In this episode, we sit with Dr. Karim Galil, the founder and CEO of Mendel.AI, an artificial intelligence-powered platform that extracts insights from medical records to improve patient outcomes. Dr. Galil shares his journey from practicing medicine to becoming a tech entrepreneur and the role that AI can play in making healthcare more data-driven. He discusses the challenges of subjective medical practices and the potential for AI to learn from every patient's journey.

Dr. Galil explains that symbolic AI is more focused on teaching machines fundamentals of logic, rules, and concepts, while machine learning is more focused on learning from patterns. He gives an example of the opioid crisis, where a machine learning model would learn that opioids are great because humans are prescribing them, while a symbolic system would understand what opioids are and what the best options are. In the process of building AI in healthcare, Mendel.AI has used both symbolic AI and machine learning. Dr. Galil also discusses the challenges of talent acquisition in the AI industry and how the economy can impact AI talent availability. He emphasizes the importance of hiring talent with grit, curiosity, and coachability and the benefits of hiring mid-level to junior talent to assist the genius.

Mendel.AI is a healthcare platform that uses symbolic AI and machine learning to provide personalized treatment plans for patients. The platform reads every medical record and encounter between patients and healthcare systems to help physicians make more objective decisions. Mendel.AI works with big pharmaceuticals, payers, and data companies to help them read their data and glean insights to make better decisions. The platform can help pharmaceutical companies understand which patients respond better to what drug and in what occasions, and payers can decide whether to cover a certain medication or not. Mendel.AI uses domain experts to learn from, rather than just data and can help pharmaceutical companies discontinue drugs that are not effective and optimize their drug offerings.

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Founder Bio:

Dr. Karim Galil, MD, is the CEO and Co-founder of Mendel.AI. Mendel's mission is to learn from every patient by structuring and de-identifying patient data at a machine scale and human fidelity to power clinical and research use cases. Dr. Galil’s experience as a physician demonstrated that medicine does not advance at the same rate as technology. With Mendel, he aims to bridge this gap, facilitate clinical research at scale, and make medicine objective. Dr. Galil’s expertise in AI, medical informatics, and digital health makes him a sought-after presence at global conferences.

Time Stamps:

01:49 Introduction of Dr. Karim Galil and his background in medicine

06:59 The potential for AI to learn from every patient's journey

10:41 The challenges of working with unstructured medical data

12:19 The importance of explainable AI in healthcare

15:20 Using real-world data to identify drug effectiveness in specific patient profiles

18:02 The difference between machine learning and symbolic AI

21:09 Difference in talent and approach needed for symbolic AI vs machine learning

23:02 The process of building concepts for symbolic AI

25:53 Challenges of talent acquisition in the AI industry

27:49 The impact of the economy on AI talent availability

31:49 The importance of hiring talent with grit, curiosity, and coachability

35:18 Building a competitive advantage and a mode in AI startups

38:53 Challenges of finding the right investors for AI startups

41:51 The myth of VCs being a value add and the importance of cash and brand

43:01 Who is the end user and how do they engage with the product

45:49 How to get in contact with the Mendel team

Resources:

Company website: https://www.mendel.ai/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/mendel_ai_

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mendelai/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mendel-ai