[0:00] what is health techHello. The guest today is Chaitin Saraba, Class of 2009. He is the director of clinical innovation at Cornell Tech, as well as the clinical assistant professor at Wild Cornell, the the, the medical school at Cornell. And so hi. Hi, Chaitin. What is health tech? Hey Tony, it's so great to be here. I love your energy that you bring to to support Cornellians everywhere. Health tech is a really exciting field. Where technology and healthcare come together. And that is a lot of the work that I helped to lead at Cornell Tech. It's thinking about, you know, when you as a patient try to contact your doctor and you're trying to make an appointment and you may be connecting to a chatbot to the technology that your doctors use to try to figure out what might be going on with you to everything in between from all of the administrative and general, general support that's out there. Health tech is this broad field that's at the intersection of technology and health. And in a related term too, is this idea of health informatics. And informatics is really the, the definition is people, process and technology. So health tech, I think sits in that broader context of work where it's not just about the technology itself. It's not just about what the technology can do for healthcare, but it's how we think about the people, the processes and the technology all together. Interesting, what are the like the the goals of health tech? Like if the health tech is better, do people live longer? Yeah, I mean, it's really, if you, you look broadly across, you know, what are the goals of healthcare, right? Health tech is tech in service of health and healthcare. We think about health, we tend to have these two words for it. So health is our general well-being. It's the things that we do every day that keep us healthy, from the food that we eat to the air that we breathe, to whether we get enough steps in. And then health care is that system of care that helps to support us when we get sick, when we have something where we need to go to the hospital or take medications. It's that system that supports our health when our body is out of line. And when you put it all together and think about health tech, that is really about how technology is in service of health and health care. So it's everything from on the health side. How can technology help us live better lives? How can it help us eat healthier, make better decisions about our stress? How can it help us connect socially more, get better sleep? But then when you think about tech and the healthcare system, it's about, you know, how do we help doctors and nurses and other healthcare professionals take better care of patients with the technology staying in the background. And I think there's a lot of excitement about what AI is able to do today, particularly large language models, because when we think about health and healthcare, it really happens in the realm of language. When you are sick and go to a doctor and you're explaining what's going on, there are, there may be some blood tests or maybe some getting vital signs, some numbers. But the actual experience of healthcare, it's really in the realm of language. It's what you describe. It's what then the healthcare provider says back to you in terms of what they think is going on. And I think that's why we're at this moment right now where there's a lot of excitement of what AI means for the health tech space in particular. Because if you look across industries, Healthcare is adopting AI more rapidly than other sectors. And I think that's really the the power of large language models in particular has that ability to bring, you know, computational scale to language that realm that people actually experience healthcare in. So everything can be broken down to words and then the LMS are very good with the words. That's that's one way to one way to look at it. I mean it, there's definitely more kind of beyond words as well. Like there's, there's obviously a lot of healthcare that requires physical touch and procedure, But but words are, are such a core component of how Healthcare is actually experienced. Because even if you have some numbers you're dealing with, like maybe you get the numbers of your blood pressure or your blood and the numbers look slightly off. But the way that we understand the numbers is through words we may say, or a clinician may tell a patient, hey, these numbers don't look so good. They're going in the wrong direction. Or these numbers are actually starting to look better, right? So the way we actually process and understand that information about our health is really through through the realm of language. Got you. That's really, really interesting. So from the perspective of like a everyday American, like, at what point does the large language model help them with their health? Yeah, I mean, I think we're

