DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - AI in Healthcare: Revolutionizing Patient Care (ft Dr. Junaid Kalia)

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

On this episode of DGTL Voices, Dr. Junaid Kalia shares his journey to becoming a neurologist and entrepreneur in the field of AI in healthcare. He discusses his pivotal moments that shaped his identity as a healer, scientist, and entrepreneur, and the creation of SaveLife.AI, a platform aimed at improving healthcare access in low-income countries. Dr. Kalia emphasizes the importance of patience, resilience, and continuous learning in both personal and professional growth.

Welcome to Digital Voices, where healthcare and life science leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move healthcare forward. Now your host, Ed Marks. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. Thank you for listening. You've made us number four in the world under technology. Thank you so much. We appreciate it.

And it's because we have a great guest like Dr. Janade Kalia. Janade, welcome to Digital Voices. Thank you so much, Ed, for inviting me. Really appreciate it. No, this can be great because what you're doing is just fascinating, and we're going to jump into that here in a second.

You and I first met less than a year ago, actually. We were doing a book signing with Chris Ross in my home, and you came out, and it was great. We got a chance to interact, and people can't see this, but today's actually lifting out the book right now with our signatures in it, and I really appreciate you making the trip out.

But it's like, wow, this guy's pretty cool, doing some cool things. And then we started a podcast together along with Dr. Harvey Castro called Signals and Symptoms. Podcasts. What's cool about it is it's live podcast. I mean, you can also get the recording, obviously, but we go live every Wednesday, 7 a.m. Central time. So we'll put all that information in the show notes. So it's great.

But, Janade, the most important thing that we ask on digital voices, is what songs are on your playlist? So I love Journey. That is one of the, I'm the biggest fan as far as that is concerned. My wake-up song is from Fort Minor, remember? And then, of course, I have a bunch of rock bands from Pakistan and India. The biggest one is Genulul that I listen to. And yeah, daily workout routine goes with the rock songs.

I love it. So what is your life message or mantra? Are there sort of words that guide you, that you live? If you save a life, it is as if you save a life of all mankind. That is my mission in life. That's why I wake up in the morning. Read the first thing. It is my prayer.

It is out of both the Old Testament and the Quran. And believe it or not, it is in most holy books from Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. Verbe. Very cool. Love it. We'll add it. We actually have a listing of all of our, not just a playlist for all of the songs, but also of all the life.

So tell us a little bit about you. Like, who are you? What's your story? Where were you born? So I was born in Karachi, Pakistan. We are essentially from India, which was before the partition. It is a town near Gujarat. And I don't know if you're familiar with Gujaratis.

Gujaratis are essentially businessmen. As a matter of fact, I never wanted to be a physician. My older sister wanted to be a physician. And then what ended up happening is that I went to my dad, hey, I got into a great business school and also got into a great medical school. So my dad says that, you know what? I'm going to teach you business. No MBA is going to teach you what I'm going to teach you.

So why don't you do medical school because, you know, it's a different thing. You might like it. And then your mom wants you to be a doctor and everything. And that led to my love for neurology, the neurosciences and the brain, which, of course, I'm going to talk about how the journey towards neurons. which are brain, an artificial neural network, which is AI, and then how essentially it was built on the basis of neuroscience. And that's how I developed my AI, basically, interest.

And then one by one, one thing led to another. We actually were offered Green Guard as a whole family because we applied. I came to U.S., trained at U.D. Southwestern for my fellowships, residency at St. Louis University Hospital. And more and most importantly, actually, I did two years of research work on Deroscience. Samma Zeda, which is my mentor at University of Wisconsin. So long journey, but very fruitful.

Yeah, and I know you're married. Were you married previous to coming to the United States or after? Oh, no, I found my wife in Chicago. Okay. She is actually my best friend's wife's cousin. So she introduced us at a wedding ceremony, which is, by the way, classic Indian package-friendly introduction. And then, yeah, she was.

is perfect. I mean, she herself is as a master's in health management, and she actually is amazing. And I'm grateful to her to stick around with three fellowships and then, of course, entrepreneurship, which is more insane than, you know, neurocritical care function. Yeah, that's cool. Was there a pivotal moment in life that fundamentally changed your trajectory? Three fundamental moments. one was actually not doing business and doing medicine, which is becoming an identity of a healer. And as you know, most positions do very strongly identify themselves from their work perspective, which is, again, one huge shift when I actually started medical school and started loving it. Before that, believe it or not, I used to even right outside high school, I was a professional teacher.

