May 29, 20260 min
Hiatus! Just for a bit.
I'm taking a brief break as work and life have both ramped up, leaving me in need of a few weeks to prep some great content for you. I'll be back later in the summer!
Episodes
63
Latest episode
May 2026
Language
EN
About the show
Health tech conversations, from a healthcare IT professional. We're going to talk about medical innovation, technology, and the ethical and operational considerations for health systems. In other words: it's gonna get super nerdy, super fast!
Listen to episodes
May 13, 202611 min
What does Privacy and Transparency Mean Anyway?
This week's Health Data Ethics podcast continues our series on the Joint Commission and CHAI guidance on the responsible use of health AI. In this episode we're digging into privacy and transparency.The guidance itself is reasonable. What I spent most of the episode on is how you actually implement it, because that's where things get interesting.Adding AI language to the Notice of Privacy Practices is a good first step, and a lot of health systems are doing it. But I think the most-told lie in modern life is still "I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions." Broad disclosure is honest, and it matters, and it's also not going to carry the whole weight of a transparent relationship with your patients.The piece I really wanted to dig into is opt-outs. If you offer patients the ability to opt out of something you can't actually turn off, you've built opt-out theater, and that erodes trust faster than just being honest about the limitation would. Ambulatory scribe is a real opt-out. Inpatient sepsis prediction is not technically feasible to opt out of, and we probably shouldn't pretend it is.I also spend some time on the clinician side, which I think gets short shrift in a lot of these conversations. Operational training on a tool is not the same thing as understanding how the model behaves, where it fails, and which patients it might be wrong for. Clinicians are the ones carrying accountability for human-in-the-loop judgment, and they need real explainability to do that well.
May 6, 20269 min
How Do You Get AI Policy Approved?
Getting an AI policy approved in a large health system is a different skill than writing one.In part two of my AI policy series on the Health Data Ethics Podcast, I share what months of drafting, socializing, and navigating formal approval at Cleveland Clinic actually looked like: the champions you need, the scope battles you'll face, and why the approval process is won or lost long before the policy enters formal review.The biggest takeaway: identify domains where your scope overlaps with someone else's, and get those leader in the room early before formal review even starts.
April 29, 202615 min
How Do You Write an AI Policy?
Writing an AI policy sounds straightforward — until it becomes the place where everyone in your organization hangs all their hopes and dreams for AI governance.In this episode of the Health Data Ethics Podcast, I walk through the first item on the Joint Commission and Coalition for Health AI's responsible use guidance: establishing an AI policy as your governance foundation. I share what we learned working on Cleveland Clinic's AI policy in late 2024 — before the JC/CHAI guidance even existed — including the structural traps that slow policies down, and why pre-approval stakeholder alignment is so important. If you're starting from zero or trying to get a stalled draft across the finish line, this one's for you.
April 8, 202617 min
What's the White House Thinking About AI Regulation? Part Two
Part two of my breakdown of the White House National AI Policy Framework — what it says about workforce, what it leaves out, and what it would take to become law.The workforce section has good instincts but no mandates, no funding, no timelines. In healthcare, this can create a patient safety problem, if our health systems don't fill this gap thoughtfully.The legislative road is crowded and uncertain, but even if codified into law, this federal posture is a light touch with the rest landing on health systems.
April 1, 202616 min
What's The White House Thinking About AI Regulation? Part One
This week's episode of the Health Data Ethics Show: The White House just released a four-page legislative framework asking Congress to pass national AI policy this year. Not a law. A wish list, but one that tells us a lot about where federal AI policy is heading.In this episode I break down what it means for healthcare governance: the preemption debate, FDA as the designated health AI gatekeeper, and the notable absence of HIPAA from the entire document.The governance responsibility has always sat with health systems. This framework confirms the federal government intends to keep it that way.
March 25, 202622 min
Can ChatGPT Tell Me When To Go To The ED?
In this week's episode of the Health Data Ethics Show, I dig into a new Nature Medicine paper that stress-tested ChatGPT Health across 960 clinical vignettes. ChatGPT Health performs remarkably well in the middle of the acuity spectrum, correctly triaging semi-urgent and urgent cases at rates that rival clinical judgment. At the extremes, though, it struggles — undertriaging more than half of true emergencies and triggering crisis resources for suicidal ideation more reliably when patients had no plan than when they did. I walk through the methodology, the results, what they reveal about the limits of benchmarks like HealthBench, and what I think health systems and patients should take from it.
March 11, 202612 min
What's AI's Impact on the Labor Market?
Last week, Anthropic published new research on the labor market impacts of AI. In this week's episode, I break down what the paper actually says, why the gap between theoretical and observed AI exposure matters, and which workers and which sectors are most impacted.Those workers, and the people reading these articles, are also your patients. They're walking into your hospital carrying headlines, anxiety, and ChatGPT conversations from the parking garage — and most governance frameworks have no place to put that.
March 4, 202624 min
What's New with AI in Hiring, with Brad Owens of Asymbl
In this episode, I invite special spousal guest Brad Owens to help explore a landmark federal court case involving Workday’s AI-powered hiring tools and potential implications for AI governance in employment and healthcare. Join us as we dissect the legal, ethical, and technological facets of AI decision-making and bias mitigation.EEOC Four-Fifths Rule - https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/questions-and-answers-clarify-and-provide-common-interpretation-uniform-guidelinesNYC Bias Auditing Law - https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/about/automated-employment-decision-tools.page
February 18, 202620 min
Can AI Help Patients Manage Their Blood Sugar?
In this week's Health Data Ethics podcast, I dissected a 2023 JAMA study on using a voice-based AI tool to coach patients through insulin titration in type 2 diabetes. Big thanks up front to Aida McCracken who listened to me work through this one! The results were encouraging—patients hit optimal dosing in 15 days vs. 56+ for standard care. But governance questions kept nagging me.→ Self-titration works for insulin because it's clinically established. Try the same with other drugs and you're in much riskier territory.→ Study was 8 weeks. Diabetes is lifelong. What happens when engagement drops or the smart speaker isn't supported anymore?I'm all for empowering patients to follow validated protocols. We need scalable chronic disease solutions. But let's innovate with eyes open about equity, sustainability, and regulatory frameworks.
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