systems and workflows work together to execute complex healthcare processes safely and consistently. They also talk about the challenges of deploying probabilistic generative AI in high-stakes healthcare environments and the importance of domain-specific AI architecture. Sandy and Sundar examine what it will take to move healthcare AI from promising experiments to trusted, scalable transformation. In this episode, they talk about:Why isolated AI use cases can become a "Band-Aid" instead of true healthcare transformationThe shift from AI-generated intelligence to connected actionWhy healthcare workflows must be redesigned, not simply automatedHow AI could transform complex processes like prior authorizationWhy probabilistic AI creates unique challenges in high-stakes healthcareWhat human-in-the-loop governance should actually look likeHow trusted AI can help clinicians focus their judgment where it matters mostWhy end-to-end AI transformation could improve care while helping bend the cost curveA Little About Sundar:Sundar Subramanian is Chief Executive Officer of Zyter, where he leads the company’s strategy and growth as it advances AI-powered transformation across healthcare and other complex, regulated industries. Prior to Zyter, Sundar spent more than 16 years at PwC, where he led strategy consulting and advised Fortune 500 companies on growth, AI-enabled transformation, and operating model redesign. He previously held leadership roles at Booz & Company, WellCare Health Plans, and McKinsey & Company. Sundar holds an MS from MIT, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a B.Tech from IIT (BHU) Varanasi.
5d ago

How Cliexa and ERC Pathlight Are Using AI to Improve Behavioral Health Care

Artificial intelligence in healthcare is moving beyond simply summarizing things that have already happened. In behavioral health, AI is beginning to help clinicians make better-informed decisions before care happens; things like bringing clinical protocols, payer requirements, documentation, and a patient's real-time condition together at the point of care. In this episode, host Sandy Vance talks with Mehmet Kazgan, CEO and Founder of Cliexa, and Susan Jerlow, VP Enterprise Applications at ERC Pathlight, about their collaboration to use AI to reduce friction across behavioral health workflows. They discuss how AI can help clinicians evaluate medical necessity, improve documentation quality, support authorization processes, and make transitions between levels of care smoother for patients and their families. The conversation also digs into one of the biggest questions facing healthcare organizations today: How do you actually measure the ROI of AI? In this episode, they talk about:How AI can bring clinical protocols, payer requirements, and real-time patient information together at the point of careUsing AI to reduce documentation burden and improve consistency in behavioral healthHow ERC Pathlight uses AI to support admissions and level-of-care decisionsWhy keeping clinicians in the loop is essential for quality, compliance, and trustHow ERC Pathlight reduced admission declines by 20% through its Enhanced Admission Review processWhy AI adoption and measurable outcomes are more meaningful than simply promising time savingsHow healthcare organizations can build trust and successfully integrate AI into clinical workflowsA Little About Susan and Mehmet:Susan Jerlow is a healthcare technology executive and AI strategist leading one of the most advanced real-world AI transformations in behavioral health today. As Vice President of Enterprise Applications, Analytics, and AI at Eating Recovery Center | Pathlight Mood & Anxiety Center, she architects and executes an end-to-end enterprise AI ecosystem across clinical, operational, and analytical domains. Her work moves beyond pilots and proofs of concept - deploying AI directly into live care environments to reduce clinician burden, improve documentation quality, and enable more consistent, data-driven decisions across the patient journey. Her portfolio includes ambient AI documentation, automated clinical audits, AI-guided assessments, admissions intelligence, and a governed semantic data layer that powers enterprise-wide insights. She is particularly focused on how AI can separate signal from noise in complex clinical environments - turning fragmented data into clear, actionable insight that improves both patient outcomes and operational performance. Mehmet Kazgan is the Founder and CEO of cliexa, the Denver-based healthcare AI company he launched in 2016. His path to founding cliexa runs through some of the most influential names in technology and healthcare — Adobe, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Visa, and Aetna — where he learned to build at consumer scale while mastering the exacting standards of financial services and the realities of how care actually gets delivered. It was his time in executive leadership at Aetna that proved formative. Working inside one of the nation's largest health insurers, Mehmet saw firsthand where healthcare breaks down: the gap between what clinicians know is right for a patient and what the system will recognize, approve, and pay for. That vantage point — sitting where medicine, coverage, and technology collide — became the founding insight behind cliexa. He built the company to close that gap, giving clinicians the clarity to know what's medically necessary and appropriate at the moment care happens, rather than after the fact. Under his leadership, cliexa earned selection into the Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate program, forged a co-development partnership with the American College of Cardiology, and delivered its flagship enterprise deployment with ERC Pathlight. A frequent speaker, mentor, and advisor across digital health, Mehmet has built cliexa into a company whose partners include the American College of Cardiology, ERC Pathlight, Columbia University, Astellas, and more.
5d ago