[5:06] everyday applications of AIstarting to see that a lot already, especially with a lot of general purpose large language models. I don't know about you, but for me, I use LLM tools to help me with workouts, to help me figure out, you know, what to make when I go to the grocery store. I have certain, you know, diet I'm trying to hit and I can use an LOL to help figure out what I should buy and cook. There's a lot when it comes to that, that general Wellness. And I think what we're also starting to see now is a lot of the large AI companies are starting to launch products in healthcare where they're allowing ordinary people outside of the walls of the healthcare system to connect their healthcare data. So what that means practically is, you know, you may be feeling dizzy, for example, and it could be from a number of reasons, right? And now you may be wearing some sort of wearable that's tracking your activity and it might be able to tell the LLM that, hey, I just walked on 1000 steps outside when it was really hot, although it's not that hot in New York right now, it's getting hotter and it and it has that information, but it also now by connecting to your medical records, it may know that your doctor just prescribed a medication that has a side effect of dizziness, right? So it's so it's really, you know, where LLM an AI can help us navigate our personal health. It's a connection between our everyday things that we're doing to stay healthy. But sometimes it also needs to connect with that healthcare information, whether it's the the medications, whether it's understanding if we have a chronic condition that we're dealing with. And LLMS are really powerful at being able to bring all that together. That being said, I think there's still a lot of important caveats to remember. They're still at risk of hallucinating, of making things up, are continuing to improve and keep releasing new models. But depending on how you prompt an AI tool, that may give you different answers. And so the experience of how we use AI, how the people who build AI, the responsibility around it all can make, you know, make a huge difference in terms of how well it works. And that's what we're really, really excited to bring all these different voices together to the the Health Tech Summit at Cornell Tech coming up pretty soon on March 2nd and 3rd. Bringing together leading voices from the AI research community, from healthcare systems that are implementing these tools, from people with lived experience with using AI tools for their personal health, to government agencies that are overseeing how this is regulated. And so the summit, in its fourth year, is really designed to help us kind of understand that holistic picture of how we can advance AI and healthcare responsibility. That makes sense because it has to come together because in the example for that fella walking 10,000 steps, feeling dizzy, If it didn't know that, the medication would cause dizziness and it wouldn't be able to connect the dots like that. Exactly, Yeah, yeah, It's all about trying to bring the full context together. But doing that requires a lot of different a lot of coordination across different fields, different expertise, different systems. Got you. So, so, so I'm trying to figure out like the the before and the after like before, like before, they might feel dizzy, but they don't think to call the doctor, but because they have the app to get reminded like what's the before and after World? And like, how different is it in terms of like lifespan, quality of life? Yeah, I mean that that was just one kind of hypothetical example of of where like someone might be using AI. The idea was the things that affect our symptoms like dizziness and come from our physical activity. It can come from the weather outside, you know, if it's really hot, but it can also come from our medications. It can come from a condition. But the idea there with that example was just about knowing that the things that affect us that cause symptoms come from a lot of different places. And it's important to understand that full context. But then to get to your question of, you know, where do these tools kind of fit in into everyday life? When does that alert happen that that's a really good question, but that that requires a whole another level of how these these tools are built and studied. And that's, you know, a lot of the research that many students, faculty members at Cornell Tech are really exploring. You know, they're really, Cornell Tech has been really leading efforts in understanding how technology works for our health in day-to-day life and then in collaboration with Wild Cornell, really understanding how this fits into the healthcare system with Wild Cornell and New York Presbyterian Hospital. And that's a big part of my role as the director of clinical innovation at Cornell Tech. I am able to help bridge the technology side of the conversation with the clinical side of the conversation. And I work to develop programs that connect students and faculty and entrepreneurs at Cornell Tech with a lot of the clinicians and researchers have deep clinical expertise. While Cornell. And I think we're really fortunate here in New York to have these two campuses right across from each other, as well as broader Cornell University in Ithaca. While Cornell and Qatar, I think there's just such a wealth of knowledge across the clinical and technical sides. And we're in a world now where we're trying to bridge and connect all of this together. Gotcha. So this is like for the research that's happening at Cornell Tech between the health and the tech, like, what are examples of research that's being done?