And not only I was a professional teacher, I actually hired other teachers. teach. So I already had a business going. Organic chemistry. That's what I used to teach and then MCATs, by the way. So that was one pivotal shift from business to really concentrating on the Healer side. And then from Healer to coming here and understanding the research side of things and actually understanding how vastly important clinical research as a as a back end, but research in general, which is lacked significantly in my mind. So essentially identifying myself from a physician to physician scientists. And then, lastly, going back to essentially becoming an entrepreneur as an identity,

but more importantly, an AI, sort of expert in healthcare. So those were three pivotal shifts in my mind that going from pure business, a physician scientist, physician scientists to entrepreneurship. And I use entrepreneurship as a different category than business. I mean, running a clinical practice is a business. Herkarts salon is a business. but entrepreneurship is very different. You alluded to the fact that you had chosen neurology.

Go a little bit deeper. Like, why did you get into it? Because that's going to lead into Save Life AI, which I want to talk about as well. Again, I'm a fairly spiritual person. I wish I was a little more religious, but I'm not. Hopefully somebody's graces actually passes me through. The most important thing that is important from an upbringing perspective

is for my parents to be ethical. So we're very, very grounded. By the way, not the whole family is not even that religious. FYI. But we were grounded in ethics, which is nothing to do with religion, by the way. Religion starts when ethics ends. But the idea was that you need to have a set of cool beliefs

that you operate under. And then even if somebody doesn't exist up there, it doesn't matter. You operate that you are answerable. Because at the end of the day. So when you're reviewing these things in the world of consciousness and going up to that, what I realize is that the operating team needs to be fully conscious and available. That's more.

And then when I was reading through this, what I realized is that most of even biggest religions are text-based, essentially. And then when the advent, because we were doing AI for vision, like image analysis, stroke and everything, But the minute I saw Chad TBD 2 and then 3, and that is even before the 3.5 and everyone understood it. And we were in the AI game because of the vision part. Then I realized that more so, it's like a light bulb moment that we are really in a strange territory. I'm just going to be honest, but it's a very strange territory. I mean, it is, and the way I defined it is a non-human intelligence, quote, and quote, an alien intelligence, right? So at that point in time, this technology basically completely shifted essentially,

really at the core shook me up because if computer is generating text and we actually thought that humans are the only one who understand language but they literally talk to someone how do you differentiate a human and an animal because they communicate, right? Clearly, beautifully communicate. Dolphins, dogs,

they communicate way better. As a matter of fact, humans, when they do need clarification and communication, they do not use language. That's where airport has signals of hands, paddles and everything. Because we miscommunicate with language. So what I'm saying is that communication is a different problem, but language,

poetry, songs that you just started with, has such a deep connection with being an identity of human and when it goes to machine, that honestly shook me to the core. I was like, okay, I need to understand, is it really true or fake?

And then I realized that it's neither true not fake. And it's a wrong way of thinking, which I'm not going to discuss, but the idea was that this thing. technology is really shaping how you define humans, let alone how you define AI. So you mentioned sort of this third identity, entrepreneurship. So you did start this company, savelife.a.I. So tell us the origin story.