From AI Oversight to Agent Governance: Rethinking the Guardrails for Healthcare AI

As healthcare AI evolves from tools that generate recommendations to agents capable of accessing data and taking action across systems, governance has to evolve with it.In this episode of The Beat's AI at ViVE series, host Sandy chats with Corinne Pellows, the Director of product management at Rhapsody about the growing need for real-time AI governance. They explore why written policies alone aren't enough, how health systems can manage AI agent permissions and data access, and where human oversight belongs in increasingly autonomous workflows. Corinne also discusses how organizations can use Rhapsody® Guardian to build flexible safeguards that evolve alongside AI. Remember, responsible AI requires more than setting policies. It requires putting them into action. In this episode, they talk about:● Why AI agents introduce new governance risks when they move from advice to action ● How to manage AI agent permissions like employee access privileges ● Why written AI policies need real-time technical enforcement ● How Rhapsody Guardian supports AI and API governance ● Why healthcare organizations need visibility into what data AI agents access ● When human oversight is essential and when it can create unnecessary friction ● How risk-based policies can evolve alongside AI technology ● Why effective AI governance must work with existing healthcare infrastructure About Rhapsody® Guardian:Guardian helps you put your AI policies into practice. It authenticates AI agents and API callers, enforces the access permissions and rate limits you set as requests occur, and keeps an audit trail you can review. Use it on its own or alongside Rhapsody, Corepoint, or another integration platform. Learn more about Rhapsody Guardian Corinne Pellows is Director of Product Management at Rhapsody, bringing more than a decade of experience in healthcare interoperability and care coordination. She focuses on helping healthcare organizations securely connect data, embrace emerging AI technologies, and put practical governance safeguards in place. Her work bridges healthcare's interoperability foundations with the next generation of AI-powered workflows.
Oct 22

AI Agents, Healthcare Marketing & the New Era of AI-Driven Work

Healthcare and life sciences have a unique challenge when it comes to using AI for marketing, sales, and communications: accuracy isn't a nice-to-have. It's a must-have. In this episode of The Beat's AI at Health series, host Sandy Vance talks with Divya Srungaram, VP of Healthcare Solutions at WRITER, about how AI agents are helping healthcare organizations accelerate highly regulated workflows without sacrificing compliance, accuracy, or human oversight. Divya shares why healthcare marketing campaigns can take nine to 12 months to move from brief to launch, and how AI agents can embed legal and compliance requirements directly into the content creation process, reducing the back-and-forth that traditionally slows teams down. Some of the key takeaways include: organizations shouldn't start by trying to automate every step of an existing process. Instead, they should start with the outcome they need to achieve and then determine how AI can orchestrate the work. As healthcare organizations move from experimenting with AI to deploying it at scale, Divya sees an inflection point ahead, one where domain expertise combined with AI fluency could become a significant competitive advantage. In this episode, they talk about:Why healthcare content creation is so slow and how AI agents can change the equationBuilding compliance and legal requirements directly into AI workflowsUsing checker agents and traceability to reduce AI riskHow AI can accelerate complex Medicaid RFPsWhy organizations should start with outcomes rather than existing processesThe importance of data discipline and a clear source of truthPreparing employees for roles that will change as AI adoption growsMeasuring AI ROI through speed, revenue, sales effectiveness, and efficiencyHow AI can make healthcare communications more empathetic and easier to understandWhy healthcare organizations may be approaching an AI inflection point A Little About Divya:Divya Srungaram is Vice President of Healthcare Solutions at WRITER, where she leads the healthcare vertical, helping health plans and providers deploy generative AI to drive measurable impact across commercial and operational workflows. She is a healthcare AI executive with nearly two decades of experience transforming payer and provider operations through generative AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics. She brings deep expertise across claims, utilization management, care management, and risk adjustment, and has served as a trusted advisor to multi-billion-dollar health plans on enterprise AI strategy, responsible AI governance, and large-scale implementation. Her work focuses on translating data and AI into actionable insights and solutions that help health plans better understand employer populations, manage cost trends, and drive improved engagement and outcomes across Commercial and Medicare lines of business. Divya was a leader in the Healthcare Strategy & Analytics practice at Deloitte, where she advised large healthcare organizations on transformation and led the development of AI-driven products and data platforms. She later served as VP of Product at Blue Health Intelligence, where she led the Employer Analytics platform supporting multiple Blue Cross Blue Shield plans and millions of members. Most recently, as SVP of Provider Growth and Product at Allymar Health, she led product strategy and growth for Medicare solutions, developing AI-enabled capabilities to improve documentation quality, risk adjustment accuracy, and clinical workflows. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Massey University (New Zealand) and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Oct 12

