AI's Biggest Bottleneck Isn't The Model | Bunkerhill Health CEO Nishith Khandwala

In this episode of The Healthcare Theory, we sit down with Nish, co-founder and CEO of Bunker Hill Health, a Seqouia-backed startup working to solve one of the biggest bottlenecks in healthcare innovation: translating AI research into real-world clinical tools.Before founding Bunker Hill Health, Nish was an AI researcher at Stanford, where he helped develop algorithms designed to identify cardiovascular risk from existing medical scans. While the model worked technically, it exposed a deeper issue - deploying AI in hospitals is often far harder than building the algorithm itself. We explore why healthcare systems struggle to adopt new technologies, the hidden operational and organizational barriers that prevent AI from being implemented, and why many venture-backed healthcare AI startups underestimate the difficulty of integration. Nish also explains Bunker Hill Health’s approach: building a platform and consortium of leading academic medical centers to help validate, regulate, and commercialize medical AI models so they can actually reach clinical practice.