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The Hidden Reason Hospital AI Keeps Failing | Angel Mena

Everyone's chasing the AI demo. Almost nobody's fixing the process underneath it.

In this episode, Chris sits down with Angel Mena, Chief Medical Officer at Symplr and former primary care physician and residency program director, to unpack why most AI pilots in healthcare stall — and why "layering AI on top of a broken process" just makes the broken process faster.

Angel and Chris get into why hospital pilots so often fail to scale, the governance bottlenecks that can stall a good idea for months (legal, compliance, and risk all included), who actually needs to be in the room before a CMIO signs off on a big implementation, and why clinicians are rarely asked what they actually need before a new tool gets built for them. They also talk about ambient AI's real impact on documentation and "pajama time," and where AI is already delivering results in production — not just in a pilot.

About Angel Mena:
Angel Mena is an internal medicine physician and former residency program director who spent over a decade at Tri Health and helped build one of the first cloud clinical communication platforms at Halo Health. He's now Chief Medical Officer at Symplr, overseeing the operational backbone of healthcare — credentialing, scheduling, workforce, and compliance.

In this episode:

• Why most AI pilots fail to scale
• The governance bottleneck: legal, compliance, and clinical sign-off
• Who needs to be in the room before a CMIO signs off
• Ambient AI and its real effect on physician burnout
• Where AI is already working in production, not just in pilots
• Building a shared governance framework across clinical, IT, and operations

Connect with Angel Mena:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angeljmenamd/
Symplr: https://www.linkedin.com/company/symplr/

Connect with The Signal Room:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/
Yt: https://www.youtube.com/@SignalRoomPodcast

📘 Beneath the Signal, Chris's book on the human work behind trusted data and responsible AI in healthcare: Get it on Amazon

Support the show

About The Signal Room: The Signal Room is a podcast and communications platform exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants. Leadership, ethics, and innovation, amplified.

Website: https://www.hutchinsdatastrategy.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisHutchinsAi

Book Chris to speak:  https://www.chrisjhutchins.com

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Generative AI is changing how the medical world works—but it is also completely rewriting the cyber threat landscape. When a security breach happens to a traditional business, it impacts revenue. When a data breach happens to a hospital system, people's lives are actively at stake. In this episode of The Signal Room, host Chris Hutchins sits down with Pranava Adduri, Co-Founder and CTO of Bedrock Data, to uncover a major operational blindspot: the dangerous gap between deploying autonomous AI agents and maintaining strict data governance. Pranava explains why the defensive advantage of AI tools is only temporary, how "helpful" AI agents inadvertently create massive security leaks, and why healthcare leaders must stop trying to build unreachable networks and instead adopt a radical new mindset: learn to get better at being breached.

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

• The AI Agent Judgment Gap: Why AI agents trying to get a job done will bypass security parameters (like creating hidden, shared data folders) because they lack human ethical judgment.
• The "Scary Forest" of Permissions: How privileged access and credentials drift over time, and why letting an unchecked AI agent act with full user permissions creates a catastrophic blast radius.
• Data-First Threat Modeling: How identifying your top five most critical data assets and working backward is the fastest way to harden a clinical environment.
• Open Source vs. Frontier Labs: Why advanced adversarial AI capabilities are catching up quickly, making AI-assisted cyber attacks more frequent and sophisticated.

Chapter Markers & Timestamps:

• 0:00 — Introduction: Why healthcare data security is a matter of life and death.
• 1:45 — Meet Pranava Adduri and the mission behind Bedrock Data.
• 3:11 — How medical ransomware differs from standard enterprise cyber attacks.
• 4:32 — The hidden threat landscape: What leaders miss when deploying GenAI.
• 6:55 — Do defenders actually hold the long-term AI capability advantage?
• 9:35 — Flipping the playbook: Why organizations must "get better at being breached."
• 12:22 — Beyond honeypots: Restructuring network access and minimizing data footprints.
• 14:38 — Why clinical settings give broad access to AI agents (and why it backfires).
• 19:37 — Exposing the false sense of security around hosted cloud environments.
• 23:55 — Reining in the "scary forest" of privileged access drift.
• 27:30 — The #1 critical cybersecurity takeaway for healthcare CEOs and tech leaders.
• 29:13 — Where to follow Bedrock Data and wrap-up.

About Our Guest:

Pranava Adduri is an expert in data infrastructure and security compliance. He was a founding engineer at Rubrik, where he focused heavily on ransomware defense and backup recovery. He later scaled data risk and compliance lines at AWS past $200 million in revenue, working directly with Fortune 500 CISOs. Today, he is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Greylock and the Co-Founder and CTO of Bedrock Data, an advanced data security and governance platform built explicitly for the AI era.