How AI Is Transforming Behavioral Health

Millions of people struggle with behavioral health conditions that remain undiagnosed or undertreated. AI could help find those patients sooner and connect them to more effective care. In this episode of the AI at ViVE series on The Beat, host Sandy Vance talks with Jeremy Kreyling, the SVP of Healthcare Informatics at NeuroFlow, about where artificial intelligence genuinely belongs in behavioral health and where clinical judgment and human connection remain irreplaceable. Jeremy explains how NeuroFlow uses machine learning across claims, EHR, assessment, and engagement data to identify hidden behavioral health risk, and why models built around an organization's own population can provide greater confidence than a one-size-fits-all approach. They also discuss how AI can help reduce the number of patients lost between identification, referral, and effective treatment. In this episode, they talk about:How AI can identify behavioral health needs that haven't yet been diagnosedWhy healthcare AI models should reflect the populations they're designed to serveHow machine learning can make behavioral health outreach more targetedWhy finding a provider isn't enough if the patient doesn't stay in careHow AI agents can take administrative work off highly trained care managersWhy behavioral health still lags physical health in analytics and integrationHow measurement-based care can identify when treatment isn't workingWhy AI should create more meaningful patient care, not simply more patient volumeA Little About Jeremy:Jeremy Kreyling is the SVP of Healthcare Informatics at NeuroFlow, the market leader in behavioral healthcare technology infrastructure, where he leads analytics strategy to integrate behavioral health into value-based care models. He brings more than 20 years of leadership in healthcare data and analytics, with prior roles at NOCD, ProgenyHealth, and Change Healthcare. Jeremy holds an MBA from the University of Arizona and a B.S. in Information Systems from Arizona State University.
Sep 23

Healthcare Interoperability Is the Foundation for AI

Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to make better use of data, AI, and automation but none of those technologies can reach their full potential without reliable access to the right patient information. In this episode of Interop Now, host Sandy Vance chats with Dima Goncharov, co-founder & CEO of Metriport, about the evolving healthcare interoperability landscape, health information exchanges, FHIR, QHINs, and the challenge of bringing fragmented clinical data together. They discuss why interoperability is becoming table stakes in modern healthcare, the limits of building connections in-house, and how a stronger data foundation can help providers move from simply exchanging information to using it to improve care. They also explore how AI and large language models answer complex patient questions in real time when the underlying data is trustworthy, accessible, and properly organized. In this episode, they talk about:Why healthcare interoperability continues to evolve and why connecting to a single network still isn't enough to create a complete patient picture.How health information exchanges, national networks, and emerging frameworks such as TEFCA fit into today's interoperability landscape.Why healthcare data transformation, patient matching, record location, and deduplication remain major challenges even after connectivity is established.Why Metriport believes interoperability should be treated as table-stakes infrastructure, rather than a project healthcare organizations have to continually build and maintain themselves.How clean, accessible longitudinal patient data creates the foundation for AI, automation, and modern care models.Why AI and LLMs could help providers synthesize complicated healthcare data and answer patient-specific questions in real time.Real-world examples of interoperability helping providers surface previously unavailable information, avoid unnecessary testing, and make faster treatment decisions.A Little About Dima:Dima Goncharov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Metriport, an open-source platform transforming healthcare data exchange. With a background as a software engineer, Dima has built everything from aerospace and defense mission systems to highly available cloud database services at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Dima’s passion for transparent, secure, and accessible health data solutions is evident in Metriport’s mission and the APIs they’ve developed for seamless medical record retrieval. Dima is an alumnus of both British Columbia Institute of Technology and of Y Combinator’s S22 cohort. Now based in San Francisco, he leads Metriport’s efforts to modernize and open up healthcare interoperability for providers everywhere.
Sep 16

