Becker’s Healthcare Podcast: Mouneer Odeh, MA, Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer at Cedars-Sinai
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast recently interviewed Mouneer Odeh, MA, chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Cedars-Sinai, about how AI is streamlining healthcare operations, reshaping organizations, and enhancing patient care by handling time-consuming tasks for clinical staff.
Odeh told podcast host Laura Dyrda that the increasing healthcare needs of an aging population, a limited supply of doctors and nurses, and mounting financial pressures on health systems make meaningful AI deployment increasingly necessary.
“We have a real opportunity to think about how do we reengineer the way that we deliver care, and the services that we provide to be much more efficient so that we can really rise to the challenge of taking care of our communities at a time when they need us most,” he said.
Odeh told Dyrda the first wave of reengineering, already underway, uses AI to enhance workforce productivity. The second wave, he said, is “transforming workforces and workflow. It’s changing the way we work, and as a result, changing the jobs that we have.”
He noted that clinicians using ambient AI and other AI-powered documentation tools are “experiencing a better quality of interactions with our patients” and “less cognitive overload.”
Even as AI capabilities continue to expand, Cedars-Sinai is taking a measured and responsible approach, Odeh said, by keeping humans at the center of the work, using the technology primarily as a tool to support people rather than operate independently.
“What I’m most curious about is the relationship between people and technology and how that’s going to evolve,” he told Dyrda. “It feels like almost every week we get up and something new is out there. It’s changing how people experience technology.”
Listen to the complete segment from Becker's Healthcare Podcast.