Resources & Links Mentioned:

• Visit the Bedrock Data Website: bedrockdata.ai
• Connect with Pranava Adduri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/padduri/
• Explore More Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@SignalRoomPodcast

📘 Beneath the Signal, Chris's book on the human work behind trusted data and responsible AI in healthcare: Get it on Amazon

Support the show

About The Signal Room: The Signal Room is a podcast and communications platform exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants. Leadership, ethics, and innovation, amplified.

Website: https://www.hutchinsdatastrategy.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisHutchinsAi

Book Chris to speak:  https://www.chrisjhutchins.com

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Is your organization’s data secretly floating around on the public web?

In this episode of The Signal Room, host Chris Hutchins dives deep into the operational layer of AI risk with cybersecurity expert Aaron Puckett, Executive Vice President at Managed Services Group.

Many corporate boards think they are protected because they signed off on an official AI policy. But as Aaron explains, a paper policy means absolutely nothing without infrastructure-level technical controls. We break down the exact mechanics of "Shadow AI", revealing how well-meaning employees are accidentally leaking sensitive company data and Protected Health Information (PHI) directly into public models like ChatGPT.

If you are a business leader, CISO, or operational executive, this episode is a critical manual on how to lock down your data before a massive security breach occurs.

Inside This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• The Anatomy of a ChatGPT Leak: What literally happens to your proprietary information the millisecond an employee pastes it into a public chatbot.
• The Illusion of Compliance: Why writing an AI policy is the easy part, but proving your security posture to SOC 2, HIPAA, or cyber insurance auditors is where companies fail.
• AI vs. AI Warfare: How threat actors use artificial intelligence to compress cyber attack timelines from hours down to milliseconds.
• The First Line of Defense: Why data hygiene, conditional access, and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) must be prioritized before deploying any enterprise AI tools.

Key Moments & Chapters:

• 00:00 - The multi-million dollar mistake boards make with AI risk.
• 09:07 - Policy vs. Reality: Why your corporate AI framework might be empty.
• 17:03 - Technical guardrails: Setting up real Data Loss Prevention (DLP).
• 24:55 - The Shadow AI nightmare: How employees bypass your security.
• 32:38 - MFA and Identity Posture: Your first line of cyber defense.
• 44:44 - The first question every operator must ask their IT team this week.

Connect with the Guest:

• Guest: Aaron Puckett, Executive Vice President
• Company: Managed Services Group (MSG)
• Website: msgrouponline.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronwpuckett

Enjoyed this episode? Make sure to hit follow, leave a 5-star review, and share this episode with an executive or IT professional who needs to secure their data infrastructure today!

📘 Beneath the Signal, Chris's book on the human work behind trusted data and responsible AI in healthcare: Get it on Amazon

Support the show

About The Signal Room: The Signal Room is a podcast and communications platform exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants. Leadership, ethics, and innovation, amplified.

Website: https://www.hutchinsdatastrategy.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisHutchinsAi

Book Chris to speak:  https://www.chrisjhutchins.com

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Why "Academic" AI Models Fail the 3 AM Real-World Stress Test

What happens when pristine corporate AI benchmarks collide with the messy realities of the frontline at 3:00 AM?

In this episode of The Signal Room, emergency physician and AI red-teamer Dr. Omer Atli joins host Chris to expose why enterprise-grade AI models frequently collapse in resource-constrained environments. If your organization is relying on theoretical AI safety protocols, or ignoring the unapproved "Shadow Formulary" already operating inside your building, this conversation is an essential guide to corporate governance, liability mitigation, and reality-aware product architecture.

EPISODE TIMESTAMPS

• 00:00 – The 3 AM benchmark vs. the 3 PM academic lab
• 02:15 – Why theoretical AI fails operational edge cases
• 06:30 – The "Shadow Formulary": Unmanaged AI in your organization tonight
• 09:45 – Hallucinations vs. Lethal Omissions: The true liability shift
• 15:20 – Designing "Resource-Aware" software for critical environments
• 21:10 – Modern CISO Governance: Transitioning from bans to live controls
• 27:45 – The Clinical Safety Officer: Who owns your digital risk?

