TDP 193: UCSD Health’s Dr. Amy Sitapati: How AI Agents May Impact Data Cleanliness, Why Clinicians Need to Get Their Hands Wet with AI, and Understanding Patient Preferences to Personalize Care

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On this episode of The Digital Patient, Dr. Joshua Liu, Co-founder & CEO of SeamlessMD, and colleague, Alan Sardana, chat with Dr. Amy Sitapati, CMIO, Population Health at UCSD Health, about "How AI Agents May Impact Data Cleanliness, Why Clinicians Need to Get Their Hands Wet with AI, Understanding Patient Preferences to Personalize Care, and more..." Click the play button to listen or read the show notes below.
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Audio:

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Guest(s):

• Dr. Amy Sitapati, Chief Medical Informatics Officer, Population Health at UCSD Health
• Dr. Joshua Liu, Co-founder & CEO at SeamlessMD

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‍Episode 193 - Show Notes:

[00:00:07] Episode preview

[00:05:55] How a quadriplegic family friend inspired Dr. Sitapati’s early interest in engineering and medicine

[00:07:58] How caring for HIV patients led Dr. Sitapati into informatics

[00:10:10] Why “little data” is more important than big data in healthcare

[00:12:02] What Dr. Sitapati learned about the challenges of cleaning healthcare data

[00:13:49] How UCSD built 190+ registries to improve data quality

[00:15:02] Why metadata is essential for AI to make sense of messy data

[00:16:54] Why clinicians must actively experiment with AI to shape its future in healthcare

[00:23:29] Why AI governance must be separate from data governance

[00:26:41] The challenges of sustaining and validating AI models with limited resources

[00:29:13] Lessons from a system glitch that placed all patients in the HIV registry

[00:33:17] Why personalized communication is the key to patient engagement

[00:36:16] Lessons from HIV care on tailoring messages to patient preferences

[00:38:05] How shining a light on disparities in diabetes care drives change at UCSD

[00:43:15] How UCSD prioritized COVID-19 vaccines for high-risk communities using geospatial data

[00:48:24] How caring for terminally ill HIV patients shaped Dr. Sitapati’s leadership style

[00:49:51] Why Dr. Sitapati practices meditation daily and sees it as vital for clinicians

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Fast 5 Lightning Round:

1. What is your favorite book or book you’ve gifted the most?
   Gandhi CEO by Alan Alexrod
2. If you could instantly master any skill, what would it be?
   Heli skiing
3. Would you rather have Super strength, super speed, or the ability to read people’s minds?
   Speed
4. What is something in healthcare you believe that others might find insane?
   Piles of faxed paper and wet signatures.
5. What is the last movie or TV show you saw?
   Another book instead: The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday

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