Almost eight years ago, my close collaborator Sanjiv Shah and I published a manuscript applying unsupervised machine learning techniques to data from patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). The rationale for our work was that HFpEF is so loosely defined that it represents an ineffective categorization for clinical decision-making — as it […]

I have a middling sense of direction. Actually, I have a very poor sense of direction, but it has been covered up well with my constant use of GPS. But the result is that I’ve now become so dependent on GPS, I use it even on routes I’ve traveled hundreds of times before. Other than […]

After defending my Ph.D. and returning to finish clinical training, I was struck almost immediately by how little scientific information went into clinical decisions. Medicine felt so behind compared to our understanding of science, and it seemed unfair that our patients did not benefit from the past decades of molecular advances. At the time, the […]

In my academic life, my group published a few papers on training and applying large language models (LLMs) to medical notes (here and here). We deliberately chose an area where scale mattered (reviewing millions of notes) and where the risk of a false positive or negative was minimal. But we founded Atman not to publish […]

You may have heard the term “patient navigator” used in various healthcare settings, but how do they fit in specifically at Atman?     First, let me define what a patient navigator typically does.  According to the CDC, patient navigators “guide patients through the health care system and help them overcome barriers that prevent them from getting […]

Excitement (still) abounds for the application of artificial intelligence to medicine, with the latest hype migrating to ChatGPT. I wrote a review on the topic (geared for clinicians) back in 2015 that I believe remains relevant to the field as a whole. But in this post, we will drill down on a particular subtopic: the […]

Part I: The why I remember long ago, on the day of my Internal Medicine residency interview at Yale, the Chair of Medicine at the time – Ralph Horwitz – a charismatic general internist, spoke facetiously of the “intellectual bankruptcy” of specialty medicine. The message, I take it, was two-fold. The first point was that […]