In this episode, we speak to Dr. Arta Bakshandeh, Chief Medical Informatics Officer of Alignment Health. Dr. Bakshandeh talks about his journey as a physician, seeing the power of machine learning and AI, and its impact on health plan members. Alignment Health, a consumer brand name of Alignment Healthcare (NASDAQ: ALHC), offers benefit-rich Medicare Advantage plans across 6 states, designed around the idea of driving more personalized healthcare for seniors. 

We talk about the change in thinking that is occurring inside health plans around the adoption of machine learning and AI. Dr. Bakshandeh highlights what it takes to drive true AI/ML use cases in healthcare versus clinical rules that have been around for decades.

Dr. Bakshandeh also shares many important insights and lessons along the journey of building an AI-centric health plan. For example, the importance of investing in core data platforms and infrastructure, a missing step that limits most healthcare organizations. Or the approach to creating an ROI framework that demonstrates the value of investing in AI and ML, and getting buy-in on these investments from the CFO and business leaders.

Finally, we end the episode with insights about where generative AI can play a role in the workings of a health plan.

A little more about our guest, Dr. Arta Bakshandeh:

Dr. Arta Bakshandeh is chief medical informatics officer for Alignment Health. Dr. Bakshandeh – or Dr. B. – began his career as a hospitalist and quickly became a medical director building care models for patients with Medicare and Medicaid. He joined the Alignment family in 2014 to help build Alignment's clinical model and clinical command center. He works side-by-side with data scientists to develop and implement Alignment’s clinical data analytics platforms and home monitoring programs for patients with chronic illnesses. To date, he has been integral in deploying over 170 data science models across clinical and health plan operations. Outside of Alignment, he is an assistant clinical professor of internal medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) and Co- CEO of Global Physicians Corps, an NGO providing sustainable care in Tanzania and Ethiopia. In addition, he continues to work on the front lines treating patients statewide both in the hospital and virtual.

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Autonomous Health is...
Produced & Hosted by: Anmol Madan
Edited by: Losa Amara Meru
Marketing: Erin Garcia Miller

About Your Host:
Anmol Madan is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and executive who has been leading the digital health and AI revolution over the past two decades. Anmol has co-founded or held executive roles at multiple unicorns in the emerging field of digital healthcare; a field which has existed for less than two decades. His professional contributions in the field have received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from leading VCs, and been featured in such media as CNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wired Magazine. His scientific contributions have been published in dozens of scientific articles in leading computer science and digital health journals, and led to over 30 issued and pending US patents.
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