AI is rapidly changing the landscape of innovative healthtech. In this episode I chat with Dr. Yoni Goldwasser, a digital health investor and entrepreneur, about the exciting new trends in healthtech and whether or not AI will advance enough to replace doctors in the future.

We discuss how accurate medical models need to be in his opinion, how he and his team of investors evaluate new healthtech startups in terms of algorithms, bias in the data and he provides tips on what makes a good startup pitch.

Progress in healthcare and medical research requires a lot of data. In the era of Big Data health data is among the most valuable and the most private information anyone can have. Two major hurdles with finding quality medical data are access to that data in a private and ethical way as well as bias on the data due to underrepresentation of women, certain racial or ethnic groups.

In this episode I talk to Dinidh O’Brien about how donateyourdata.org and DataLake are trying to solve this problem with a patient-first approach to sourcing medical data for research. Data Lake is an EU-funded start-up creating a global medical data donation system based on blockchain technology, with privacy and informed consent as fundamental pillars.

We discuss this data donation framework and how it addresses the issues of privacy, consent, data monetization and working to minimize biases. Dinidh explains how they approach patients to opt in, how they vet organizations that request access to this data and how they plan to expand throughout Europe and the US.

In this episode I chat with Rich Edwards, CEO of Mindspan systems, about the changing tech and data landscape for Financial Institutions, especially big banks vs. regional ones - how Mindspan turns tech into a commodity and data from what was once a regulatory liability into a democratized operating asset.

In this age of consolidation we chat about how data is the smaller banks’ secret weapon to improve service, add innovation and combat bias in financial data that has historically barred access to services from underrepresented communities. We also chat about how financial data is shared more broadly among financial institutions through the Open Banking framework and what that means for privacy and competitiveness.

In this episode I talk to Ryan Janssen and Paul BLankley, the founders of Zenlytic, a company that strives to bring the world Generative-AI-powered self-serve business intelligence.

But what does that even mean? How does it work? And most importantly - will it make the Analyst Role obsolete in the future?

Join us as we discuss the problem that Zenlytics aims to solve, how LLM’s understand your business data, how they will affect the role of the data analyst in the organization and where data products are today in the innovation cycle.

You can learn more about Zenlytic at: https://www.zenlytic.com/

You can reach Ryan at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janssenryan/

You can reach Paul at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulblankley/

Femtech - or Female Health Technology, which includes apps such as period trackers, is experiencing unprecedented growth. But nowhere is this podcast’s tagline - how life affects data and how data affects life - more relevant than in this industry in the shadow of the Dobbs decision by the supreme court overturning Roe V. Wade this year.

In this episode I talk to Bethany Corbin, a Femtech innovation and data privacy attorney, about the Femtech industry and its challenges in a post Roe V. Wade world - what kind of data do these apps collect? What are the unique data privacy concerns and how these were affected by Dobbs?

Bethany discusses The calls to delete period tracking apps and other reactions to Dobbs, some actual cases of data privacy violations and gives tips on how to vet such apps to make sure they are compliant with stringent privacy standards. We also touch on data aggregation and utilizing AI in this space. I hope you enjoy this fascinating and timely conversation.

The field of Public Health has always involved collecting and analyzing data but when a worldwide pandemic hit suddenly, it was necessary to speed up these processes so as to make decisions and recommendations in real time. As the pandemic changed and shifted, with vaccines and treatments, so did the need for public health data. In this episode I talk to Amelia Burke-Garcia and Lucy Rabinowitz Bailey of NORC at the University of Chicago, an independent research organization, who conducted just such a study in real time to understand the pandemic’s effect on public mental health and coping strategies.

We talk about the kind of data they used, the challenge of collecting it and processing it so quickly, how data changed throughout the pandemic, how they approached issues of bias and privacy and how AI figured into the equation. We also touched on some hot topics in the news - the proposed moratorium on generative AI research and its effect on public health as well as the effect of social media on teen mental health.

In this episode we tackle the issue of AI generated art - Recently the news has been abuzz with names like chatgpt, Dall-E, Lensa AI and other services that utilize AI to generate art. Is this the beginning of the end for human creativity and artistry? I am joined by Tery Spataro, an author and creator who uses AI tools to create and enhance her art - we talk about how these tools actually get used and what it means for the future of human artistry, privacy and copyright. Lastly we discuss some current hot topics that have been in the news recently involving AI and art. Tery has some valuable insights that might surprise you!

Did you know that the US has one of the highest if not THE highest maternal mortality rate in the world? This is especially true for Women of color who suffer from lack of access to quality care and cultural sensitivity. Join me for a conversation with Mohamed Kamara, Founder and CEO of InovCares, an app for women, particularly women of color, that provides access to culturally-sensitive clinicians. It combines real-time metabolic health data gathering with telehealth, computer vision, artificial intelligence in order to provide access to quality maternal healthcare.

We discuss what it means for clinicians to be culturally competent, and how they use data and AI to provide services such as virtual ultrasounds from home, post-partum care and a community of online support. We talk about data privacy and what it means to disrupt the healthcare space, an industry that is so ripe for disruption.

Mohamed also provides insight on his experience as a Black entrepreneur and advice on navigating that space.

In this episode I chat with Josh LaMar, who after many years of doing Design Research at Microsoft now heads Amplinate, a Design firm that fast-tracks domestic and international product growth, helping tech companies save millions by building the right product for the right audience in the right markets.

We discuss LGBT representation in Tech, what it means to be inclusive when designing software products by being cognisant of cultural and global differences. We discuss the type of data they use, the difference between qualitative and quantitative data and how they complement each other in this field. Josh gives us some tips on how to implement inclusive design in our product management processes as well as what he’s excited for in the future of design research.

In this special episode to commemorate National Coming Out Day on October 11th, I give my perspective on what it means to come out in the workplace, why it's important and why it's not a singular event but rather something that happens continuously throughout our careers.