STRATEGIC TAKEAWAYS FOR LEADER-BOARDROOMS

• Prohibition Fails Corporate Governance: Frontline staff, operators, and clinicians are already using consumer-grade AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) out of their pockets to solve immediate problems. Banning these tools simply drives "Shadow IT" deeper underground, creating unmapped compliance failures and massive legal liabilities.
• The Rise of Lethal Omissions: The ultimate liability risk isn't a blatant AI hallucination—it’s a lethal omission. Advanced models successfully identify complex problems but drop the critical, context-dependent next steps. For executives, this creates an invisible malpractice risk that standard evaluation frameworks miss entirely.
• Software Must Be "Resource-Aware": AI cannot safely optimize an action if it is blind to the physical operating environment infrastructure infrastructure. True enterprise AI must be built to survive the absolute hardest edge cases first—because if a system works where resources are thinnest, it will work seamlessly anywhere.

CONNECT WITH THE SHOW & GUEST

• Dr. Omer Atli on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dromeratli/
• Dr. Omer Atli's Website: omeratli.com
• The Signal Room Website: signalroompodcast.com
• Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/

If today's conversation sparked an idea, challenge, or perspective worth amplifying, please leave a review and subscribe to stay ahead of enterprise AI risk.

📘 Beneath the Signal, Chris's book on the human work behind trusted data and responsible AI in healthcare: Get it on Amazon

Support the show

About The Signal Room: The Signal Room is a podcast and communications platform exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants. Leadership, ethics, and innovation, amplified.

Website: https://www.hutchinsdatastrategy.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisHutchinsAi

Book Chris to speak:  https://www.chrisjhutchins.com

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Before he was advising boards on AI strategy, Bennett Bordon spent eight years as a U.S. intelligence analyst, then went to law school, then earned a graduate degree in data analytics. That cross-disciplinary background eventually led him to analyze a decade of billing data from 14,000 attorneys, and conclude that roughly 80% of what lawyers do today is better done by AI.

Bordon is now the founder and CEO of Clarion AI Partners, a boutique firm that advises companies on AI governance, risk, and strategy while also building the AI systems themselves. In this conversation with host Chris, he breaks down:

• Why he left a top-10 law firm to build Clarion instead of trying to "turn the Titanic" on the billable hour
•  The "Iron Man, not Terminator" framework for thinking about AI and human work
• How the legal concept of reasonableness — what did you identify, what did you do about it, can you prove it — keeps companies defensible in an unsettled regulatory landscape
• Why 80% of AI adoption is a psychological and change-management problem, not a technology problem
• How AI governance committees go wrong when they're owned entirely by tech, compliance, or the business alone
• The work Clarion does on child safety, access to justice, and public policy as AI scales globally

A wide-ranging look at what it actually takes to deploy AI responsibly, from the boardroom down to the workflow level.

Find Bennett Bordon at clarionaipartners.com or on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bennett-borden/
Website: https://clarionai.com/

Find Us on:
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SignalRoomPodcast
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/

📘 Beneath the Signal, Chris's book on the human work behind trusted data and responsible AI in healthcare: Get it on Amazon

Support the show

About The Signal Room: The Signal Room is a podcast and communications platform exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants. Leadership, ethics, and innovation, amplified.

Website: https://www.hutchinsdatastrategy.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisHutchinsAi

Book Chris to speak:  https://www.chrisjhutchins.com

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What does it mean to be ready — really ready — to take care of a patient at 3am?

Passing boards says you're safe enough to start. But clinical judgment? That's built through repetition, feedback, and experience that nursing education often can't provide. And the consequences of that gap are real: 50% of new grad nurses leave the bedside within 2 years, before they ever become the senior mentors the next class needs.

Angela Millan has lived this from every angle. As a new grad thrown onto the floor after 18 days of orientation. As a nurse practitioner navigating an even steeper learning curve. As a clinical instructor watching her students freeze at the bedside — not because they didn't know what they were seeing, but because they didn't know what to do next. And now, as the co-founder of Prismn Health Technologies, where she's building Nurse Hazel: a conversational AI clinical reasoning tutor designed to close the gap before a nurse is ever alone in those high-stakes moments.

In this episode, Chris and Angela get into:

- Why the NCLEX measures minimum competency — not readiness
- The difference between clinical knowledge and clinical judgment, and why it matters
- A story about a nursing student who followed every protocol and still nearly lost a patient
- The emotional cost of entering a profession where you're measured for compliance, not care
- How Nurse Hazel works — and the strict line Angela drew on what AI should never do at the bedside
- What a strong nursing workforce looks like in 10 years, and what it will take to get there

Angela's perspective is rare: she's building from inside the problem, not around it. This is a conversation about what healthcare education has normalized, and what it looks like to refuse to accept that as inevitable.

