Closing the Gap Between AI and Clinical Reality w/ Dr. Sanjay Juneja, Tempus AI

Most AI in healthcare fails before it ever even reaches a patient, not because the technology can't do the job, but because nobody really translated it into something a clinician could actually use. Dr. Sanjay Juneja has spent his career closing exactly that gap. He's an oncologist who sees patients. He's also building and shipping real AI into clinical workflows, and he's an author and an influencer who has a massive global following by making all this hard stuff really easy to understand. And today, he's here to do the exact same stuff for us. [upbeat music] Now, welcome back to Humanify Health Tech, where we explore how AI is really rewriting the rules of healthcare and putting people right back at the center where they belong. I'm your host, Francesca Vereb, head of marketing at Net Health. Today's guest has a gift for that genuinely rare talent in this industry. He can take something that is impossibly complex, like a cancer diagnosis, an AI governance framework, or even a broken data pipeline, and make it practical to the people who need it the most, which as a marketer, frankly confuses me to some extent, but also impresses me in equal measure. Dr. Sanjay Juneja is a triple board-certified hematologist and medical oncologist. He's the VP of clinical AI operations at Tempus AI and the founder of TensorBlack, an AI education platform that's really focused on oncology. He's also known as The Onc Doc on social media. Dr. Juneja has built a global following of more than half a million people, and his podcast, Target Cancer, has been downloaded over four million times. He's written a f- on Forbes. He's been credentialized through Harvard Medical School's inaugural AI healthcare program, and he was invited to the White House for a roundtable on healthcare leaders in social media. And somehow in between all of that, he still has a couple of hours to see his patients. Dr. Juneja, welcome to the Humanify AI Health Tech podcast. So Dr. Juneja, you've built your career around one skill, taking topics in healthcare that are genuinely really complicated and then making them much more human. And you do this with patients, and you do it with your social media followers, and you do it in one of the most complex AI deployments in oncology. So what I would love to know from you is what is the one, uh, sort of moment from the bedside that just sort of shapes how you think about AI, something that happens organically in the p- in the room with the patient, um, and what does that tell us about the gap between what AI builders are thinking about and thinking that clinicians need and what clinicians actually need?

Yeah, it's a great question. Um, I think really the most important thing, uh, that made me realize we have kind of a, a technology, you know, insufficiency is really just the, quote unquote, "ball drops" that happen when it relates to just a very important thing as it relates to the patient's care. So obviously with cancer, uh, treatments, there are all kinds of side effects that can happen, especially with immune therapy, uh, and other things that can be a little nebulous. So you have to have a really interdisciplinary or collaborative approach,