[11:01] health tech research at CornellYeah, I mean, there there's a, there's a a really, there's a really broad range of work. Doctor Thanzin Choudhury, who leads a lot of the health tech work at Cornell Tech, whom I work closely with, she leads a lot of work around her and her PhD students lead a lot of work around mental health and how we can use sensors for better understanding our everyday behavior, mental health conditions, understanding where AI plays a role here, but also understanding where to bring in guardrails and the safety systems that are needed there. Jan Hickey, he's a PhD student in Ithaca. He's been working with Erica Abramson and the the medical school, other leaders there like Joe Safdie, Dean of Education, to really look at how AI can help educate medical students through through simulation. There's a lot of the work of Doctor Deborah Estrin, who's been working with New York Presbyterian across wild Columbia, where AI has applications in cardiology care. Doctor Angelique Taylor at Cornell Tech leads a robotics lab that's really working with the wild Cornell Emergency Medicine Department, looking at where automatic automatic robots in the hospital can help in emergency situations. And we have some research that I helped to lead with Doctor Udad Gupta at Cornell Tech looking at the environmental footprint of AI that we're using in healthcare. AI has a lot of exciting potential across many different areas of healthcare that we just started to highlight a few of. But using that AI requires A tremendous amount of electricity and water, and that has a lot of broader implications from an environmental perspective in terms of the cost. And so Doctor Gupta and I have been working in that space. We published A framework called Sustainably Advancing Health AI to really create a road map for how how to think about the environmental footprint of AI tools and do this more responsibly. That's so interesting. Like are these like research? Are they more clinical trial type of research or are they more like algorithm research? What's the output of the research papers typically? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a wide range. I think you know, you described in clinical trials where there's, you know, you're comparing an intervention group to a control group. There's a lot of, a lot of studies like that that are taking place. But then there's also research that's more about developing new algorithms. It's it's really the whole, whole gamut. How integrated are they? Like do they usually share data between themselves? Like what's the common thing that helps all the research rise up together? I think you know what's what's happening right now. That's really interesting is additionally, when you think about clinical research, you had a lot of different silos. You know, it's organized by clinical department like cardiology, nephrology, Pediatrics. You also have more basic science research and pharmacology, genetics. And I think the interesting element is how technology is driving completely new ways of looking at everything. And I think we're actually developing across, you know, our strengths from the, the Cornell tech side to wall Cornell really working towards building those new layers of innovation. Because for example, we, you know, we talked about how large language models can work with human language. And there's a lot of research happening in terms of technologies to better interpret medical tests to explaining things to patients and doctors better. But there's also a world of research in how tools like large language models work with the language of life work with, you know, DNARNA in terms of processing that, in terms of understanding protein folding better. And so right now, we're, we're at a time where the technological shifts that we're experiencing are completely changing what's possible. And no one really knows what that future looks like. And I think we're we're at that cusp of a lot of transformation of possibilities. And that's where I think the combination of resources across the Cornell canvases is really potent makes. Sense because before you might draw the lines on the org chart this way, but because of the new tech, you're able to redraw the lines very quickly. That's very, very interesting. So you're a good example of this because you cross both sides of the river.

[15:35] healthy environmentsI think going back to why I love Cornell so much, for me, really fortunate and grateful to be working for Cornell today, but my journey goes all the way back to Cornell as an undergraduate student, as we heard, I graduated in 2009 and I grew up in upstate New York, about two hours away from Ithaca in Utica. And I, you know, going to to Cornell. I came into the cows school as a biology major interested in pre Med. But I was drawn to Cornell because I knew there was this, this wealth of knowledge and training. And, you know, really the motto of any of Ezra Cornell, of any person, any study really, really rings true. You know, I was motivated to go into medicine because of some of my own experiences as a patient, as a child growing up. And that's what drew me to want to become a doctor, to become a pediatrician. But in the journey of going into medicine, I knew I was motivated to make the healthcare system work better for patients, for patients to have a more empowered voice, for clinicians, to have a have a better experience in taking care of patients. And so when I got to Cornell as a freshman, I knew I wanted to learn other skills to work to make the healthcare system better. I didn't know exactly what that would be, but very serendipitously, I discovered the Department of Landscape Architecture, which was in Cal's, and I took a class. For those of you who haven't been, if you're in Ithaca, go to Kennedy Hall where you might be getting food at Trillium. Really great spicy black bean quesadillas there. But if you go up to the 4th floor of Kennedy Hall, it's the landscape architecture department and it's this beautiful space. We're looking the AG Quad and Bailey Hall. It's this really amazing light filled space full of plants and people building models and creative thinking go on to that space right away. Because when we think about health and healthcare, connecting to nature is so fundamental to that able to, you know, connect to that that natural world at the power of landscape architecture is really about designing health into our cities, into our lives. The kind of quintessential story of landscape architecture starts with the creation of Central part Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park, was able to convince New York City to set aside so much land to build Central Park because of the health benefits of the park. So landscape architecture is a field that is fundamentally rooted in health, and it's really about a form of systems design thinking rooted in ecologic principles. And for me, it gave me this foundation and how to bring design to healthcare. Also think about these broader