—

Guest: Angela Millan — Nurse Practitioner, Nurse Educator, Co-Founder of Prismn Health Technologies
Connect with Angela: linkedin.com/in/angela-milan
Learn more about Prismn: https://joinprismn.com/

About Angela Millan:
Angela Millan is a nurse practitioner, nurse educator, and co-founder of Prismn Health Technologies. She has lived the readiness gap from every angle — as a new grad put on the floor after roughly 18 days of orientation, as a nurse practitioner navigating an even steeper learning curve, and as a clinical instructor watching capable students freeze at the bedside because they did not yet know what to do next. At Prismn she is building Nurse Hazel, a conversational AI clinical-reasoning tutor designed to help nurses rehearse judgment before they are alone in high-stakes moments — with a deliberately strict boundary on what AI should never do in patient care.

—

The Signal Room is hosted by Chris Hutchins. New episodes every wednesday.
Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

📘 Beneath the Signal, Chris's book on the human work behind trusted data and responsible AI in healthcare: Get it on Amazon

Support the show

About The Signal Room: The Signal Room is a podcast and communications platform exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants. Leadership, ethics, and innovation, amplified.

Website: https://www.hutchinsdatastrategy.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisHutchinsAi

Book Chris to speak:  https://www.chrisjhutchins.com

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Are your employees using AI as a tool, or is it quietly eroding your company's culture? 

In this episode of The Signal Room, we explore why digital transformation is primarily a trust event, not a technical one. Guest Katherine Tuominen, an organizational narrative strategist, joins the show to uncover the growing friction between top-down executive directives and the lived operational realities of frontline workers. 

We break down the immediate compliance dangers of employees typing confidential patient diagnoses into public large language models (LLMs). We also expose the rise of "AI slop"—such as the sudden verbal epidemic of corporate words like "delve"—and how relying on automated communication builds a toxic phenomenon known as "narrative debt."

Whether you are a CEO trying to safely implement AI or an individual contributor navigating career progression traps, this episode provides actionable frameworks for human-centric leadership.

Key Takeaways From This Episode:
• Defining Narrative Debt: What happens when public values don't match workplace reality.
• The AI Compliance Trap: How frontline healthcare workers accidentally expose secure data.
• Deconstructing AI Slop: Why automated email threads fail to create authentic team alignment.
• The Promotion Paradox: Why forcing top technical performers into management destroys trust.
• Intrinsic Rewards vs. Performative Wellness: What your staff actually wants from leadership.

Chapters

0:00 - The Human Reality of AI Adoption
1:15 - What is Narrative Debt in Corporate Culture?
4:54 - How AI is Ruining Human Jargon (The Delve Epidemic)
10:12 - Why Automated AI Email Threads Fail
12:54 - How AI Slop Destroys Authentic Communication
15:46 - Frontline Workers Are Accidentally Leaking Private Data to LLMs
17:29 - Building Psychological Safety During Tech Transformation
20:52 - The Promotion Paradox: Why Good Employees Fail as Managers
25:57 - Nudge Theory: How Leaders Can Win Back Workforce Trust
33:38 - Intrinsic Motivation vs Performative Wellness Benefits
37:25 - How to Build a Safe AI Communications Infrastructure

Connect with our Guest:
• Katherine Tuominen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-tuominen

About Katherine Tuominen:
Katherine Tuominen is an organizational narrative strategist, marketing strategist, and publicist, and the founder of Catalyst Brand Strategy. She helps companies treat digital transformation as a trust event rather than a purely technical one, focusing on the friction between top-down executive directives and the lived realities of frontline workers. Her work centers on "narrative debt" — the cultural cost that accrues when an organization’s stated values stop matching how work actually feels — and on helping leaders build psychological safety, resist "AI slop" in corporate communication, and stand up safe AI communications infrastructure that protects confidential data.

About The Signal Room:
The Signal Room explores ethical leadership, corporate data privacy, and organizational transformation in a modern workforce.

📘 Beneath the Signal, Chris's book on the human work behind trusted data and responsible AI in healthcare: Get it on Amazon

Support the show

About The Signal Room: The Signal Room is a podcast and communications platform exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants. Leadership, ethics, and innovation, amplified.

Website: https://www.hutchinsdatastrategy.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisHutchinsAi

Book Chris to speak:  https://www.chrisjhutchins.com

Send us Fan Mail

Less than 25% of employees say they trust their CEO.

