What Happens When Clinicians Become Innovators | Live @ Civic Health Forum

**Gillian Sandler** (0:03)
It's really not about who per se pays, but that there's a lot of collaboration. It's not patients or profits, it's better health and health care.
And I think we now are on the verge of having the data infrastructure and the tools to be able to do that a lot better. And I think the onus is on everyone. So if you're a health system, if you're an investor, you can't silo that way. You have to be able to look at the full picture and think about the inefficiencies that are going to get there.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:37)
Welcome back to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health.

**Sara Holoubek** (0:46)
Thank you all for joining us again. I'm delighted to be here with three incredible innovators and funders of innovation. And if you spent any amount of time in health tech, you are probably familiar with the fact that a lot of tech companies believe they will fix health care.
We've seen it many times. Tech is really, really important to how we will imagine our future. But what I think we're about to discuss today is where innovation actually starts. And if there isn't a real human problem, the tech could be wonderful. The ambitions for ROI are wonderful, but if we're not solving a real human need with the people on the ground, it's not likely to succeed. So we're going to talk a little bit about provider led innovation. What I'd like for each of our panels to do is just give a quick introduction, who you are and what your function is. And so we're going to start with Kevin on the end.

**Kevin Chen** (1:46)
Sounds good. Hi, everyone. I'm Kevin Chen. I'm a primary care physician at a public clinic in Brooklyn, and I also work at New York City Health and Hospitals as the Assistant Vice President of Design and Evaluation in our Office of Clinical Services. My team is called the Innovation Lab, and really our mission is to bring frontline ideas, rigorously test them and see how we can scale them across the health system.

**Sara Holoubek** (2:09)
Anaïs.

**Anaïs Rameau** (2:10)
Hi, everybody. My name is Anaïs Rameau. I am a laryngologist. Basically, I'm a doctor of the voice box. I'm a subspecialist and Vice Chair of Research in our Department of Otolaryngology at Wall Cornell Medicine. And my lab has been dedicated to leveraging technology to see if we can use AI to detect communication disorders early.

**Gillian Sandler** (2:33)
My name is Gillian Sandler. I am at Northwell Health and also managing partner of a new business we're building called Northwell Health Equity Partners. Northwell is the largest health system in New York and in four regions of Connecticut. And the new from Northwell Health Equity Partners is developing a growth investment fund for investing in biomedical and health technology innovation, the growth stage commercialization.

**Sara Holoubek** (2:58)
What I love about this panel is that we have a provider inventor, a catalyst within a system and somebody who invests. And so I'm excited to have this conversation. Gillian, we are going to turn to you last, but feel free to chime in along the way, because I think where the money comes from is so important. Anaïs, we were just having a conversation where you were talking about your invention. And I asked you, do you consider yourself an inventor?
And what does that look like for you as a provider?

**Anaïs Rameau** (3:31)
Over the past eight years, I've been really focusing on my clinical skills and how they allow me to detect disease early. So I think this is really relevant to this audience today, because prevention includes detection and screening.
And so one thing that I kept on seeing in my clinic is that a lot of the patients who presented with voice disorders or swallowing disorders were coming after complications. And yet when the moment they stepped into my clinic, just from the sound of their voice and the way they talked, I could already pick up that there was potential disease. So what I really focused on is think about how we can average the power of sounds and voice to see if we can create tools to detect disease early. And particularly for swallowing disorders, because the very frequent story in my clinic is that patient had a pneumonia, went to the emergency room, were found to have a swallowing problem, and now they come to me. So what I'm trying to do now with AI is to detect the swallowing problems before patients go to the emergency room with a pneumonia.

**Sara Holoubek** (4:34)
And so when you said this, it's you as a human are able to detect this initially, when did you get the idea to say, how do I take that to the next step, which would be a vocal biomarker that AI could pick up?