So origin story is very simple. I'm a stroke physician. I came to U.S. We wanted to go back and serve the countries because, by the way, my whole medical school fee was $500 for five years. Wow. $500. dollars. So I was on a government scholarship and I said, you know, I should give something back. So I, we used some of these applications here from great companies, by the way. I'm not going to

name them, but they are fantastic people that developed us. And I asked them, hey, can we take these technologies back? But they were saying that it was not possible or it was extremely expensive. So there was no business case or because it was more of a philanthropy, of course. So I said, I mean, I would rather build it myself. So I actually spent a, a high, half a million dollars on building sort of this back end. And of course, when you're doing it in the start, a lot of money is wasted because you're learning. So I ended up building it,

and then the whole idea was making it free for low and middle-income countries. My thought was that I am actually trained as a director of Nibaba ICU with 26 beds ICU back in the advocate. I don't know, 26 of 12, now I forget. But I was director of Nile ICU. And what I realized about any human interaction, I'm just going to be very honest

and people are going to hate me saying it. Medicine is easy. But taking care of humans is the hardest one. Right? I mean, diagnosing in air is very easy, right? You have UTI, you have URI, you have this. They're going to give steroids, you're going to give this, you're going to give antibiotics, antivirus.

That's so freaking easy. Taking care of the patient is the hard part. So that all depends on two things. Number one is workflow and number two is actually understanding you know, and dig everything into a first principle's way and dissect the whole problem. So as a neurointensivist, when you're sitting there, you have to understand who's going to get choppered in, who's going to get ambulance in, who's going to stay at a peripheral hospital, who's going to get, you know, wherever you're going to start another neurology service.

We're going to, you know, enhance through virtual care. We're not going to enhance to virtual care. So when we went through this whole decision process and learning and all of that, taking courses, then when I set up this company and the software, everything. I set it up from a first principle thinking. So everything was design, development was document first approach, which is very different to people develop and then document. So mine was document first approach. And then I realized, man, I can get an FDA. And this is becoming a very good business model. And then one thing led to an order. So one of the technical things that I had to

actually go for was to put it on an edge device because of the low income and low resources. It's a USBC battery pack. It is basically a nanopath on which my model works for bleed in the brain. So this is one of the things we did. So people actually came up to me that how the hell are you making it free for low-income countries? And I said, well, this is the reason because I have it in edge. I don't need to upload, download, you know, infrastructure costs can be down. And then people gave me orders like, hey, can you make breast cancer detection, breast mass detection? Because we want to put it in Etopia, Uganda, Nigeria or other places. And then, of course, once you think of a product release or everything, you do all over to

your back and research, a business plan and everything. And every time there's a business plan in terms of, you know, being able to make it available to US as well, those are the technologies we're bringing through the approval and US. And some of these, you know, solutions that we bring just models out. We don't even get regulation. Because again, business side is very different than regulatory. and all of that. So we have to manage them.

So the journey was simple. Do things in an organized fashion, document first. And once you do that, you're going to realize that, you know, there are more possibilities in the future and that learning is always safe. So you have to repeat everything. Yeah, that's great. So tell some success stories to date. So interestingly, as I said, that number one success story is that now I go anywhere investors are actually lining up. So that's a very good validation that you have something of bad. Number two is that we have implemented this in multiple places in low-income countries, and they are actually utilizing it. Number three is that while we were doing this, we learned

the large language model portions, and we were able to enhance both the vision model and the language model and now we are developing multiple fast iteration of it. As a matter of fact, we have our own pre-trained LLM for just writing at the A application. So we are now, you know, iterating very fast. We actually have signed contracts significant here in U.S. now officially. So we are on track for breaking even by end of March. And then, of course, we have significant expansion opportunity in the VINRA region with our partners, Hart's medical solutions. they are out of Doha Khadr. Honestly, the one line I would say is that start crawling,

you will learn how to walk and you will eventually learn how to run. And things open up. I mean, you have been amazing, important advisor for me, Harvey Castro, et cetera. And then once you get into that model of continuous learning, and for me especially was, you know, I am actually very open. There's some mistakes. So what? Everyone doesn't say.

As a matter of fact, investors are very appreciative of that. That if you have known blind spots and you know how to correct them, or at least ask for help, that is extremely important. So for me, it is keep walking. Start crawling at least. You learn how to walk and run. Yeah, that's great. It's a great success story. Where do you think savelife.a.ai is headed?

What's next? Like, in terms of development or the potential of what could be in the future? So, as I said, what is the real move when I teach? let's say entrepreneurship to someone. And then I'm going to ask you like, okay, define a mode. And that's something that I learned from you is first DOI, value and investment, which has two factors, soft autoi and hard autoi. You always calculate that.

