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AI in hospitals is shifting from separate tools toward a coordinated layer that supports everyone delivering care, and David Niewolny of NVIDIA explains what it takes to build an AI-native hospital.

David Niewolny is director of business development for healthcare and medical at NVIDIA, where he focuses on easing the adoption of AI in healthcare and medical applications. He joins Chris Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants, to open Season 2 of The Signal Room with a look at what changes when AI becomes part of how a hospital coordinates its work.

David defines an AI-native hospital as one that puts the intelligence it already creates from patient and operational data to work, and he traces AI's path from perception to generative, agentic and physical AI. Chris and David walk through an X-ray room that guides patient positioning and checks image quality before the patient leaves, preoperative surgical planning and rehearsal in simulation, ambient clinical documentation, and conversational agents that prepare patients before and after a procedure. They close on digital twins in healthcare, where a health system can design and test an entire hospital in simulation before construction begins.

David says he cannot name a role AI has made disappear, and points to radiology, where efficiency created demand for more imaging and more radiologists. He compares surgical robotics to driver assistance with warnings and automatic braking, and does not expect fully self-driving surgery. Explainability rests on being clear about the problem, the data, how it was labeled and how the model was trained, with simulation and synthetic data covering rare cases before anything reaches a patient. His advice for hospital leaders is to aim AI at the single biggest problem the organization faces and to choose partners with care, since hospitals are buyers of technology.

The conversation covers open models and open model architectures, levels of surgical autonomy borrowed from autonomous vehicles, synthetic data built with world foundation models, and testing AI applications in simulated environments before clinical trials. David also describes NVIDIA's collaborations with Abridge on clinical documentation models and with Hippocratic AI on a digital agent for post-procedure care.

David Niewolny has 18 years of experience building and leading healthcare-focused businesses at AWS, Real-Time Innovations, NXP and Freescale Semiconductor. He holds an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.S. in biomedical and biochemical engineering from Iowa State University.

Episode page: https://signalroompodcast.com/episodes/ai-native-hospital
David Niewolny on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidniewolny/
David Niewolny on the NVIDIA Blog: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/author/dniewolny/
Beneath the Signal, Chris's book on the human work behind trusted data and responsible AI in healthcare: Get it on Amazon
The Signal Room is featured in Feedspot's Best AI in Healthcare Podcasts, 2026: https://podcast.feedspot.com/ai_health_podcasts/

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About The Signal Room: The Signal Room is a podcast and communications platform exploring leadership, ethics, and innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Christopher Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants. Leadership, ethics, and innovation, amplified.

Website: https://www.hutchinsdatastrategy.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chutchins-healthcare/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisHutchinsAi

Book Chris to speak: https://www.chrisjhutchins.com