Two-thirds of the global workforce is disengaged.

And now companies are rolling out AI on top of that already-broken foundation.

In this episode of The Signal Room, Chris sits down with Diane Weaver, fifth-generation entrepreneur, EdTech veteran (Pearson, Waterford), and co-founder of Baryons to talk about the trust crisis hiding inside every organization, and why most AI implementations are quietly making it worse before making it better.

Diane has spent her career at the intersection of learning, systems, and human potential. After her EdTech startup CourseTune was acquired, she co-founded Baryons, an agentic AI platform built on positive psychology and organizational science to help everyone in a company, not just the C-suite, flourish at work.

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WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE
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→ Why the trust gap between leadership and frontline workers is getting worse with AI adoption
→ The difference between being a technology user vs. a technology steward and why it matters right now
→ How Baryons' AI companion is intentionally designed to push people toward human connection, not away from it
→ The 2-minute morning habit that elite athletes and executives share — and how anyone can use it
→ Why most AI tools are subtly training you to think and communicate like them
→ What "human flourishing" actually looks like inside a workplace — and how to measure it
→ The neuroscience behind why verbalizing your intentions changes what you actually accomplish

──────────────────────────────
TIMESTAMPS
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00:00 The stat that changes everything
01:38 Meet Diane Weaver — 5th generation builder
07:07 AI opportunity is massive. Where do you focus?
08:48 Technology user vs. technology steward
11:06 How AI rollouts create a leadership disconnect
13:05 The trust crisis: less than 25% trust their CEO
16:21 Why Baryons was built
19:20 What is a Baryons? The 2-minute morning habit
23:31 Two-thirds of the workforce is disengaged
30:49 The 4 modes inside the Baryons platform
34:09 Built on positive psychology
40:09 The sacred space — AI with real guardrails
44:01 AI is shaping your language and behavior
49:27 Brain capital and human flourishing
53:43 Rapid fire round

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CONNECT WITH DIANE WEAVER
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🌐 Baryons: https://baryons.com
📱 Sign up for your Baryon: https://baryons.com

──────────────────────────────
WATCH ON YOUTUBE 
──────────────────────────────

Prefer to watch? The full video episode is on The Signal Room YouTube channel. Link: https://www.youtube.com/@SignalRoomPodcast

──────────────────────────────
ABOUT THE SIGNAL ROOM
──────────────────────────────

The Signal Room is where real conversations happen at the intersection of AI, leadership, and what it means to do meaningful work. Every episode, host Chris brings in founders, executives, and thinkers who are building the future not just talking about it.

Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Grab Chris's book Beneath The Signal on Amazon:
Get it on Amazon

Support the show

About The Signal Room: The Signal Room is a podcast and communications platform exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants. Leadership, ethics, and innovation, amplified.

Website: https://www.hutchinsdatastrategy.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisHutchinsAi

Book Chris to speak:  https://www.chrisjhutchins.com

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Explore the AI literacy crisis in healthcare with Dr. Steve Labkoff, focusing on AI governance, ethical leadership, and responsible AI strategy. Learn how leaders can navigate AI democratization and clinical AI implementation to ensure trustworthy AI systems that advance healthcare innovation and patient safety.

Dr. Steven Labkoff, physician executive and former VP at Bristol Myers Squibb, joins Chris Hutchins on The Signal Room to expose a growing crisis hiding in plain sight: senior healthcare leaders deploying powerful AI tools without the literacy to use them safely.

Drawing on decades at Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, Dr. Labkoff breaks down why treating AI like a search engine is one of the most dangerous mistakes in modern medicine — and why "democratizing data" may be doing more harm than good.

In this episode:

• Why AI literacy is the most overlooked risk in healthcare leadership today
• What "data chemistry" means and why your AI is only as good as it
• The real dangers of over-trusting large language models in clinical care
• How pharma's failure to treat data as a product is holding the industry back
• Lessons from the front lines of Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and rare disease research

Whether you're a clinician, health tech professional, or just someone who cares about where medicine is headed, this conversation will change how you think about AI in the exam room and the boardroom.

Connect with Dr. Labkoff: www.PracticalAIinHealthcare.com

[email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevelabkoff/

Connect with Chris Hutchins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/

https://www.youtube.com/@SignalRoomPodcast

https://signalroompodcast.com/

Enjoying the show? Chris's new book Beneath The Signal is now available on Amazon → Get it on Amazon

Support the show

About The Signal Room: The Signal Room is a podcast and communications platform exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants. Leadership, ethics, and innovation, amplified.

