Agents of Health

UPMC just deployed agentic AI across 18 hospitals — the same week investors poured $26M into fixing the data infrastructure those agents depend on. Coincidence or confession? HealthTech Architect Ethan Brooks breaks down what actually breaks when autonomous clinical AI scales faster than its data foundation.

Epic just embedded autonomous AI agents directly into clinical workflows — while the FTC circles. Hospital CIO Megan Carter joins Dr. Wellis to expose the liability gaps, governance failures, and hidden costs that no vendor demo will show you. This is the conversation your boardroom needs before you sign anything.

Health systems are deploying AI directly to patients — summarizing records, reasoning through symptoms, chasing bills — and the accountability question is wide open. Dr. Wellis and patient advocate Olivia Grant of The Patient Voice dissect Oracle's AI portal, Cedar's Kora billing agents, and Ubie's symptom tool to ask: who actually protects the person on the other side of the screen?

Agents of Health is hosted by Dr. Wellis — an AI-built persona designed to think and argue like the sharpest minds in healthcare. Each week, Dr. Wellis sits down with a different AI guest — a hospital CIO, a clinical researcher, a policy voice, a skeptical founder — to debate one real shift in global HealthTech.The hosts are synthetic. The dilemmas are real. Every episode is grounded in what's actually happening in healthcare right now — new AI tools entering clinical workflows, data decisions with real consequences, pilots that looked great on paper and struggled in the ward.**Disclosure:** All hosts and guests on this channel are AI-generated personas. No episode features real individuals, real medical advice, or real clinical claims — the analysis is synthetic; the challenges it discusses are not.

Aetna just moved agentic AI into production healthcare workflows — but who's asking what happens when that autonomous agent gets compromised? Brian Hayes, healthcare cybersecurity expert at The Security Check, breaks down prompt injection, silent care alert suppression, and why "HIPAA compliant" tells you almost nothing about AI security.

Kaiser Permanente and Abridge just launched "Care Signals" — ambient AI that generates post-visit clinical insights. But 81% physician adoption doesn't mean safe adoption. Dr. Michael Harris, Senior Clinician and Clinical Adoption Expert, joins Dr. Wellis to expose the governance gaps, automation bias risks, and liability blind spots health system leaders can't afford to ignore.

HHS has shifted from observing clinical AI to writing the rules that will govern it—retroactively applied to tools already running in your health system. Prof. Elizabeth Harris, clinical research and validation expert, exposes the dangerous gap between model performance metrics and actual clinical outcomes, and tells hospital leaders exactly what Monday morning should look like.

Payer AI denies faster. Provider AI appeals faster. Patients wait longer and costs climb. Natalie Janssen, HealthTech Market Analyst at The Market Signal, breaks down the bot-versus-bot prior authorization arms race — what's driving it, why "just buy the tool" is only half an answer, and what health system leaders must do right now.

A Mayo Clinic retaliation lawsuit and a Kaiser nurses protest broke the same week — and they point to the same structural failure. Dr. Wellis and health policy expert Emily Parker dissect what happens when health systems deploy AI without real internal accountability, and what C-suite leaders must do before the next deployment.