AI Frontiers of Healthcare and Medicine Summit delivers exciting opportunity for collaboration between industry, biopharma, and DBDS

In an rousing event that connected industry leaders from biopharma, consulting, tech, and start-up companies with Stanford faculty, postdocs, and students from the Department of Biomedical Data Science (DBDS), the future for research in the AI sphere felt limitless. The inaugural Executive AI Summit on “AI Frontiers of Healthcare & Medicine” on April 8 at Stanford proved to be an innovative and successful initiative that will undoubtedly produce connections and research that were previously untapped.

Co-presented by DBDS and Accenture LLC, the Executive AI Summit provided a platform to foster cross-sector discussion between industry executives, researchers, and faculty on the transformation of healthcare and medicine with AI. The summit was an outgrowth of the ongoing partnership between DBDS and Accenture, which includes research projects such as the AI-augmented tumor board initiative in 2024 that ultimately led to an ARPA-H award to DBDS last fall.

Spearheaded by Karen Matthys, Executive Director of DBDS, and Laetitia Cailleteau, Lead of Accenture’s Responsible AI program in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, the summit was developed to achieve a deeper understanding of technical developments and challenges, and to address responsible AI risks and concerns.

The summit kicked off with leaders from both DBDS and Accenture sharing their vision for AI and the opportunities to collaborate, including those from Sylvia Plevritis, Professor and Chair of DBDS; Lloyd Minor, Dean of the Stanford School of Medicine; Nigam Shah, Chief Data Scientist for Stanford Health Care and Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) and of Biomedical Data Science; and Kailash Swarna, Accenture Managing Director R&D Practice Life Sciences. More than 24 leaders from industry attended, making the summit a substantial opportunity for the development of thought leadership in AI and medicine. 

“One take away for me is just how exciting the agentic AI era is in enabling a faster integration of life sciences and clinical sciences as we think about the molecular basis of health and disease,“ Plevritis said. “This will improve our basic understanding of human biology and really enable us to advance clinical decision support and do so in a very responsible, rigorous way by being biologically-principled and data-driven.”

Dean Minor shared Plevritis’ perspective about the future of AI and precision healthcare, and sees the future of this area as promising. “This is an incredibly exciting time,” he said. “But I think also we have the collective sense that we are still in the very, very early days of what is possible by deploying various forms of AI in discovery in the delivery of health care, and also, very importantly, in education.” 

Faculty and researchers from DBDS presented talks about their current projects, featuring James Zou, Associate Professor; Rob Tibshirani, Professor; Emily Alsentzer, Assistant Professor; Akshay Chaudhari, Assistant Professor; and Tuomo Kiiskinen, Postdoctoral Scholar. Topics included AI-assisted cancer diagnosis, AI for disease risk modeling and inference, imaging foundation models, and perspectives on evaluating AI models. 

“The talks today are truly exciting,” said attendee CG Wang from Regeneron. “I’ve found all these talks very relevant to what we do in clinical trials, and I look forward to establishing collaborations that will result in impactful deliverables for my group and for the clinical trial design analysis field in general.”

Industry executives Corey Featherly of Meta and Ari Yacobi of Accenture presented “Synthetic Data for Clinical Trials: Transforming Control Arms with LLMs,” followed by David Galich of Avanade, who discussed “Enabling Collaboration for a Public-facing Health Registry Through Applied Model Cards.”  

In the afternoon, a panel addressing “Responsible AI and Evaluating AI Models” was moderated by Laetitia Cailleteau and included DBDS faculty members Roxana Daneshjou, Assistant Professor, and Tina Hernandez-Boussard, Associate Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) and of Biomedical Data Science, who were joined by Global lead for Responsible AI Product and Innovation of Accenture, Jay Subrahmonia, and Research Scientist in the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Jason Fries.  

“To unlock AI’s true potential in healthcare, we must move beyond siloed deployments with generalization, quality, trust and safety as critical imperatives,” Laeticia Cailleteau added. “Scaling AI in healthcare demands adherence to higher quality standards, trust, and safety throughout the value chain—from patients to health professionals and clinicians. Trusted and knowledgeable leaders will be pivotal in transforming the healthcare system, ensuring AI evolves alongside the workforce to address patient needs and build confidence in its outcomes for everyone.”

The summit ended successfully with a bustling networking session and demos from AI startups in healthcare. Ideas for collaboration bounced back and forth, as well as opportunities for collaboration between industry and academia to combine resources, and smaller follow-up discussions are already planned. The event was energizing and left the attendees buzzing with potential for future projects.

An e-book is also in the works to emphasize the collaboration of the lively event, featuring key points of the summit, links to videos, and access to recent research papers. It will be available shortly to all attendees.

“This collaboration between Accenture and Stanford brings two very interesting perspectives together — breadth of real-world experience with educational focus,” Shah said. “If we can figure out a way to work together, it will accomplish the vision that our Dean has, which is about things invented here and used everywhere. I hope this collaboration continues to grow.”

Laetitia Cailleteau from Accenture could not agree more. “Our two-year seed-funded partnership with Stanford’s Biomedical Data Science is propelling AI breakthroughs in health,” she said, “creating a profound impact not only on healthcare but also on adjacent industries such as life sciences.”

As this event was the inaugural summit, Karen Matthys plans on strengthening the partnerships between these industry leaders and the DBDS. The summit, which was the a groundbreaking event for DBDS,  is certain to be the first of many to follow, and revealed the potential of creating relationships between the two academies and exchanging ideas in the role that AI does and will play in healthcare and medicine. 

“We are delighted to host this inaugural Exec AI Summit focused on the potential to transform healthcare and medicine in many positive ways — from drug development to clinical trials to healthcare delivery,” Matthys concluded. “These conversations between industry, academia, government and NGOs are essential to ensure we design and evaluate AI models with responsible AI at the core of everything we do.”