links between the health of our environment and the health of us as humans. And it also introduced to me the the door to technology in an interesting way. And this is a testament to how interdisciplinary Cornell is. And because I had that design background, I was hired to be AUI design intern for the Human Computer Interaction Lab, which at the time was in college Town. But it was in the Department of Information Science and Computer Science and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, as well as the College of Human Ecology, where I took a lot of classes, just had such really creative interdisciplinary majors and possibilities, as well as all the other colleges as well. I was, you know, the iPhone had just come out in 2007, two years before I graduated. And my last two summers at Cornell hired to be AUI design intern, working with JP Pollock, who's also a a senior kind of researcher in residence with Cornell Tech, getting his PhD at the time and got to work with him and designing very early stage healthcare apps before there was even an App Store out there. And so that was the experience that Cornell gave to me right before I went to medical school. You know, I went to medical school in Syracuse, not too far away. And as I went through my training, I have that solid foundation, really interdisciplinary foundation from Cornell of my biology, genetics, pre Med major with that interdisciplinary landscape architecture, design thinking, as well as the tech experience working in the human computer interaction lab. And I think. It's just so emblematic of what Cornell is built around, the ethos of really thinking across disciplines. And I think today, when we think about the potential of technology to help people live healthier, to live healthier, to have more meaningful, fulfilled lives, Cornell is really well positioned to to help drive that forward to drive this health tech health AI era forward. What's still interesting, this collaboration between all these different majors, is there like mostly cultural, where they're also structural that connects people together. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think it's both. I think there's, you know, I think different majors kind of create different ways of looking at the world, right. And when we think about something like AI and how broadly transformative it is, it can't just be in the realm of computer science that we we think about AI because it's going to change the nature of the way we work. And that's why Cornell's, you know, College of Industrial Labor Relations, ILR has been leading a lot of really interesting work in how AI is transforming the future of the workforce. And the College of Human Ecology, for example, has this really interesting collaboration with the the the College of Hotel Administration called the Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures. Really interesting institute. I am a kind of faculty fellow with them and helping guide where AI is going at this intersection of health and design and hospitality. And so I think it's structural and how we match these different institutes together across our Cornell campuses. But I think it's also the ways of thinking that we're able to melt together and really look at this transformation that's happening in society from every possible discipline and vantage point. So interesting. Like, for example, when you first started at the Cornell Tech, Like how did you first learn about the Institute of Healthy Pictures? Yeah, yeah.

[22:21] collaboration at CornellSo while I was at Cornell back in the early 2000s, I, I had the chance to meet with a lot of folks, took a lot of classes across campus. And then I went to medical school and Pediatrics residency throughout the Northeast. And then I went out to Stanford for a fellowship in clinical informatics and really stayed in Silicon Valley for seven years where I got really in depth into the health tech field in Silicon Valley. But I knew I always wanted to return back east. And while the Silicon Valley is still probably where the the most amount of technology is concentrated, I was drawn back to New York and to Cornell because I knew from what I just said that we need to think about technology from a much more multidisciplinary perspective. And so I was starting to plan my way back East, was reconnecting with some Cornellians that I knew from the past. So I mentioned JP Pollock and he had introduced me to Doctor Deborah Estrin and to Doctor Thinzin Choudhury. And that was sort of the beginning of, of reconnecting of learning what was happening with the health tech hub. And coming from Silicon Valley, I was just really excited to see all of this energy for for health tech in New York and that Cornell was really helping to orchestrate, orchestrate. This professor JP, he knew a lot of the other professors and he was able to introduce you into that. Yeah, that was that was how it started. So it, it all went back between my, my roots as a Cornell undergrad student sort of reconnecting. And I think it's the power of the Cornell network in terms of how wide and deep it stretches. And I know Tony, you're, you're really a master of connecting Cornellians everywhere. And you do it with such, just such loving energy too. So I think it's in that spirit. Yeah. So when you were coming back from Silicon Valley, did you consider other parts of the ecosystem? Like how does academia compared to venture capital, compared to be working on an insurance company where you have the money to feed into the system? So how did you decide academia to be the best position for you to make this change? Yeah, great question. So I'm someone who's lived across both worlds, across academia and industry. So after finishing my informatics fellowship at Stanford actually joined an early I went into industry joining an early stage health AI company in Palo Alto called Doc AI. Whereas working most of my time. But I also did maintain an academic appointment at Stanford as a clinical assistant professor of Pediatrics and worked one day a week taking care of patients there. My journey into industry. So I worked at this early stage health AI company and Doc AI was kind of an early R&D lab for many new AI tools that were coming out at that time in 2018. It was a lot of computer vision tools, but we're also working with early versions of large language models. We were working with GPT 2 and GPT 3, and we were working with people across the healthcare ecosystem, from large payers to pharmaceutical companies to healthcare providers, helping to kind of build and show them where AI was taking things. And then Doc AI ended up getting acquired by a company called Share Care. And after we got acquired, we went public through a SPAC. And so I've experienced that journey of being at a small stage Silicon Valley startup, getting acquired, going to a large public company building in the health sector across those spaces, all still also maintaining A clinical foot and an academic Medical Center.