Solving Healthcare's Passwordless Problem

Passwordless authentication sounds like a solved problem, until you try to roll it out across a hospital full of shared clinical workstations. In this episode, host Sandy Vance sits with Dawud Gordon, Ph.D. Founder & CEO at Twosense.AI, to unpack why passwordless projects in healthcare so often stall out and what it actually takes to get them across the finish line. Dawud explains how continuous, invisible authentication powered by behavioral biometrics can eliminate passwords for clinicians without adding friction to patient care, and why the real risk in shared workstation environments isn't malicious hackers but accidental session sharing between coworkers. He also shares hard numbers from a 90-day passwordless deployment at a top 10 U.S. health system, including an 89% drop in login failures and a 79% drop in password-related help desk tickets across 17,000 users. The conversation closes with a look ahead at the next frontier of identity security: verifying not just human users, but the AI agents acting on their behalf. In this episode, they talk about:Why compliance is finally forcing health systems to ditch passwords for clinical staffWhy passwordless projects stall: what works in the back office breaks on shared clinical workstationsHow Twosense.AI makes authentication fully passive and invisible using behavioral biometricsThe real risk isn't hackers; it's accidental session sharing between clinicians"Is this really you?" A one-click fix that replaces a full compliance investigationThe case study: 17,000 users, 90 days, 89% fewer login failures, 79% fewer help desk tickets, 100% of sessions protectedHow the rollout happened passively in the background, with zero change management painBuilding an AI native security product, from research prototype to enterprise scaleThe next frontier: verifying AI agents, not just humans, on a user's sessionTwosense.AI's new SSF/CAEP support for broadcasting identity risk across the enterpriseDawud's advice: design for clinical and non-clinical together, and win over your loudest skeptics A Little About Dawud:Dawud Gordon, Ph.D., is the CEO and Co-Founder of Twosense, a cybersecurity company revolutionizing identity security through continuous, invisible authentication. An award-winning researcher with a doctorate in Computer Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Dawud leverages deep expertise in machine learning and behavioral biometrics to solve the friction of traditional Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Under his leadership, Twosense has developed a platform that automates security challenges on behalf of users, successfully securing millions in venture funding and key partnerships with organizations like the U.S. Department of Defense. His work bridges the gap between rigorous academic research and scalable enterprise solutions, transforming how organizations protect their infrastructure without compromising user experience. Driven by a vision to make security effortless, Dawud is defining the future of passive identity verification for the modern workforce.
Sep 2

How AI Is Changing the Ransomware Threat in Healthcare

Ransomware remains one of the biggest cybersecurity threats facing healthcare, but the threat landscape is changing rapidly. Attackers are becoming more targeted, ransomware-as-a-service is making sophisticated tools more accessible, and artificial intelligence is giving cybercriminals new ways to identify vulnerabilities and craft convincing attacks. In this episode of The Beat's Cybersecurity at ViVE series, Sandy Vance speaks with Dave Bailey, VP of Consulting Solutions & Strategy at Clearwater, about the evolving ransomware threat and what healthcare organizations can do to stay ahead of it. Dave explains why smaller healthcare organizations and specialty practices are increasingly attractive targets, how attackers are using AI to improve social engineering and phishing, and why traditional cybersecurity approaches may not be fast enough for the threats ahead. The conversation also explores why healthcare organizations need to understand their AI risk, establish guardrails, inventory their AI use cases, and prepare defenses that can respond at machine speed. Dave shares practical advice for organizations beginning their AI journey, while emphasizing that cybersecurity can no longer be something organizations assess once a year. It has to become a continuously monitored, evolving process. In this episode, they talk about: Why healthcare continues to be one of the most attractive targets for ransomware How ransomware attacks have shifted toward smaller healthcare organizations and specialty practices Why dental practices and specialty providers can be particularly appealing targets How ransomware-as-a-service has created a more scalable business model for cybercriminals Why cybercriminals increasingly operate like businesses How attackers decide which healthcare organizations to target Why post-COVID healthcare's rapid shift to telehealth changed the threat landscape How AI is making phishing and social engineering attacks more sophisticated Why AI creates new governance and risk-management challenges for healthcare organizations Why healthcare organizations need defenses that can operate at machine speed How frontier AI models could help attackers discover previously unknown software vulnerabilities Why patching needs to become faster as AI-powered attacks evolve Why healthcare organizations need to challenge vendors about their cybersecurity roadmaps How organizations can begin building an AI governance strategy Why organizations should inventory their AI use cases before trying to govern them How healthcare organizations can use a tiered approach to AI risk Why workforce training and communication are essential to responsible AI adoption Why cybersecurity risk assessment can no longer be a once-a-year exercise Why scalability and continuous monitoring will become increasingly important A Little About Dave: Dave Bailey is Vice President of Consulting Solutions & Strategy at Clearwater, where he leads the development and delivery of enterprise-level cybersecurity and risk management services for healthcare organizations nationwide. With more than 24 years of cybersecurity experience, including 14 years focused on healthcare, Dave is a trusted advisor to executive teams navigating complex regulatory, operational, and cyber risk challenges. A recognized authority in cyber risk management and NIST Cybersecurity Framework assessment and implementation, Dave brings a strategic, business-aligned approach to security transformation. He previously served 13 years as a Communications and Information Officer in the United States Air Force, with leadership assignments spanning the Pentagon, domestic bases, and overseas operations. Dave holds an Executive MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology and is a CISSP, blending executive perspective with deep technical expertise.

The Beat, powered by HLTH, is a weekly interview series dedicated to paving a better path forward for the future of health. Each week a variety of hosts bring you authentic conversations with prominent thought leaders. Through these interviews with people at the forefront of change in healthcare, we hope to spark new ideas and encourage new collaborations among listeners.

Creator

HLTH
Years Active

2023 - 2026
Episodes

461
Rating

Clean
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