Advertise on podcast: The Medical Innovation Podcast

In this episode, we speak with Dani Marques, co-founder and CEO of SkinCheck, about using AI to close the dermatology access gap for the nearly 10,000 Americans diagnosed with skin cancer daily. Dani explains how SkinCheck combines a consumer skin monitoring app with a 24 to 48-hour digital consultation service, and how a patented domain adaptation technique addresses racial bias in dermatology AI. With 220,000 organic users and 18 potential skin cancers caught in their commercial launch alone, SkinCheck is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for dermatology beyond the clinic.

In this episode, we speak with Jaimal Soni, co-founder and CEO of Insight Health, about automating the clinical operations stack for independent specialty practices using agentic AI. Jaimal explains how Insight Health's Magic Flow orchestration layer strings together multiple AI agents to manage the full patient journey, from intake through scheduling and chronic disease follow-up, while their Safe AI framework ensures patient safety in real time. With 4 million patient encounters facilitated across 85-plus specialties in under three years, Insight Health is helping independent clinics resist consolidation by eliminating the administrative burden that consumes a third of physician time.

In this episode, we speak with Dr. David Lortscher, founder of Curology and a board-certified dermatologist, about building the first telehealth platform to combine custom compounded medications with direct-to-consumer acne care, growing it to $200 million in revenue and 5 million patients treated. He shares how he licensed himself in all 50 states, drove consultation costs to $5, and built a 50,000-square-foot compounding pharmacy from scratch. We also explore his broader thesis on physician entrepreneurship, including why doctors are statistically and structurally positioned to build the most valuable companies in healthcare.

In this episode, we speak with Jason Woosley, Chief Product Officer at Omnicell, about bringing Silicon Valley product thinking to pharmacy automation. Jason shares how his background scaling Magento and the Adobe Commerce Cloud is shaping a new approach to hardware, software, and team structure at Omnicell, including a shift toward cloud-based infrastructure, agile AI-assisted teams, and a modular hardware strategy built around continuous delivery. We discuss how innovations like the Titan XT cabinet and the XR2 robot are reducing the cognitive burden on pharmacists, giving them back time to focus on direct patient care.

In this episode, we speak with Dr. David Carmouche, Chief Medical Officer at Lumeris, about using agentic AI to solve the primary care shortage. He explains how Lumeris built Tom, a 24/7 AI care team member named in honor of co-founder Tom Doerr, that handles proactive outreach, symptom triage, visit preparation, and clinical decision support grounded in real patient data. We discuss why safety and hallucinations have not been the obstacle many expected, how physicians are responding to AI-generated care recommendations, and why the biggest barrier to the future of primary care is not technology but the outdated fee-for-service payment model.

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Jhonatan Bringas Dimitriades, co-founder and CEO of Lapsi Health, about Keikku, an FDA-cleared device that merges digital auscultation, ambient AI scribing, and voice biomarker analysis into a single clinical platform. Jhonatan explains how Lapsi Health is rethinking the stethoscope not as a niche device, but as the hardware foundation for a comprehensive healthcare AI ecosystem. We discuss the challenges of building medical hardware on a lean budget, navigating FDA Class II clearance and ISO certification, and conducting clinical trials in pediatric cardiology in Peru, and why the future of clinical AI must go beyond documentation to truly capture the full value of a patient consultation.

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Tom Kelly, CEO and founder of Heidi, about the platform's evolution from a free AI scribe into a multi-product clinical AI suite now supporting nearly 2.5 million visits per week across 116 countries. Tom explains how Heidi's two newest products, Evidence and Comms, give clinicians agentic tools to query medical literature, conduct surgical audits, and engage patients across phone, text, and web with full visit context. We discuss why scribing reliability is harder than it looks, how Heidi is navigating medical device regulation in the UK and EU through their Automedica acquisition, and why Tom believes the future of clinical AI is a single platform, not a collection of disconnected point solutions.

