BCLA's 10th Annual Healthcare Summit: The AI Revolution in Healthcare

On March 14, 2025, Biotech Connections Los Angeles (BCLA) brought together healthcare leaders, AI innovators, and life sciences professionals for its 10th Annual Healthcare Summit—The AI Revolution in Healthcare: Transforming Care and Elevating Patient Outcomes at USC’s Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience. The evening event provided a compelling look at how artificial intelligence is transforming patient care, drug development, and clinical operations, while addressing the challenges of adoption in highly regulated healthcare environments. Through keynote perspectives and a multi-expert panel discussion, attendees explored the opportunities AI presents to elevate care delivery and system efficiency, and the structural changes needed to translate innovation into impact.

Dr. Matthew Michelson, CEO of Readout AI, delivered the keynote address, discussing the transformative role of AI in healthcare. He traced the evolution of AI applications from experimental tools to essential technologies enhancing clinical trials, population health analytics, and drug development. Michelson highlighted advancements such as AI-driven protein folding predictions, like AlphaFold, and the rise of automated wet labs, which optimize experimental workflows. He also emphasized the significance of digital twins—virtual patient models based on EMR data—that can simulate clinical outcomes, enabling more efficient trial designs and personalized care planning. Beyond research, Michelson explored AI’s expanding influence in clinical decision support systems, care transitions, and payer processes. He described how AI is helping physicians manage multi-morbid patients, improving evidence-based reimbursement guidelines, and extracting structured data from unstructured clinical notes. Michelson also highlighted platforms like Yonalink, which integrate EMR data into clinical trial systems, improving communication between providers, researchers, and payers, while also boosting care coordination and reimbursement efficiency.

Following the keynote, a panel discussion moderated by Fay Lin, Senior Editor at GEN Biotechnology, explored how organizations should manage AI in healthcare, balancing transformative and incremental technologies while navigating the complex regulatory and legal challenges of the sector. Harsh Parikh, Partner at Nixon Peabody LLP, offered a candid breakdown of the complex regulatory terrain, highlighting the importance of distinguishing whether a company is truly delivering healthcare or simply operating adjacent to it, as this distinction significantly affects compliance obligations. He discussed the intricate patchwork of state and federal laws—including HIPAA, medical licensing rules, and reimbursement structures—that AI developers must navigate, cautioning that these overlapping regulations often create hidden barriers to innovation. Parikh also noted that the adoption of electronic medical records, accelerated by federal incentives after the Great Recession, has been a critical enabler of AI integration in healthcare. Martha Lawrence, CEO of AccendoWave, expanded on these challenges from a commercialization perspective, addressing the disconnect between fast-moving innovation and slow-moving financial and administrative structures. She emphasized the difficulty of funding high-risk, transformative technologies and underscored the role of public mechanisms like ARPA-H in supporting ideas that traditional investors might find too uncertain. Lawrence also discussed inefficiencies in healthcare credentialing systems, where repeated review and approval processes across institutions create friction points that delay innovation and increase deployment costs, stressing the need for streamlined infrastructure to facilitate faster adoption of AI tools.

The conversation then shifted to explore the more nuanced challenges of adapting AI to healthcare, as panelists were asked to share their insights on the current bottlenecks and the aspects of AI’s future that most excite them. Naim Matasci, Senior Director of Applied AI Research at the Ellison Medical Institute, and Nilay Shah, Machine Learning Engineer at Amgen, shared valuable insights on the evolving landscape of AI in healthcare. Matasci highlighted the shift from interpretable models to high-performing but opaque black-box systems, acknowledging the powerful capabilities these models bring to drug discovery and patient stratification. However, he emphasized that trust and transparency are critical for clinical adoption, and that foundation models must be fine-tuned for healthcare applications to ensure clinical validity and user acceptance. Shah, on the other hand, pointed to data infrastructure as the biggest challenge in healthcare AI, stressing that fragmented, inconsistent, and poorly formatted data hinder progress despite advancements in machine learning algorithms. He advocated for solutions like federated learning and tokenization to secure AI model training across decentralized datasets while protecting patient privacy. Shah also underscored the importance of standardized, interoperable data formats in enabling AI's full potential, warning that without addressing these foundational issues, even the most sophisticated AI models may remain underutilized.

Ultimately, the discussion returned to the central theme: for AI to succeed in healthcare, it must be not only technically sound but practically deployable. The evening’s conversations consistently circled back to this imperative, reinforcing that AI’s promise will only be realized when paired with thoughtful integration, stakeholder alignment, and a deep understanding of the healthcare ecosystem it aims to serve. The event concluded with a networking happy hour, offering attendees the chance to connect, exchange ideas, and establish meaningful relationships. We extend our gratitude to all our core sponsors, Magnify at CNSI, USC Bridge Institute, Keck Graduate Institute, California Life Sciences and LA BioSpace, and our event sponsor, Xencor, which helped make this evening a success!