Advancing Acute Care and the Patient Experience with AI Voice Agents – Healthcare AI Pioneers
Jesse chats with Dr. Adrian Haimovich, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Division of Artificial Intelligence at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Dr. Smit Desai, Assistant Professor at Northeastern University and leader of the Conversational Human-AI Interactions Lab (CHAI Lab). Together, they discuss the potential for AI-powered voice agents in emergency departments and other acute care settings, the challenges these tools are designed to address, why voice may offer advantages over text-based interactions, the technical architecture behind AI voice agents and how it compares with off-the-shelf solutions, the future of voice agents in acute care, the potential for patient-authored notes, and much more.
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The OpenAI Foundation commits $100 million to an initiative aimed at using AI to expand access to advanced medical care, particularly for uninsured and underserved patients.
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About Our Guests
Dr. Adrian Haimovich
Dr. Adrian Haimovich has dedicated his career to integrating artificial intelligence, data science, and emergency medicine to improve acute care delivery. An Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and attending physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, his work focuses on translating electronic health record data and machine learning into deployable clinical tools.
He has published extensively in leading journals including Science, Nature, JAMA Internal Medicine, Annals of Emergency Medicine, and Academic Emergency Medicine, and lectures nationally on the application of AI to diagnostic reasoning, operational decision-making, and clinical uncertainty in the emergency department.
Dr. Haimovich directs and collaborates on multiple extramurally funded research programs focused on real-world implementation of clinical AI and serves in national leadership and advisory roles related to artificial intelligence in emergency care.
Dr. Smit Desai
Dr. Smit Desai is an Assistant Professor in the College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD) at Northeastern University, with joint appointments in Art + Design and Communication Studies and an affiliated appointment in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He directs the Conversational Human–AI Interactions (CHAI) Lab, which investigates how people understand, trust, and collaborate with conversational AI—and how these systems can be designed to augment human capabilities and support meaningful interactions.
Smit’s research bridges theory and design practice: he examines users’ mental models through methods such as metaphor analysis and persona design, and applies these insights to build next-generation conversational agents. His current projects span healthcare (AI assistants for serious illness conversations in emergency departments), aging and well-being (voice-first reminiscence systems like Memory Box), and everyday collaboration (LLM-powered chatbots that adapt to user personality). Across these efforts, his work emphasizes human-centered AI principles, transparency, and the social consequences of giving machines personalities and roles.
His work has appeared in premier HCI venues including CHI, CSCW, and TOCHI. He serves on the organizing committee for the ACM SIGCHI Conversational User Interfaces Conference (2024-2026) and leads workshops on ethical conversational persona design at major HCI conferences. Smit received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.