In this episode, we speak to a luminary in the field of mental health. Dr. Tom Insel is the executive chair at Vanna Health, former executive at Verily, and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Insel begins by putting the current AI revolution in context, calling this the fourth wave of mental health innovation – the previous waves being pharmaceuticals, followed by genomic advances, and (most recently) digital mental health technology innovations. According to Tom, the impact of AI in mental health will be immense, but we still have basic problems to solve like streamlining operational tasks for mental health providers. Dr. Insel and host Anmol Madan go on to discuss the fundamental challenges before AI models can augment or replace human therapists, including safety and clinical efficacy requirements. We discuss opportunities for AI models to use passive data for early diagnosis (an approach Anmol helped invent during his PhD research).Perhaps most controversially, Tom and Anmol then explore challenges in access, public health, and policy that are not going to be solved by AI and technology, such as homelessness. Tom highlights recent increases in suicide rates and other structural healthcare challenges that get in the way of technology and AI adoption. Mentioned In This Episode:Rising US Suicide Rates DataMore info about Dr. Tom InselAbout Our Guest:Tom lnsel, M.D., a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, has been a national leader in mental health research, policy, and technology. From 2002-2015, Dr. Insel served as Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). More recently, he led the Mental Health Team at Verily (2015-2017); co-founded Mindstrong Health (2017-2019), a start-up building tools for people with serious mental illness; and served as a special advisor to California Governor Gavin Newsom (2019), helping on behavioral health issues. In 2020, he co-founded Humanest Care, a therapeutic online community for recovery. In 2022, he joined Vanna Health as a co-founder and executive chair. Vanna Health is a start-up helping people with serious mental illness engage in psychosocial supportive care. He currently serves on the boards of Fountain House and the#autonomoushealth #tech #ai #machinelearning #healthcareThank you for listening!Subscribe here to be notified every time we release new episodes!You can also find our podcast episodes on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@AutonomousHealthLearn more at: https://www.autonomoushealth.com/Come follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/autonomoushealth/And continue the conversation on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AutonomousHealAutonomous Health is...Produced & Hosted by: Anmol MadanEdited by: Rebecca AhnMarketing: Erin Garcia MillerAbout Your Host:Anmol Madan is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and executive who has been leading the digital health and AI revolution over the past two decades. Anmol has co-founded or held executive roles at multiple unicorns in the emerging field of digital healthcare; a field which has existed for less than two decades. His professional contributions in the field have received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from leading VCs, and been featured in such media as CNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wired Magazine. His scientific contributions have been published in dozens of scientific articles in leading computer science and digital health journals, and led to over 30 issued and pending US patents. Anm...

Most of our guests at our Autonomous Health Podcast talk about novel insights about data, AI models, and applications. But in this episode, we’re going down a different path – learning about building high-performance AI teams in healthcare. Have you wanted to build a high-performing AI team? Are you thinking about roles in the field? In this episode, we speak to Peg Olson and Abbie Turek, experienced recruiters who have been building technology and executive teams in this space for over three decades. Peg and Abbie share their secrets for building high-performing AI teams, as well as common mistakes they’ve seen. They also go behind the scenes of executive hiring with what to look for in seasoned AI executives and talent-magnets. Finally, we talk about why AI requires a cross-functional collaborative approach with product management, clinical leaders, and engineers. Our field is currently at the intersection of two contrasting trends. On one hand, late-stage healthcare investing is at the lowest it has been in six quarters, leading to a hiring market that favors employers over candidates. On the other hand, generative AI and LLMs have accelerated consumer and enterprise awareness, and valuations for companies in this sector are growing sky-high. Listen to Peg and Abbie address both of these trends, and share their guidance for both employers and candidates. Mentioned In This Episode:Decline in Digital Health Funding (by @healthcaredive)Connect with Peg Olson on LinkedInAbout Our Guests:Peg Maynard OlsonPeg is the Founder & Managing Partner of JPEG Executive Search. With three decades of experience as a recruiter, Peg has a track record of landing top talent spanning all functional leaders and executives, from CEO and the rest of the c-suite to VPs and director-level managers, through each major wave of technological advance – from the Internet, to cloud computing, and now AI. She is known in the industry as a creative and strategic business partner to the firms she represents and for putting humanity at the center of what she does every day. Abbie TurekAbbie has over a decade immersed in the dynamic intersection of HR and technology, her role in technical recruiting#autonomoushealth #tech #ai #machinelearning #healthcareThank you for listening!Subscribe here to be notified every time we release new episodes!You can also find our podcast episodes on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@AutonomousHealthLearn more at: https://www.autonomoushealth.com/Come follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/autonomoushealth/And continue the conversation on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AutonomousHealAutonomous Health is...Produced & Hosted by: Anmol MadanEdited by: Rebecca AhnMarketing: Erin Garcia MillerAbout Your Host:Anmol Madan is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and executive who has been leading the digital health and AI revolution over the past two decades. Anmol has co-founded or held executive roles at multiple unicorns in the emerging field of digital healthcare; a field which has existed for less than two decades. His professional contributions in the field have received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from leading VCs, and been featured in such media as CNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wired Magazine. His scientific contributions have been published in dozens of scientific articles in leading computer science and digital health journals, and led to over 30 issued and pending US patents. Anm...