Website: https://www.hutchinsdatastrategy.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisHutchinsAi

Book Chris to speak:  https://www.chrisjhutchins.com

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Sid Dutta is a 24-year cybersecurity veteran, former data-protection executive at American Express, Worldpay, Activision Blizzard, and OpenText and Founder & CEO of Privaclave AI. His work targets the layer most healthcare AI conversations ignore: the runtime data layer where pilots actually stall.
In this episode, Chris Hutchins and Sid examine why healthcare data governance is the bottleneck in clinical AI, what privacy-preserving AI looks like in practice (tokenization, federated learning, secure enclaves, differential privacy), how organizations can collaborate on PHI without exposing it, why static perimeter controls fail in non-deterministic AI workflows, what healthcare leaders get wrong about vendor risk, and the shift from "block first" to enabling controlled data usage at runtime.
For health-system executives, CIOs/CISOs, data and compliance leaders moving AI from pilot to production without compromising patient trust.

What We Cover
• Why healthcare AI initiatives stall before models are ever deployed
• How runtime data protection differs from static perimeter controls in non-deterministic AI workflows
• What privacy-preserving AI actually means in practice — tokenization, federated learning, secure enclaves, differential privacy
• Why cross-institutional research breaks down when data leaves an EHR boundary
• Where shadow AI emerges — and how to remove the friction that creates it
• What separates trustworthy AI infrastructure from a checkbox compliance posture

Key Takeaways
The bottleneck is the data layer, not the model. Healthcare AI does not fail because the model is wrong. It fails because the data layer cannot be governed safely as data moves between systems, copilots, and agents.
Static security models break in AI workflows. Encryption at rest and in transit clear an audit checkbox without protecting data once it leaves an EHR. Runtime, context-aware controls are the only governance that survives non-deterministic agents.
Stop framing privacy and access as opposing forces. Privacy-preserving infrastructure is the unlock for cross-institutional research, real-time clinical decision support, and partnerships that have been blocked for compliance reasons.
Trust comes from technical enforcement, not contracts. Data-sharing agreements describe intent. Auditability, traceability, and runtime policy enforcement deliver it.
Block-mode is a sign of immaturity. Organizations that default to "deny" instead of enabling controlled data usage are signaling that their governance model is not ready for AI partnerships.

Frameworks & Tools Mentioned
• Tokenization, format-preserving encryption, deterministic encryption
• Homomorphic encryption, federated learning, differential privacy
• Trusted Execution Environments (confidential computing, secure enclaves)
• Data Discovery & Classification / DSPM (Data Security Posture Management)
• Runtime context-aware access controls and intent-based policy enforcement
• Data clean rooms for cross-institutional analytics and research

Chapters
00:00 - Cold open and guest introduction
02:14 - Why healthcare AI stalls before models deploy
07:04 - Data sharing, regulations, and runtime control
11:58 - What privacy-preserving AI actually means
16:54 - What becomes possible: cross-institutional research at scale
22:04 - Misconceptions and the rise of shadow AI
27:48 - Why cross-institution collaboration is hard
31:00 - Privacy-preserving infrastructure as the partnership unlock
35:31 - Infrastructure vs models: the underestimated data layer
40:19 - Building trustworthy AI: governance and shared accountability
43:09 - Signals an organization isn’t ready
48:55 - From institutional to network-centric data ecosystems
55:21 - What leaders should pay attention to right now

About Sid Dutta
Sid Dutta is the Founder & CEO of Privaclave AI and a 24-year cybersecurity veteran with more than a decade leading data protection and privacy engineering at scale. Before Privaclave, he was Vice President of Data Protection & Privacy Engineering at Activision Blizzard (Microsoft Gaming), Product Head of Voltage SecureData at OpenText (formerly Micro Focus), Vice President & Global Head of Data Protection & Applied Cryptography at Worldpay, and Director of Cryptographic Utilities & Services at American Express. He holds nine issued patents in cryptography, blockchain, and tokenization, with one additional patent pending, and has served on multiple vendor and cybersecurity advisory boards.

About The Signal Room:
The Signal Room is a podcast exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder & CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants.

📘 Beneath the Signal, Chris's book on the human work behind trusted data and responsible AI in healthcare: Get it on Amazon

Support the show

About The Signal Room: The Signal Room is a podcast and communications platform exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants. Leadership, ethics, and innovation, amplified.

Website: https://www.hutchinsdatastrategy.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisHutchinsAi

Book Chris to speak:  https://www.chrisjhutchins.com