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Clinical AI is reshaping clinical denial management, but hospitals need more than automation. Gretchen Heinen, founder and CEO of Authsnap, joins Chris Hutchins on The Signal Room to explain how fragmented payer communications and hospital workflows can cause denials to be missed. They discuss clinical review, patient identifiers embedded in notes, privacy and AI governance, implementation constraints, rural hospitals, trust, and operational impact.

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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

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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/

Support the show

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

Send us Fan Mail

Clinical knowledge management decides whether clinical AI is safe at the bedside, and Dr. Declan Kelly explains why a hospital's own governed knowledge matters as much as the model.

Dr. Declan Kelly is a physician, software engineer, and founder and CEO of Eolas Medical, whose platform uses AI to index a hospital's own guidelines, policies and medicines information so clinicians get answers in seconds. He practiced for about five years, mostly in emergency medicine, before building Eolas, which is now live in roughly 500 sites, including most acute NHS trusts and U.S. hospitals such as Stanford and Mass General. He joins Chris Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants, to talk about the knowledge layer that clinical AI keeps skipping.

Declan explains why external evidence gets a clinician only part of the way, while the last mile of a decision depends on local knowledge such as how to book a scan overnight or which drug sits on the formulary. By his estimate only about 10% of that knowledge is written down, and the rest lives in people's heads. Chris and Declan discuss why trust in clinical AI depends on context, transparency and the ability of a clinician to check where an answer came from. They also cover regulation in the U.S. and Europe, and how a physician's mindset has to change to build a company.

Clinical AI should be judged like any other clinical tool, with safety nets built around an imperfect test, much as a troponin result is read alongside other checks and clinical judgment. Most health systems will not need to train their own models, since retrieval built on their governed data supplies the context that makes answers safe. Managing that knowledge is harder than accessing it, because ownership spans clinical, operational, legal and governance teams. Declan argues that healthcare needs technology to lower costs and widen access, with clinical safety as the condition for that progress.

The conversation covers retrieval augmented generation versus fine-tuning, capture of tacit clinical knowledge, and connecting a knowledge layer to ambient listeners, the EHR and general AI assistants. Declan describes how Eolas has a separate answer engine review every question for clinical safety. He also notes that some European regulators classify ambient listeners as medical devices.

Dr. Declan Kelly trained as a medical doctor and worked clinically for about five years, mostly in emergency medicine, while also building software for his own hospital. He founded Eolas Medical, a Belfast-based healthtech company, after living the problem of reaching approved local guidance at the point of care. Eolas announced a $12 million Series A in January 2026.

Episode page: https://signalroompodcast.com/episodes/clinical-ai-hospital-knowledge
Dr. Declan Kelly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/declan-kelly-484bb7187/
Eolas Medical: https://www.eolasmedical.com/
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/

Support the show

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