The Beat

HLTH Executive Series: Kimberly Powell of NVIDIA: How AI Is Revolutionizing Healthcare

Episode Summary

Artificial intelligence is poised to revolutionize healthcare, becoming one of its most crucial applications. In this episode, Kimberly Powell, Vice President of NVIDIA’s healthcare department, discusses how AI is transforming healthcare from drug discovery to surgical procedures. She highlights the ability of AI to represent drugs in computers, accelerating drug development and clinical trials, with some AI-designed drugs already in clinical trials. Kim explains how generative AI can enhance surgical outcomes through digital agents that aid in pre-op preparation, provide real-time surgical guidance, and automate post-op documentation. She notes how AI can help to provide healthcare access globally by codifying medical expertise and powering cost-effective, miniaturized devices. Kim also touches upon the importance of guardrails for privacy, security, and bias in AI systems, including embedding AI models directly into medical devices. Tune in and learn how AI is reshaping the future of healthcare as a digital employee!

Episode Notes

About Kimbery Powlell:

Kimberly Powell is the Vice President of Healthcare at NVIDIA, overseeing the global healthcare sector. She leads efforts to advance hardware and software platforms for accelerated computing, AI, and visualization, driving innovation in medical imaging, life sciences, drug discovery, and healthcare analytics. Before this role, Kim managed NVIDIA’s higher education and research initiatives, strategic evangelism programs, NVIDIA AI Labs, and the NVIDIA Inception program. Since joining NVIDIA in 2008, she has been instrumental in positioning NVIDIA GPUs as a foundational technology for medical imaging systems.

Things You’ll Learn:

• Generative AI is transforming surgical procedures by supporting all phases of the process, including pre-operative patient education, real-time surgical guidance, and automatic post-surgical documentation, resulting in safer and more efficient operations.
• Privacy and ethical concerns in healthcare AI are being addressed by embedding models directly into medical devices and introducing reasoning layers to ensure safe, responsible, and ethical operation.
• Ethical safeguards, or "guardrails," are essential for reducing AI-related risks by preventing the system from operating in unsafe or untrustworthy ways.
• AI should be seen as a "digital human" teammate in healthcare, enhancing staff efficiency and productivity while improving care quality.
• Evaluating the ROI of AI requires analyzing its ability to reduce costs from rescheduled surgeries and automate tasks, allowing healthcare staff to focus on patients with the greatest need.

Resources:

• Connect with and follow Kimberly Powell on LinkedIn.
• Discover more about NVIDIA on their LinkedIn and website.