Unlocking Healthcare’s Potential with the ”AI Layer”: A Conversation with Layer Health’s David Sontag (Part One)

In this episode of Smarter Healthcare with AI, Dr. Tetteh speaks with David Sontag, co-founder and CEO of Layer Health, about applying AI to transform healthcare delivery. They discuss how technology, like large language models, and the appetite for AI in healthcare have rapidly evolved. David shares his path into AI research, which focused on building reasoning systems before co-founding Layer Health, which aims to be the "AI layer" that unlocks insights from unstructured clinical data to provide the right information for better care decisions. They dive into Layer Health's work on enabling scalable clinical data abstraction for quality improvement registries, optimizing sites of care by routing patients appropriately based on their profiles, and surfacing best practices for care standardization—all facilitated by extracting structured data from text using large language models without labeling. David also highlights their approaches to validation and model monitoring. The episode provides a compelling vision for how AI can reshape healthcare.