That's number one. And it could be time savings. It could be, you know, money savings. It could be money generated and it could be early diagnosis and detection. So that's always concentrated on the DOI part. So that's something that we sort of always give you first when we are looking at Save Life AI in terms of fuel. future projections, how we're going to build different products. But the second biggest

auto-wide mode that people don't understand, and that's where clinicians need to really take high stakes into these developing processes is because that we are merging. So I was vice president of clinical strategy of B.1, which is a telemedicine. So now I have AI. I have telemedicine, and I know how to move people from a neurointensiveist to stroke to different tertiary centers. So we are developing essentially a user experience for all of critical solutions in which it could be managing patient journey through artificial intelligence end-to-end, which includes voice, reasoning, and vision agents. And that is what Save Life is the AI is going to capture the biggest market. And it could be tele-ICU, telestroke, or, again, acute coronary syndrome. So I have personally worked significantly are in developing that user experience too,

because that's the key thing, to understand how the patient journey connects with the provider's journey. And that is where the biggest mode in AI will be, in my opinion in the future, as we democratized for frontier foundation models. No, super. We will put information about savelife.a.ai in the show notes for people who are interested in pursuing more. Let's talk about leadership. Where do you go or what do you do when you feel creativity drained? Because you're a super smart person, obviously,

and you're also very creative and innovative. But those times where you're not just having that free sort of flow of thinking, what do you do? Oh, during a startup, I'm doing a little bit of work. Of course, my chances are very low. One is music. As a matter of my escape is essentially I drive with a, volume blasts for 20 minutes.

I'm fully refreshed, come back. I don't pray that much, but I mean, somewhere between meditation and prayer, you can say there is always recharge possibility. But interestingly, I wake up at two, maybe three in the morning, I start my work, clinical work and everything. But I'm a very good napper.

And I think that really re-energizes me significantly. So I can literally take a nap for 10 minutes and micro-naps or something, recharge, move on. Those are my three ways to recharge for creativity. Leadership is interesting and it's also changing in the age of AI. Because how do you have a marketing team that you can run with one person? Should you?

So essentially what I realize is that there's a C-suite. This is not like one person. There's a C-suite. And the CEO or the founder is on top of that. So my initial problem was not leadership. It's fairly user experience with neurocritical care, director, tele-director, tele-icU, and then, of course, working in different organizations.

That was fairly done. What was hardest for me is to be what we call leadership training for my C-Suite, which was the hardest part, because it is very different that prospective changes and more importantly perceptions change. So that's how. Yeah.

Well, what are two things that you have learned the hard way along your journey? Things do at times take time. You just have to be patience, actually. That could we say that, you know, patience is extremely important. And that's where my wife comes in. She always reminds me again and again that anything worth doing in life at least takes seven years. medical school in four years, three years of residency. I mean, even in any other career in your life, where you come in, out, it takes seven years.

And I know it's just a real odd situation with this VC funds and all of that and my investor last week, well, he's saying three years. And I said, go with him. I'm not going to, I'm just going to be very honest and clear. Anything worth doing in life requires time and patience. And then And the second big, of course, is with the patients is resilience. And that's where the second important thing is. And that's what I keep teaching my leadership now. I think the biggest, the best book I word is with grit. If you have, if you're going to spend money behind a founder, which is, again, early

stage industry is essentially the founder, because co-founders, even D, even everything. But the point, the definition of grid is essentially doing hard work persistently for a number of years. And that's great. without basically tying out and everything. And that's, I think, is my biggest lesson that I realize and I'll keep telling physicians, entrepreneurs, that you need to be patient because, you know, for you, and by the way, just to give you an example,

the average physician lifetime income is going to be $25 million, with a $5 million savings at the end. Maybe, of course, some people do move better and all of them. Right. At the end of the day. And if you're thinking you're going to make a start, for the $15 million or $100 million or $500 million without medical school, residency, fellowship.

