Dr. Tara Bishop Moderates AI Panel at HealthNext Summit

Last month, Dr. Tara Bishop, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Black Opal Ventures, moderated a panel titled “Everyday AI: Transforming Personal Health Management” at the HealthNext Summit. Tara was joined by panelists, Brittany Sigler from CVS Health, Shyamal Patel from Oura Ring, Ruth Poliakine Baruchi from MyndYou, and Rekka Kumar from Weill Cornell and Found Health. The panel centered around how AI is being used everyday by patients and consumers.  

With the rise of wearables, health AI coaches, and digital therapeutics, we are now gathering more data and insights than ever before. These insights can be critical to understanding our health at an individual and public health level. The panelists dove into questions around the role of human expertise in healthcare and how we can use AI responsibly to enhance health outcomes.  

The panelists were all bullish on the use of AI for consumers and patients. Coming from companies that develop AI technology, Ruth and Shyamal shared excitement around the market’s willingness to adopt AI and the groundbreaking nature of the advent of LLMs. The panelists shared a common challenge with the lack of integration with personal health data and the healthcare system. Rekka, as a physician, tried to integrate these datapoints in her clinical practice, but has found that most medical practices are not set up to integrate or allow use of this data. Coming from the payer side, Britney shared that they are using AI more and more to identify at-risk patients, but she also finds that the data sources are limited and very often siloed. 

That being said, all the panelists feel that consumers will use AI to manage their health, and this will push health systems and payers to work on more integration.  The vision of a quantified self with recommendations and plans driven by AI was something that the panel felt was not too far in the future 

Cornell Tech’s HealthNext Summit convenes stakeholders from academia, industry, and government to foster collaboration in building a nexus of health technology innovation in New York City. Read here for details about the key institutions and individuals behind the Summit. Black Opal Ventures aims to improve health outcomes for all by investing in companies at the collision of healthcare and technology.