Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Last question. When you look around in your space, where would you point new entrepreneurs to look for white spaces? 

Ram Swaminathan: In general, you should look for problems by not reading some Forbes article. The challenge is more on the ground. The more that entrepreneurs can talk to functional workers in that particular domain, the better.

The first way to start is, of course, to look at Forbes, Wired, and all of these magazines to find areas where they are pointing at problems. The next step is to take some of these problems and see what relates to the functional workers and the journey they have gone through in life. They need to spend the time and go meet people. 

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You are from Utah, right?

Ram Swaminathan: I spent 20 years in India. I grew up in Chennai and had a full scholarship at Utah State for electrical engineering. I always wanted to go to Utah. You might be surprised, but NASA has a sister division of JPL which is called Space Dynamics Lab (SDL) in Utah. It is located 80 miles north of Salt Lake in a city called Logan, Utah.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Your AI is integrated into all kinds of EMR systems?

Ram Swaminathan: Yes. We are working with one of Athena’s accounts and we hope to grow that account and potentially work with Athena directly as well. The hope is to keep going up the channel partnership route and integrate ourselves with almost all the EMRs now. 

Sramana Mitra: But is the model still taking a percentage of the collections?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 3)

Ram Swaminathan: We go back in time with the hospital data sets; and we mine the claims data and the medical record data, the way the physicians writing the notes come from different backgrounds. We grab all of those variants in history and we customize the NLP technology for AI to understand these various documents.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: There is a company that we covered extensively for a while in the payments space. This was Athenahealth. It sounds like what you are doing is like what Athenahealth does but with AI. Is that correct?

Ram Swaminathan: That is correct.

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t you expound on that? I’ll phrase the question a little bit more specifically. Athenahealth’s big innovation was having the expertise to be able to manage these codes, claims, and collections processes.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 1)

You have read our coverage of AthenaHealth over the years in the healthcare IT space. BUDDI.AI is taking an AI-driven approach to healthcare coding and billing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start introducing our audience to yourself as well BUDDI.AI.

Ram Swaminathan: I am the co-founder and CEO of BUDDI.AI. We focus on building the next generation of artificial intelligence for healthcare.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Spence Green, CEO of Lilt (Part 4)

Spence Green: One of the first applications of digital computers for cryptography and bomb-making were developed with machine translation. People started working on this in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Machine translation research surged and flowed over the following decade and it took off after 9/11 when the United States government realized that it didn’t have enough Arabic language speakers.

It started investing money and research in the university system to build these machine translation systems. Out of that came Google Translate and Microsoft Translator Hub. The latter was what put my co-founder and me through grad school. There were a bunch of us in 2000 working with machine translation.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Spence Green, CEO of Lilt (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How big is your community of translators?

Spence Green: It is a reasonably large community. It’s smaller than some of our competitors, but there is a reason for that. The reason is that we believe in our community. We would rather have a smaller group of highly-specialized people that we utilize completely than to have a much broader group of people that we treat like a crowd. We are building the technology at the same time that we are building the operational process.