This is the Generative AI’s ‘Hello World’ Moment

Welcome to the Big Unlock Podcast, Piyush. It is great to have you as our guest today. I’m Rohit Mahajan, Managing Partner and CEO at BigRio and Demo Consulting. I would request you to please introduce yourself. 

Piyush: I’m Piyush Mathur. I’m a physician, an Anesthesiologist, and work in ICU too. Originally did my MBBS in India from Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, and then subsequently through my journey came to Cleveland Clinic where I have been for more than 21 years now. Did further training in quality and education and for the last many years have been very focused on how can we impact the quality of patient care using artificial intelligence, which is a data driven science.  

Q. Great to know that you started your journey as a physician. So, what motivated you? What choices you had at that point in time when you started your journey and how did you come to US? 

Piyush: The motivation was very simple. My dad, actually wanted to be in the armed forces and he always wanted me to be a doctor and always encouraged me to focus on that. I happen to be good in biology too, throughout my high school. So, it was a natural fit. I ended up at armed forces medical college for that reason, and then decided to further pursue learning and training in the US.  

I didn’t know about Cleveland Clinic at all, being in India over two decades ago, and it was actually my last application for a residency program. When I matched here, I was really excited. Since then, I’ve pursued my career at Cleveland Clinic, training in anesthesiology and later in critical care. Working here with people from all over the world and learning from them has been an excellent journey. 

Q. Piyush, I know that you’re pretty busy as a physician, but you still find time to do other business ventures. Could you tell us about those?

Piyush: Yeah, I always like to learn and grow. Being a clinician is important, but as we thought about applying AI in healthcare, we wanted to innovate and make it something sustainable—beyond a hobby or pure research. That’s when, along with Frank Pepe, chair of plastic surgery at Cleveland Clinic, we founded BrainX, an AI and healthcare company.  

We were both very excited about this scientific opportunity for applying AI in healthcare. But there were a lot of challenges and there were a lot of misunderstandings somewhere around six, seven years ago and still continue to be. But that’s what we wanted to demystify, that how can we apply this exciting, rapidly growing science into healthcare to make our patient’s journey, a better journey, how do we empower our clinicians with this wonderful tools that the science represents so that they can be enabled to give better care to our patients. 

How can we make the healthcare system more efficient using this data driven science so that the delivery becomes better? So those were all the questions that we were trying to trying to address. And we did believe together, collectively, that AI represented a great opportunity to solve that rather than just trying the tools that had been tried in the past. 

And subsequently, we had, you know, other founding partners like Dr. Szymanski, Dr. Maeshwari, and Dr. Khanna join us. And we started working on exploring this, and over a time period, we had Raghav and Shreya join us as our technical leads and our research leads now. They are both PhDs in AI. And we have just subsequently grown leaps and bounds in this exploration. 

Q. That’s great to know, Piyush, that you have now, you know, a team which has expanded. So, how many years has it been, and which are your focus areas? Tell us a little bit of the work that you do by giving perhaps one or two examples. 

Piyush: Yeah, no, that’s a great question. And we never anticipated that we’ll grow that rapidly. So it’s just been six, seven years now since we started. Initially started with just our core team, the BrainX team. Eventually, there were so many other people who were asking the same questions what we were asking, and everybody was so excited. So we ended up forming a community around us. Called it the BrainX community so we can engage people from across the world. 

So that’s a 6, 000 plus member international community. Also very active LinkedIn group with the same name called BrainX community. We have a website, a whole host of resources that are available over there. Free to join. All the content is free. As we grew, we also realized that, you know, we need to expand our research team. 

So we created one of the verticals that we have now within BrainX, our own lab called BrainX AI Research. Now we have people from across the world participating in our, our research work with all different backgrounds, all the way from undergraduates to PhDs. Awesome. Everybody working together, trying to research different aspects of AI application in healthcare. 

All the way from basic data science. Cheers. The translational aspects. We are very focused on all those.  

Q. I know that we were very fortunate to have you as our keynote and spotlight speaker when we did our Gen AI workshop at the location near Cleveland Clinic. You spoke very deeply about the applications of AI in healthcare and Gen AI in healthcare. So could you share with the audience some of the insights perhaps from either that talk or any others that you very frequently do otherwise as well? 

Piyush: So generative AI or for others who don’t know the term generative AI like chat GPT is an application that people are more familiar with. 

So tools like that, AI tools like that have become way more Available for public consumption and public use and people are very excited to use them. It so happens that our team was very focused on the predecessors of these AI tools. So we were already working with pre GPT era of AI, especially focused on natural language processing. 