[25:51] patient care, saw wildfire and asthmaAnd clinical work I did, I should also mention, was at a federally qualified Health Center. So we were taking care of patients on Medicaid, didn't have a lot of resources. It was a lot of children who were fleeing violence in Central America. And so also, I should mention being in California during that time in the middle of COVID, we had really bad wildfires, some of the worst wildflowers in California that time. And I was seeing it impact the children I was taking care of. It was triggering their asthma. But when I was looking at their medical records, it didn't say anything about air quality. And that has taken me on a journey over the past five years and really starting the field of climate health informatics of really looking at that intersection of health and climate. I mentioned some work around looking at the environmental footprint of AI, but there's also a side where AI can really help us because, you know, increased air pollution, increased heat waves have detrimental healthcare impacts from mental and physical health across different ages. And we're learning more and more about those risks. But we need to connect the data between environmental Health and Human health. And AI can help us kind of process that expense of it, make recommendations. And so I've really been growing this field out. And at Cornell, I also lead a lot of work at this intersection of climate, health and AI. Very first health and climate AI hackathon at Cornell Tech last New York Climate Week and are planning to continue to develop that space. And it also in terms of the ethos of Cornell Tech, we not only have health tech, but we also have the urban tech hub as well as other fields as well. And urban tech is really considered concerned with technology in cities. And so fireman and health really, really spawns those bridges. And finally, you know, going back to your original question about industry versus academia, I think Cornell Tech sits really across both of those in a really unique way because all students here have to learn entrepreneurship. We have programs like Studio and one way to support entrepreneurship, and it's about really not one side or the other, but it's understanding how at a top academic institution we can take the best and brightest minds and research, but then to use the power of industry to scale that for the greatest impact and reach. And Cornell Tech really sits at that Nexus. And that's why it was so exciting for me to come here and to take on this role. Because I I can see that the wildfires, they cause all kinds of smoke in the air because they breathe it in and causes asthma. I guess it's like a very important academic research problem. So that's why being in academia makes sense. Yeah, we, we need to kind of understand exactly how it's triggering. But at the same time, you know, these wildfires are happening more and more frequently. Climate change is accelerating. And, you know, research takes time, but we also need to help people who are suffering. And, you know, that's in the world of of healthcare. And so part of what we need to do is, yes, we need to do more careful methodological research, but we also can't wait forever because the impacts are already happening here today. So we need to take the best of what we learned already and start to put that into action. So it's all like the trajectory from research to impact, like, for example, the papers you've published and what are examples of impact? So one of the papers I published that I mentioned at the start is called Sustainably Advancing Health AI. It's a framework publication in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst that also has Doctor Gupta from Cornell Tech. So this is a framework paper that's building a coalition together of health systems. We are working with, you know, Walt Cornell, with organization, other healthcare institutions that we're talking to like Stanford, University of Michigan to better quantify these impacts. This publication has also caught the attention of the National Academy of Medicine as well as large organizations like the Coalition for Health AI and Health AI Partnership. And so I'm actually going to be leading a session on this at the National Academy of Medicines Climate and Health Grand Challenge that's happening in April to coordinate more of this work. So that's one publication. There's also a publication more in the space of how informaticians can you know what the role of health informatics, data science and AI is in understanding the links between climate and health. And this is a publication that we had in a special issue of Janio. That's the journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, where a few years ago we led the very first survey of of health informaticians in understanding what their role should be in climate and health. And this led to the creation of the Climate Health Informatics Working Group within AMIA. AMIA is the American Medical Informatics Association, It's the academic home of medical informatics. And I am now the chair left of the Climate Health Informatics Working Group. We're bringing together a lot of the data science, data standards, informatics experts in building the infrastructure to mitigate that and adapt to the health impacts of climate change.

