Prescribe Responsibly

Picking the right antibiotic is only part of the job. You also need to know the patient is getting enough drug for it to work, without reaching toxic levels.

Dr. Ari Frenkel talks with Dr. Raj Singh, PhD, MSc, Senior Director of Strategy and Innovation at ARK Diagnostics, about therapeutic drug monitoring and why it belongs in antimicrobial stewardship. They discuss why standard doses fail in critically ill, renal, obese, elderly and pediatric patients. They explain why voriconazole levels are so easy to get wrong and why linezolid levels vary so much between patients. They also cover why turnaround time matters and why a drug level needs clear guidance before a clinician can act on it. The conversation ends with AI in precision dosing and Raj's one rule for clinicians: trust but verify.

Guest: Dr. Raj Singh, PhD, MSc, Senior Director, Strategy and Innovation, ARK Diagnostics, Inc.

Host: Dr. Ari Frenkel, MD, MPH, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Arkstone Medical Solutions

Learn more: https://arkstone.ai

This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.

A medical student walks the hospital looking for a faculty member with a pen. That is the moment that started EdMedAI.

Most conversations about AI in medicine focus on the practising physician. This one looks earlier, at how the next generation of doctors is trained, tracked and assessed.

Dr. Ari Frenkel is joined by Dr. Chandra Sekhar Bondugula, founder of EdMedAI and a physician educator with eleven years in US graduate medical education, where he served as a DIO and created three residency programs. The two worked together at North Alabama Medical Center.

In this episode:

• Why more than 2,600 competencies were being tracked on paper
• Socratic learning: building AI that asks students why instead of handing them answers
• Where AI simulation helps in clinical reasoning, and where it stops
• Managing hallucination through faculty review before content reaches students
• Why the faculty adopted faster than the undergraduates everyone expected to lead
• Competencies in evaluating AI performance, bias and reproducibility entering accreditation

Learn more at arkstone.ai or visit our guest website https://edmedai.in

Follow the podcast for future episodes.

This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.

She visited five doctors. None found the infection. It took Tami Burdick — not her clinicians — to identify the organism causing her disease.

In this episode of Prescribe Responsibly, Dr. Ari Frenkel sits down with Tami Burdick, patient advocate and author of Diagnosis Detective: Curing Granulomatous Mastitis, to explore what happens when standard lab methods fail, antibiotics become guesswork, and the patient is forced to become their own researcher.

Tami's infection — granulomatous mastitis caused by Corynebacterium kroppenstedtii — was invisible to conventional Gram stains and cultures. What followed was a seven-month odyssey through misdiagnosis, ineffective treatment, two abscesses, and a wound vac. Along the way, she traced the source of her infection to contaminated well water in Connecticut — her "Erin Brockovich moment."

In this conversation we cover:

• Why negative cultures don't mean no infection — and how clinicians are misled by false negatives
• The 80% problem: most U.S. counties lack an infectious disease specialist
• How trial-and-error prescribing costs patients months, tissue, and trust
• Why patients are turning to AI before their doctors do
• What "super doctors" look like in the age of clinical decision support

Whether you're a clinician managing complex infections, a lab director evaluating diagnostic tools, or a patient navigating the system — this conversation will change how you think about responsible prescribing.

🔗 More from Prescribe Responsibly:Website: https://arkstone.ai

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📖 Tami's book: Diagnosis Detective: Curing Granulomatous Mastitis — available on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Diagnosis-Detective-Curing-Granulomatous-Mastitis-ebook/dp/B09DTBH9P9

Today, we’re diving into a topic that is reshaping the landscape of modern medicine: Antimicrobial Resistance, or AMR. AMR happens when bacteria, viruses, and fungi evolve to resist the drugs designed to kill them. It’s a silent but growing threat, leading to longer illnesses, more complicated treatments, and, in some cases, life-threatening infections that no longer respond to standard antibiotics.

To help us understand what this looks like on the front lines, I’m joined today by Dr. Zachary Mostel an infectious disease physician specializing in transplant medicine.

🎧 More from Prescribe Responsibly:
Website: https://arkstone.ai
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