So it was a natural transition for us as some of these fascinating tools were made available to us. It’s like, Being in a toy shop and all of a sudden, you know, all these developers are putting out all these different algorithms and we’re fascinated, we’re excited to use them and that’s what we are, we are trialing.

But it’s also a pivotal moment. It’s a pivotal moment because one, just like Steve Jobs made personal computers say hello to people because prior to that it used to be those IBM mainframes and only some computer scientists could interface with computers. Similarly, now AI is talking to people. People can actually interact with AI directly, and they’re seeing how powerful it is, and they’re using it in daily life. 

So this is the generative AI’s hello world moment, so as to speak. But there is, with all this excitement, We have to be careful in, especially in healthcare, how we mindfully apply, you know, it needs to be validated. It needs to be tested. Maybe it needs to be morphed in different ways. Maybe it needs to be modified in different ways. 

Maybe one model is not the right model to be applied in healthcare. Those are all the different experiments that are being done worldwide that are being done by our team to understand what’s the right approach to apply these generative AI models. Or other models along with generative AI models in healthcare. 

And that’s the exciting part. Now all of a sudden we have these very exciting tools, very state of the art tools that can be applied, that people can actually interface with in natural language and use them. But we still have to make sure that we vet, we are able to provide the tools in the right way so that they can help with patient care. 

And that’s the exciting part.  

Q. That’s great to know. And I was also super excited to learn that you have launched a new book, Piyush, and I’m looking forward to reading it very soon. Would you like to give some insights to us and the audience about what is the contents of the book and what motivated you to write the book as well?

Piyush: Yeah, no, thank you, Roy. You know, we’re trying to put together our experience and expertise in that book. It’s called Strategies for AI and Healthcare. You can go to Amazon. Frank Pepe, myself, and Jeff Mangus, we co authored this book. The whole idea behind this book was not to provide too much technical knowledge that already exists out there in multiple publications, but it’s more about the strategy. 

That is something that I commonly find lacking across organizations or individuals. Like how do you approach application of AI in healthcare? And that’s why if you see the sections of the book, they’re laid out the same way, like why, why AI in healthcare, who, what, and so forth. So when you read that book, it reads Easy, and it tells you how you can approach application or learning about AI and healthcare, whether you are a startup, whether you are a hospital, whether you are a multinational company. 

We hope that that book provides that key strategy element so that you can mindfully look to apply AI and healthcare. So we’re really excited about that book. That’s beautiful. And how long has it been, Piyush, since the book has been out? Oh, it just came out in August. So it’s part of the press. It’s out of the press. 

Okay. It’s on Amazon, so you can get it right off Amazon.  

That’s great to know. That’s great to know. So with that, what I would like to finish with, uh, you know, our conversation today and for today, and I, I say it because we might have a follow on a podcast as well with you as things change, the landscape changing so fast.

Q. And what do you see in the crystal ball? What do you see in the next few months from a perspective of, you know, the health care adopting more of AI and gen AI applications? If that’s what you wish to talk about from a crystal ball or any other thing that you are seeing from a perspective of, you know, the Cleveland Clinic as well or your practice there being a physician. 

Piyush: The thing that excites me the most is the opportunity that AI brings. So look at this opportunity, right? You and me talking about AI over here, a physician and somebody who’s been in the technological world. It’s brought all of us on a common platform. And what is it bringing us together for? 

It’s bringing us together for a common purpose, which is beautiful, that is to improve delivery of patient care. That is what I’m most excited about. And that is what keeps me energized all day long about this opportunity. I think we, on this platform, collectively, working together, will clearly build great tools, you know, in the future, whether it’s with BigRio. 

In our collaboration together with many other companies that we are looking forward to build. The other part of that is the evolution of AI itself. So if you see how fast paced it is, we started with natural language processing a few years ago. Then it was slow over time period. Now all of a sudden with the generative AI part. 

And now we are getting into multi modal AI. I think the excitement of the technology that is constantly evolving is something that is exceptional. I haven’t seen this fast pace in growth of science and so many people engage and involved in this in decades together. So that’s what excites me. So that’s why it brings a lot of hope. 

It makes, keeps me optimistic that we are going to build a great future for our patients, for our clinicians, and for everyone.  

And that’s a great note to end this conversation on Piyush. Thank you so much. And I’m looking forward to many more interactions with you in the future. Thank you, Rohit. Thank you for having me here.