[31:07] from policy to clinical best practicesSo interesting how you went from like you writing the doctor notes and realizing that it doesn't have have an asthma and wildfire connection and you all span all the way up to the big national groups now. Like are you able to like change what doctors write in their doctor notes to mention that there was a wildfire? So you went from the really the small to the big, and how do you go back to the small and tell the doctor to write down that there was a wildfire? Yep, definitely really appreciate how you connect, connected those dots. So, yeah, and I think, you know, this goes back to my original training at Cornell as a landscape architect, right? When you when we're as a doctor, you're kind of sitting in the walls of a clinic room. You're not seeing the broader picture outside of a, you know, outside of the clinic. But you know, those are things that are impacting the patient. And so I would like to, when I'm making a decision for this individual patient on what type of inhaler would be best for them, how often they should use it, that is impacted by the air quality that they're exposed to. But if I can't see the air quality in some sort of visualization, then I'm not able to make the best decision for this patient. And so having gone through that experience is what led me to then work with these national groups to say, Hey, the current infrastructure we have doesn't really allow us to fully address the true factors that are impacting people's health beyond the walls of what we see in the clinic. And so that's why for me, I consider, you know, the work I do is across all these levels. I still do individual patient level care where I see patients at, well, Cornell today. But I also need to, you know, advocate on this national level to build the infrastructure to connect the dots to these, these greater, you know, impacts. And as a, you know, as a, as a pediatrician, my goal as a paediatrician is to help children grow up healthy. And when I think about those longer term risks, when I'm, you know, helping a family take care of their newborn baby and want to help that child grow and thrive into childhood and to becoming a teenager. When I think about that long term trajectory that the greatest health threat that we all face, but particularly children is, is climate change. And so it's responsibility of all of us, particularly in healthcare to, to be thinking about this and to be addressing it. And the ability to connect the data and using technology is a really meaningful way to start to connect those dots. The small to big makes sense to me. Like what's the big to small like? Like do they come up with like continue medical education? Do they teach it in medical schools now? What are the ways to get it onto the ground? Again, exactly 2. Two things to say here. So there has been a seismic shift over the last, you know, ten years or so where medical schools are incorporating climate change into their education. And if you look at a lot of medical societies. So the American Academy of Pediatrics put out a statement, a position piece on the health impacts of climate change and the need to address it in medical and and residency education in 2007, right in 2007, nearly 20 years ago. So the healthcare organizations have been taking that on. It's becoming a part of medical education. But I agree with you that to to, to translate that into true clinical practice, there's still a lot of education gaps. And this is actually one of the areas I'm really excited for the potential of AI. There's AI tools that can allow you to search the latest and clinical knowledge, right? That makes it really easy to find the latest research that's most meaningful for a patient and to put that into practice. And so I think tools like that will be really helpful if we can connect the dots, right? If we know, for example, you're a doctor taking care of a patient with asthma in a place where there's bad air quality, we hope that we'll be able to these AI tools will then be able to say, hey, you know, you may not be have the latest education on what to do about air quality and, and asthma, but here's some guidance from the top medical journals. Here's exactly how you should incorporate this into your care. So there's there's a huge ability for AI to help accelerate that gap from research to clinical practice. That makes sense. So, so back to the the health tech Summit, like the collaboration that you have, what was the process in setting up like the health tech Summit? Like how does the collaboration between all the different parts

[35:42] come to the Cornell health tech summitof Cornell help? Yeah, definitely. So, you know, the Summit is the brainchild of of Doctor Cinzine Choudhury, who started it four years ago and has built kind of this going growing core team. She had also brought in Chang and Danish Manier, who come from the venture capital world. And then I've been part of the the Summit organizing team for the past two years. And this year we also have professor Doctor Faye Wang, who's both at, well, Cornell and Cornell Tech and leading a lot of our AI work. And so we have this interdisciplinary planning team across academia and industry. And we look at, you know, first when we start planning months in advance, we look at some of the emerging trends that are happening in the space. And we try to ensure that we're bringing in speakers from different vantage points, from the government side, from the industry side, from the academic side, make sure we're covering