This episode of Autonomous Health takes a longer-term look at the future of sleep. What can we learn about sleep in extreme environments from astronauts, military pilots, and oil rig workers? Our guest this episode is Dr. Cassie Hilditch, a scientist in the field of sleep countermeasures. Sleep countermeasures, in simple terms, is discovering approaches to maximize the benefits of sleep in a continuous operating environment, such as military applications. In this episode, we discuss the role of light manipulation in minimizing fatigue, and give examples of how military operators and astronauts prepare for critical professional goals. Cassie also shares how lessons in sleep countermeasures can apply to everyday consumers and the tens of millions of consumer devices that people use every day. Aerospace innovations have influenced consumer products in every sphere, from jet engines to GPS. Our discussion then dives into how the sleep research community can keep up with the consumer data generated. One of the core limitations we dive into is performance evaluation and validation for rapidly changing consumer devices against a true sleep lab. Listen as we brainstorm possible solutions, like creating common standards for consumer healthcare data, and as Cassie shares how this consumer data translates into designing better interventions and actions for all of us.Mentioned In This Episode:https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassie-hilditch-phd-817a1816/https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cassie-Hilditchhttps://hsi.arc.nasa.gov/groups/fatigue/personnel_view.php?personnel_id=1660 About Our Guest:Dr. Cassie Hilditch is currently working as a Senior Research Associate through San José State University at the Fatigue Countermeasures Laboratory of NASA Ames Research Center. She received her post-doctoral training at the Division of Sleep Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brown University’s Sleep for Science Research Laboratory. Over her 18-year career in sleep research, Dr. Hilditch has accumulated comprehensive experience in human sleep research, ranging from tightly-controlled inpatient studies to logistically-challenging field studies across#autonomoushealth #tech #ai #machinelearning #healthcareThank you for listening!Subscribe here to be notified every time we release new episodes!You can also find our podcast episodes on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@AutonomousHealthLearn more at: https://www.autonomoushealth.com/Come follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/autonomoushealth/And continue the conversation on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AutonomousHealAutonomous Health is...Produced & Hosted by: Anmol MadanEdited by: Rebecca AhnMarketing: Erin Garcia MillerAbout Your Host:Anmol Madan is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and executive who has been leading the digital health and AI revolution over the past two decades. Anmol has co-founded or held executive roles at multiple unicorns in the emerging field of digital healthcare; a field which has existed for less than two decades. His professional contributions in the field have received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from leading VCs, and been featured in such media as CNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wired Magazine. His scientific contributions have been published in dozens of scientific articles in leading computer science and digital health journals, and led to over 30 issued and pending US patents. Anm...

Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) were first approved by the FDA nearly 25 years ago, but have seen widespread adoption in the last decade with popular CGM models from leading companies such as Dexcom and Abott. This has also led to discovering the everyday health insights that CGMs can inform beyond diabetes management.In this episode, we speak to data scientists RJ Elllis, PhD and Robbie Capps, PhD who have gone deep into understanding metabolic patterns in CGM data. RJ and Robbie talk about the benefits of continuous monitoring – where the resolution of data can be 100x over traditional finger-pricking. Robbie jokes that he has the unique qualification of looking at CGM data for almost every day over the last three years.Together, we discuss the types of insights that are unlocked with CGM data and related trends. We cover the rising applicability in managing Type 2 diabetes, building closed loop systems to deliver insulin, and the journey to artificial pancreas. We also explore what happens with blood glucose when appetite suppression drugs like Ozempic are involved. Our discussion also takes a philosophical bent. AI and ML systems can learn predictive models of signals like blood glucose in ways that are fundamentally different from how our systems work – “black-box” vs. “explainable” models. Robbie and RJ make a compelling case for why models based on CGM data need to consider everything else that is going on with the person, and why physio-functional models that explain causality may be a better approach when using CGMs in real-world applications.Mentioned In This Episode:RJ Ellis website: https://robjellis.net/index.html Robbie Capps website: https://robcapps.comPFun Digital Health website: https://pfun.oneAbout Our Guests:RJ Ellis, PhDRJ has 7+ years healthtech industry experience (Teladoc, Livongo, Omada) and has led projects/teams focused on extracting signals from high-throughput connected monitoring devices. Expertise in biometrics, experimental design, statistical testing, data viz, classical ML, and scientific communication. PhD from Ohio State (Experimental Psychology); postdocs at Harvard Medical School (Neurology) and the National University of Singapore (Computer Science).  His greatest pro#autonomoushealth #tech #ai #machinelearning #healthcareThank you for listening!Subscribe here to be notified every time we release new episodes!You can also find our podcast episodes on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@AutonomousHealthLearn more at: https://www.autonomoushealth.com/Come follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/autonomoushealth/And continue the conversation on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AutonomousHealAutonomous Health is...Produced & Hosted by: Anmol MadanEdited by: Rebecca AhnMarketing: Erin Garcia MillerAbout Your Host:Anmol Madan is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and executive who has been leading the digital health and AI revolution over the past two decades. Anmol has co-founded or held executive roles at multiple unicorns in the emerging field of digital healthcare; a field which has existed for less than two decades. His professional contributions in the field have received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from leading VCs, and been featured in such media as CNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wired Magazine. His scientific contributions have been published in dozens of scientific articles in leading computer science and digital health journals, and led to over 30 issued and pending US patents. Anm...

Welcome back to the Autonomous Health podcast. AI conversational agents and natural language have existed well before the recent advances in large-language-models (LLMs). In this episode, we talk to John O’Donovan, PhD. John is a machine learning and AI innovator who serves as a research scientist at UC Santa Barbara and has authored 100+ scientific publications. He also leads AI teams at Teladoc Health. John has been working on conversational agents for the last several years, and has built and scaled large conversational systems that serve millions of consumers prior to the most recent LLM revolution.John and I talk about his personal journey and the role of language in healthcare conversations. We discuss some of the differences between operational-use cases in healthcare vs. the path to clinical triage and care delivery. We dig into reasonable use-cases today, and the modeling approaches that could lead us to AI-driven clinical decisions. Then we end this episode with competing predictions on the timeline that lead to true AI-driven care.  About Our Guest: John O’Donovan leads an AI team at Teladoc Health, working on innovative chat and computer vision applications for telehealth. He also holds an appointment in the Computer Science department at UCSB as an Associate Researcher, where he previously lectured in CS and co-directed the Four Eyes research lab for many years. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 2008 with a focus on Trust in Recommender systems, and has published over 100 peer reviewed papers in the area of AI and HCI. He also recently served as program chair of ACM's RecSys and IUI conferences. Mentioned In This Episode:John O'Donovan UCSB page:  https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~jod/#autonomoushealth #tech #ai #machinelearning #healthcareThank you for listening!Subscribe here to be notified every time we release new episodes!You can also find our podcast episodes on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@AutonomousHealthLearn more at: https://www.autonomoushealth.com/Come follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/autonomoushealth/And continue the conversation on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AutonomousHealAutonomous Health is...Produced & Hosted by: Anmol MadanEdited by: Rebecca AhnMarketing: Erin Garcia MillerAbout Your Host:Anmol Madan is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and executive who has been leading the digital health and AI revolution over the past two decades. Anmol has co-founded or held executive roles at multiple unicorns in the emerging field of digital healthcare; a field which has existed for less than two decades. His professional contributions in the field have received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from leading VCs, and been featured in such media as CNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wired Magazine. His scientific contributions have been published in dozens of scientific articles in leading computer science and digital health journals, and led to over 30 issued and pending US patents. Anm...