9: AI in Healthcare: Tracking and Trusting AI in Medicine, Dr. Shantanu Nundy

In this episode of the Stanford Healthcare AI Podcast, Justin and Matt sit down with Eric Larsen, President at TowerBrook Advisors and venture partner at Thrive Capital and SignalFire, to explore whether AI has already begun to bend the U.S. healthcare cost curve, and why this may be healthcare’s Oppenheimer moment. They unpack a controversial paper on autonomous AI exceeding physicians, debate how far and how fast AI will displace “prestige professions,” and discuss GLP‑1s, site‑of‑care shifts, and a cost-curve paper that suggests nearly $1T in unexpected savings. They ask: What happens when medical expertise becomes abundant and can incumbent health systems adapt in time?

A fast-paced Stanford Healthcare AI podcast episode with Optum Insight CEO Sandeep Dadlani exploring how large healthcare enterprises are actually using AI today. The conversation covers the shift from simple chatbots to long-running agentic workflows, the exploding costs and risks of LLM tokens, model choice and “lock-in” (including GLM 5.2), and why AI is rapidly becoming the business, not just a project.

Recorded on location at Stanford Medicine’s Health AI Week, Matt Lungren and Justin Norden sit down with leaders from healthcare, life sciences, and industry to separate hype from progress in medical AI.

Guest DJ Patil, former U.S. Chief Data Scientist, along with hosts Matthew Lungren and Justin Norden, highlight the explosive growth of tools like Open Evidence and GPT for clinicians, rising patient engagement, and the moral question of whether powerful AI should be gated or widely accessible.

In this episode of the Stanford AI and Healthcare podcast, hosts Matt Lungren and Justin Norden interview Dr. Bob Wachter, Chair of Medicine at UCSF and author of The Digital Doctor and The Giant Leap. Learn more about Stanford's Healthcare AI programs: https://stanford.io/3NEt7uE