different key topics in terms of, you know, what's happening in the payment space, what's happening in the biotech space, what's happening from health systems who are trying to figure out how to adopt AI to what's happening in kind of public health and a New York City perspective. And so we we try to curate our list of speakers and events based on that very kind of broad scope, But we also try to make it a place where we can have deeper, more intimate discussions, longer discussions. Would you give speakers longer amount of time? And we also do a lot of planning and, and how we orchestrate these conversations and creating planning guides for for speakers. So that really turns into a rich discussion over 2 days. So how do you position the Health Tech Summit versus like all the other health tech summits in the world? Like is it more focused on like academic or is it more focused on like how do you position them? Yeah. So it's really great. Great question. I think, you know, there's a lot of conferences that happen in in healthcare technology. There's some big ones, there's some small ones. I'd say we're kind of, you know, really Goldie Lott sized where we're in a place where we bring a few 100 people together in a space where you're able to have really intimate conversations with leading luminaries. But we also make sure to bring in students and folks who are getting started in their careers so that it's it's a wide, you know, wide swath. And we look at, you know, we look at the other events that are that are happening in New York as well as nationally. And New York is really an epicenter and hub for healthcare technology, technology probably outside of San Francisco. And whether you look at it in the amount of funding or the people who work in health tech here, depending on the exact metrics you look at, we're either #1 or #2 each year with San Francisco. And so we also look at where our, our summit, you know, in its fourth year, is really emerging as that key health AI conversation in New York because we we bring all these different voices and angles together. I was very impressed by the speaker last year and I learned about the ordering last year. What are examples of some of the speakers this year? Yeah, So really, really thrilled to have, you know, wide range of of speakers this year. So we have some folks who are coming from government where there's a lot of different aspects to government. There's the Department of Health and Human Services. There have been a lot of advances in how to make AI work better for patients and for clinicians. And so we have folks like Chris Clump and Amy who've been leading some of that work. We have folks from the kind of industry space as well as academic, deep academic research. I'm really excited for a conversation that Dave Chokshi is going to be leading, who's the former health Commissioner of New York City and Doctor Mitch Katz, who is the CEO of New York City Health and Hospitals in terms of the perspective they bring and balancing healthcare innovation, but also leadership from a public health lens to ensure that technologies are distributed equitably across across the the the population. What's what are examples of like successful conversations that you would want to see? Like what are examples of outcomes from the past summits? Yeah, exactly. So I think you know one thing is from last year's summit to this year we have now. Launch the health tech advisory committee that you're going to be hearing more about that's that's building on the success of the summit and really to helps to elevate the work that we're doing at the health tech hub and grow it out for for greater impact. Last year, I was fortunate to have the chance to interview Arianna Huffington, the Health Tech Summit, and understand some of the work that she has been leading in terms of health AI for personal use, for how AI gets incorporated into everyday life. And after the summit presentations, we've had a number of meetings with speakers that have driven different projects that are in, you know, research collaboration stages. But the summit helps to elevate the profile of the work that we're doing at Cornell Tech. We also like to feature and some of the founders coming out of Cornell Tech, some of the the runway postdoc founders who are founders starting health tech companies and we create opportunities for them to feature the work that they're doing. We also this year, you know, have some panel and and lunch sponsored by a large health AI innovation organization called R37 that is really looking at the future of payments in healthcare, but is also really excited about more broadly and kind of looking at academia, industry collaboration, elevating the role of, of what's possible in particularly in in health tech broadly, but here in New York. Then for the closing question, I I always ask the guest, what's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you? That's a really, that's a really

[41:39] closing questionnice, nice, nice question. I think I'm only here today because of a lot of the people who have opened the door for me. I shared with you some of the mentors I've had who kind of reconnected me and allowed me to get into this role that I'm in. It's all kind of a series of giving people a chance, allowing them to flourish. And so that's why when when students and others reach out to me for advice, I'm always, I'm happy to share and give back. And I think that that's really kind of that kindness ethos that I'm really grateful for. Super thanks for. Sharing.