The use of generative AI platforms like OpenAI’s GPT-4 has spread rapidly into business, educational, and consumer software solutions in 2024. Yet compared with other industries, adoption in health care sometimes seems slow. In an interview for his Master of Health Care Innovation lab course, Addressing Challenges, Aaron Hopkins, MHSA talks with Dereck Paul, MD about the pace of technology adoption in health care, and about the advantages of entrepreneurship as a driver of health care innovation.

Paul is the founder and CEO of Glass Health, a startup focused on AI-powered clinical decision support that combines generative AI with established clinical guidelines to identify potential diagnoses and draft clinical plans.

In the interview, the two discuss traditional pathways to achieve impact in health and health care: clinical practice, academic research, and health policy. And Paul explains why he has turned to entrepreneurship instead: because it can offer a faster route to impact. Whether or not a product succeeds at making an impact is determined by the entrepreneur, their team, and the market. Entrepreneurial ventures, in other words, are able to lead the way.

Hopkins and Paul also discuss why health care might rightly be slower than other industries to implement new technology. Cutting-edge technologies, Paul says, “can help us get our work done as health care providers.” And they can help improve outcomes and experience for patients. But health care and health systems tend to be conservative in adopting new technology out of a well-justified concern for protecting patients.

Health care startups must be cognizant of that dynamic. For example, Paul says, at Glass Health, teams devoted to clinical excellence and validation work “to truly ensure that the AI responses are elevating what the clinician on their own would do [and to] make sure these technologies are deployed responsibly.”

For cutting-edge health technology startups, products are often ahead of the regulatory guardrails that ensure patient safety. Because of this—and because patient safety is such an important concern—these ventures have a particular obligation to act ethically and responsibly on their own, until regulation catches up with innovation.

Learn more about the Addressing Challenges lab and its role in the MHCI Curriculum.