In this episode, we speak with Tina Liedtky, Global President of Transplant Diagnostics at Thermo Fisher Scientific, about how cutting-edge diagnostics and emerging AI are reshaping organ transplantation. Tina explains how HLA compatibility testing underpins successful transplant outcomes and how innovations like the non-invasive CXCL10 urinary biomarker are expanding access to post-transplant monitoring for patients far from clinical centers. We also explore her vision for AI's role in improving donor-recipient matching for highly sensitized patients, personalizing immunosuppressive regimens, and the strategic importance of partnerships for early-stage companies navigating this specialized and highly regulated field.

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Holly Urban, VP of Business Development at Wolters Kluwer and a pediatrician-turned-health-IT-leader, about how UpToDate is bringing AI into clinical decision support without compromising safety or trust. She explains how UpToDate Expert AI grounds its responses exclusively in curated expert content, acts as a virtual attending physician by prompting clinicians with relevant considerations, and ensures full transparency by surfacing its assumptions and content sources. With 50 health systems already live and EHR integrations underway, the platform is poised to deliver proactive, workflow-embedded clinical guidance at scale.

In this episode, we speak with Joseph Sokol and Roman Sandler, co-founders of iCardio.ai, about their mission to fully automate echocardiograms using AI. They explain how their two FDA-cleared products - EchoMeasure, which automates over 60 echo measurements, and CardioVision, which screens for aortic stenosis via standard ultrasound - are reshaping cardiac diagnostics by integrating directly into clinical workflows. We discuss the commercial and regulatory lessons learned along the way, and their ambitious roadmap toward a fully autonomous, "self-driving" echo that matches the capabilities of a human cardiologist.

In this episode, we speak with Chris Economos, Senior VP of Business Development at Eko, about how the company is transforming the humble stethoscope into an AI-powered diagnostic platform capable of detecting heart failure, AFib, and structural heart disease. Chris explains how Eko's Core 500 device captures both acoustic and ECG signals to deliver specialist-level insights in 5 to 15 seconds, fitting seamlessly into existing clinical workflows. We discuss the landmark Tricorder study's striking results, Eko's impact in resource-limited settings across Africa, and the company's ambition to put one million AI-enabled stethoscopes into clinicians' hands worldwide.

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Amit Phull, Chief Clinical Experience Officer at Doximity and practicing ER physician, about how the platform serving over 80% of US doctors is approaching healthcare AI. Amit walks us through Doximity's evolution across three eras: from network building to workflow tools to AI-powered solutions like DoximityGPT and Scribe. We discuss their "human in the loop" philosophy, why trust is the key to AI adoption among clinicians burned by past technologies, and how to ensure AI handles administrative burdens while preserving the humanity at the heart of medicine.

In this episode, we speak with Alex Frenkel, clinical psychologist and founder of Kai.ai, about building an AI companion named Kai that delivers mental health support at scale. Alex explains Kai.ai's innovative "two-contact" architecture pairing always-available AI with human clinical oversight, and how the platform avoids the "sycophantic" tendencies of general chatbots by encouraging real-world engagement over digital dependency. We discuss their deployment supporting Ukrainian refugees within days of the war, efficacy data showing 30% improvement in emotional well-being, and the path toward insurance reimbursement and APA certification.

In this episode, we speak with Jim Foote, CEO of First Ascent Biomedical, about functional precision medicine and why testing drugs on a patient’s own tumor cells could transform cancer treatment. Jim explains how their CLIA-certified lab cultures live cancer cells and uses robotics and AI to test hundreds of drug combinations in just 10 days, achieving an 83% correlation with patient outcomes in a Nature Medicine study. We discuss why this approach differs fundamentally from genomic sequencing, hear powerful patient stories, and explore how converging technologies in robotics, AI, and cloud computing have finally made individualized cancer treatment possible at scale.

In this episode, we speak with Henry O'Connell, co-founder and CEO of Canary Speech, about using voice as a biomarker to detect conditions ranging from anxiety and depression to cognitive impairment and autism. He explains how their technology analyzes 12.5 million data elements in 40 seconds of speech, working ambiently during natural conversation to provide clinicians with objective diagnostic insights in real time. We discuss their partnerships with leading medical institutions, integration with Microsoft Dragon Copilot, and their vision for early detection of conditions like ADHD while the brain is still developing.