Like, come on. So anyways. Yeah, let's end by going back almost to the beginning. Was there anything that your parents forced you to do when you were a kid growing up and maybe rolled your eyes, but now that you look back, you're glad they did it? Oh, yeah. I was essentially in a kid with ADHD, supposedly, and my mother was. extremely strict and I'm extremely grateful to her for that.

But once I did, but she understood because, you know, when I commit, I commit. I mean, there's a small story. In the first grade, actually, I failed on the midterms because there was a midterms. And then my mom was like, are you crazy? And said, don't worry, I'll be fine. And then I came the first in class at the end because my mom was like, dude, what is the problem? And it just was a little switch that goes off. And that's very important for parents who understand in this age of, you know, extreme distraction and beautiful distraction with these AI images and everything.

That it is, you just need to refocus patiently and everything. So that's number one. And the second thing that my dad taught me is the word value itself. Anytime you would have a discussion, he would have, okay, what is the violent? And he would say, okay, what is the time commitment? What is the money commitment? what is this commitment? And 10 is it going to be?

If I have to, any purchase is concerned. And he would have yes. Like I would do courses. Look, Jeannate, you can't do all the courses. Just define value,

value, value. So I'm very grateful for my dad on that regard. Being a business-minded person and, you know, everything he has to do with calculation, that he instilled in me that always calculate value and then always wear different hats,

time value, money, value, opportunity costs as a value, all of these things. So my parents were amazing and they did second straight and just being honest. Yeah, I love that. And you're still in touch with them. Like you have regular, regular interactions. If I don't call a day, which is, by the way, I've been calling them.

And my wife is like, what kind of person are you? You have to call your mom every day. But anyway, I do. I do call my mom every day practically. And if I don't, she would like, what happened? And she would call my wife first because she knows I may be in the media. or something. And we go over a weekend, and then we all brothers and sisters get together.

My parents are all about grandkids at that time. Yeah, yeah. And all of the grandkids were there and they're just having fun with the grandkids. So they're not going to even chat with me or anything. So I specifically make sure that I alone, and not my brothers or sisters are not allowed either. Like every Wednesday or so, 12 noon, I take them for lunch outside. Then the reason behind it is my mom loves cooking and she gives it.

wants you to give it, but I bring it back home. But I take my parents out for lunch so that I can hear directly from them. Yeah. You're a good man. I really appreciate. I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing with us about your journey, all from, speaking of journey, your favorite band. And then your life mantra and message, you know, all around Save a Life,

which is also the name of the company. And then sharing with us about your roots in Pakistan, India, and coming over to the United States. And I liked how you, you know, you talk about your three identities as a healer, scientists and entrepreneur. And then talked about your career. We talked about savelife.a.i, all the great things and how it's saving lives all around the world. And then your whole journey into entrepreneurship.

And I like what you said about medicine is the easy part. Taking care of humans is a lot harder. Whenever you get humans involved, there's something about that. And then what I like, we talk a lot about leadership. But the thing I picked out the best, Dunaid, is it's okay to nap. it's important. So you're a neurologist. So we know it's fact, how important napping is. And then you also talked about grit, the need for grit and being patient, you know, the seven year mark, the wisdom from your wife. What did we miss or anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

Yeah. Now, you know, AI people are talking about it and it's sort of an odd situation and calling it as an AI bubble. There's just a circle between NVIDE, IBMD, Microsoft, and all of that. And this has been, what the history of any technological advancement. Everything comes out of a dot-com bubble like Amazon, Google, and everything. And then if you really look at the history, you're going to see that Google has acquired what, 27 to 100 companies, so of Microsoft, so I've done. So I'm going to tell you right now that it scares the shit out of me now personally because it's never used to.

Believe me, there's a click that happened this year because we have reasoning models, we have degrees in this. So my last thing would be that please learn artificial intelligence, how to use new tools on a regular basis. And number three is that I think healthcare may be the most important and fascinating and exciting application of artificial intelligence. So I would recommend that everyone should teach their kids, learn them, develop those skills actively

because the future is the era of you. Dr. Junaid, Kelia, thank you for being guest on Digital Voices. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices. We help today's conversation sparked ideas, reflection, and connection. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify podcast so you don't miss an episode.