AMIA: For Your Informatics

In this episode, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)'s For Your Informatics podcast, Sabrina Hsueh and Li Zhou host Haider Warraich, a Program Manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and a practicing cardiologist at Boston Medical Center. At ARPA-H he leads the ADVOCATE program that supports the development, regulation, evaluation and deployment of Clinical Agentic AI to revolutionize care delivery for patients with chronic disease. Previously, he served at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a Senior Clinical Advisor for Chronic Disease to the FDA Commissioner, where he helped shape policy around drugs, devices, nutrition, digital health, and AI. Before that, Warraich was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital and Director of the Heart Failure Program, at the Veterans Affairs Health System in Boston. He is the author of more than 180 peer reviewed papers and several books. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Atlantic.

The episode explores how agentic AI can address critical gaps in chronic disease management, focusing on heart failure and cardiovascular health. Dr. Warraich shares insights from his transition through clinical practice, academic research, the FDA, and his current role at ARPA-H, notably the newly launched ADVOCATE program, an ARPA-H initiative designed to build, evaluate, and deploy FDA-ready, patient-facing agentic AI technologies to serve as clinician extenders. The discussion covers geographic access gaps in care, autonomous agents and "copilots," the current state of AI evaluation, and extending the ADVOCATE program from heart failure to all chronic disease management.

In this episode, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)'s For Your Informatics podcast, Sabrina Hsueh and Li Zhou host Monica Bertagnolli, a surgical oncologist, physician-scientist, and President Elect of the National Academy of Medicine—the first woman to hold that position in NAM's history. Her previous positions include the Richard E. Wilson Professor of Surgery in surgical oncology at Harvard Medical School, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and a member of the Gastrointestinal Cancer Treatment and Sarcoma Centers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, all in Boston, Massachusetts. In the past, she served as the 17th Director of the National Institutes of Health and the 16th Director National Cancer Institute (NCI), as well as President of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

In the interview, Dr. Bertagnolli shares her unique journey from Princeton engineering to cancer surgery and national leadership. She emphasizes collaboration, system thinkings, and bringing an engineering mindset of "pilot, test, scale, and continuously improve" to AI in healthcare. She highlights her role in founding mCODE, an initiative to improve patient care through oncological data interoperability, and how NAM's six core commitments and ten guiding principles for responsible AI address issues of bias and equity. Dr. Bertagnolli also offers insights on the growing erosion of trust in science and medicine—and how to restore it.

In this episode, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)'s s For Your Informatics (FYI) podcast, Sabrina Hsueh and Li Zhou host AI safety and ethics expert Ray Eitel-Porter, Luminary and Senior Advisor for AI at Accenture and an Intellectual Forum Senior Research Associate at Jesus College, the University of Cambridge. Previously, he served as Accenture's Global Responsible AI Lead. Ray is the author of Governing the Machine and sits on several boards and councils advising on data analytics and strategy.

In the interview, Ray shares how he was inspired to research responsible AI by data privacy concerns and how biased datasets harm models. He describes his objective as helping people understand the potential risks of emerging technologies in order to confidently use them. He discusses case studies from his book where companies successfully implement responsible AI practices in the workplace, and shares how his framework will be useful even as technologies continue to emerge and change. Finally, Ray offers some advice for younger professionals in AI and medicine.

Recorded live at AMIA's 2025 Annual Symposium This session explored today's challenging funding climate across informatics research, strategies for managing staff and resources under uncertainty, and practical ways to regain control and strengthen resilience. Our panelists shared expertise and lessons learned for all levels of researchers in health informatics towards navigating these pressures and building sustainable paths forward.

This thoughtful dialogue with the CTO of Garner Health highlights his professional journey, lessons learned in leveraging data and AI, and strategies for building inclusive solutions. The conversation also provides guidance for upcoming and current informaticists preparing to enter a rapidly advancing field.

Episode Hosts:

Dr. Leyla Warsame, ACMIO - M Health Fairview

Host: Leyla Warsame, MD

Guests: Josh Vest, PhD and Tiffany Harman, MSN

Description: This episode revisits a discussion on social determinants of health with our experts at the 2023 AMIA Annual Symposium. This reflection focuses on addressing SDOH from the healthcare organization to the individual level, budget impacts, and making informatics strategy actionable.

Host: Karmen S. Williams, DrPH, MBA, MSPH, MA, CPH, Assistant Professor, City University of New York

Guest: Peter Tippett, MD, PhD, CEO, careMESH

Description: Listen in on our fireside chat with a true pioneer in the informatics field. Dr. Peter Tippett discusses his career from clinical practice to startup to the White House.

Host: Leyla Warsame, MD, M Health Fairview

Guest: Manijeh Berenji, MD, MPH, UC Irvine, VA Long Beach

Description: This conversation discusses real-world practice and research in environmental and public health informatics with the chair-elect of the Climate, Health, and Informatics Working Group, leader of the Public Health Informatics Working Group, and 2024 AMIA Leadership Award Recipient. #WomensHistoryMonth

Host: Dr. Leyla Warsame, ACMIO, M Health Fairview

Guest: Jaysón Davidson, PhD Candidate, UCSF

Description: Listen in to this episode with PhD Candidate Jays'on Davidson on his educational path to informatics and his work with data and social determinants of health.

Host: Vivian Hui, RN, BSN, PhD

Guests: Bill Hersh, MD, FACMI, FAMIA Wendy Chapman, PhD; Jay Patel, BDS,MS, PhD

Description: Recorded live at the 2024 AMIA Annual Symposium, join our experts on this episode as they explore the excitement and hesitancy of AI in healthcare.