WHOOP Podcast - How AI & Wearables Are Shaping The Future of Healthcare with Dr. Ami Bhatt

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

The WHOOP Podcast Longevity Series is back! This week, WHOOP SVP of Research, Algorithms, and Data, Emily Capodilupo sits down with Dr. Ami Bhatt, renowned cardiologist, Chief Innovation Officer at the American College of Cardiology, and the first-ever Chair of Digital Health at the FDA. Dr. Bhatt offers a rare, inside look at how medicine, technology, and policy are coming together to enhance the future of healthcare. From wearables to AI to patient agency and clinician training, this conversation unpacks what it takes to modernize healthcare. Dr. Bhatt shares her personal journey from practicing cardiologist to national innovation leader, highlighting the role of  education, ethics, and human-AI collaboration in creating a better healthcare landscape for patients across the country.(00:53) Intro to Dr. Ami Bhatt, First Chair of Digital Health, FDA(3:20) Seeing AI As A Tool In Healthcare(06:23) Teaching AI: Responsibility & Ethics In Healthcare(09:19) Dr. Bhatt: From Cardiology to Policy(12:21) Role As A Chief Innovation Officer in Healthcare Regulation(16:03) Adjusting Teaching Policies to AI(21:45) Thinking About Wearables: Data Translation & AI(30:38) Technology in Healthcare: Building Algorithms & Navigating FDA ApprovalFollow Dr. Ami BhattLinkedInXSupport the showFollow WHOOP: Sign up for WHOOP Advanced Labs Trial WHOOP for Free www.whoop.com Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

This is not your grandmother's FDA, if you will. It has been progressively changing and understanding that digital health has changed things for us. Wearables are, in fact, the only way we are going to achieve population health goals. We can't achieve population health without the use of wearables. How do you take that wearable daughter and make it relevant to your health care provider? And how does a health care provider understand that? The level of science that you create here at Boo, it's real science. It's not consumerism.

It's patient agency. And it's really my job and my colleague's job to teach our clinicians that and to get them to accept that culture change. I want an infrastructure to enable this kind of care in the communities where people live, using their data. How do I do it safely and with good guardrails? And that's kind of what we're about. Hi, everybody. I'm Emily Capitaluco, WOOP, Senior Vice President of Research Algorithms and Data. and today I am joined by the incredible Dr. AmiBot.

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for being here. Dr. Bot is a cardiologist. She is the chief innovation officer at the American College of Cardiology, as well as the Chair of Digital Health at the FDA. Dr. Bott has an incredibly interesting perspective because she sees cardiology both from a policy and regulatory side, as well as previously being a practicing cardiologist,

and so she blends both of those worlds in a world. really fascinating way and I'm very excited to have her on the podcast today. So I want to start off because you are the very first chair of digital health at the FDA, so a new role, which is a really cool sign of the FDA being with the Times and understanding that this AI revolution is coming and all of that. And so what is this new role? What is this new department? And what does it say about what the FDA is thinking about and doing? This is not your grandmother's FDA, if you will. It has been progressively changing and understanding that digital health has changed things for us. And looking at software as a medical device was the first time that the FDA really started to

kind of speed up in a safe and efficient way, the process of getting access to these types of technologies to our patients. And that's the most important part of this. Whether we're talking about diagnostic screening or understanding algorithms, there is so much we have to offer. And we really need a streamlined way to get there. And so it's before the Digital Health Advisory Committee, which is what I chair, even started that the FDA started becoming aware of the need for us to really modernize our approach. The Digital Health Advisory Committee itself, we are a group of individuals that are here to talk. We speak kind of publicly and have a public meeting about some of the issues that we haven't yet figured out how to grapple with. And it's largely not thinking about

regulation, actually thinking about how do you build an infrastructure with guardrails? And that's the frame shift that's happening for us now. Not I want to regulate, I want to control. It's really more about I want an infrastructure to enable this kind of care in the communities where people live, using their data. How do I do it safely and with good guardrails? And that's kind of what we're about. I think that's so interesting. And when you look at how quickly AI and large language models are moving, it seems almost impossible for these big kind of bureaucratic government institutions to keep up. And so it's encouraging, obviously, that this committee exists. But what practically does that look like right now? And do you think that the FDA is keeping up?

Or is there still a lot more work structurally that needs to be done? I think the FDA is keeping up the best any, as you said, large institution that is trying to keep its citizens safe can move. I think some of the experimentation going on at the FDA, not in my group specifically, but on using AI is also just a good sign that we're trying to figure out how the internal processes work, because if a company uses AI for themselves, they're better aware of what they're doing when they're using it for their customers, if you will, right? And then that's kind of how I think about it. But really, when we meet as the FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee, our concern is, if things are moving really quickly, then we can't just approve and let go.

That's no longer a strategy that works in this day and age. We need to approve and then monitor. So what does post-implementation metric measurement look like? What are the metrics? How do we do that? And that's where partnering with companies, organizations, researchers, industry is so important. to say what's reasonable to measure? What can we actually do to make sure that as algorithms change, as the science advances, that the goal and the intent of having good outcomes for our patients

still stays at the center. Do you think we're getting it right right now? I think we haven't been given a real chance to measure yet. Okay. I think a lot of the things coming through are the types of algorithms or diagnostics or other things that we're not yet seeing used. in practice at such a scale that we have an idea. However, what we don't want to do is the FDA is say, well, let's let things scale first and then figure out how we're going to measure them, because we could risk people getting in trouble. I don't think we're doing it yet because I don't think the opportunity has arisen. There's a meeting November 6th of 2025 for digital mental health technologies. I think it's going to be one of the first times where we sit down and really say

what kind of technologies are going to work almost agentically. I hate to use the word agending, but I really do think that there's so many people who need care and we don't have enough people to provide it. We're going to need to use some compute power to help us, to upskill people, to do things in a somewhat automated but monitored fashion. And then there are other places where you have complex care where the adjunctive AI is something that people are a lot more comfortable with. So I don't think of this upcoming meeting as digital health specific for mental health. I think of it as a great example of an epidemic that we have of mental health, how we're thinking about it, and then ideally that'll set some groundwork for how we think about other diseases.

You and I were talking earlier today before this podcast about how there's Nielsen data showing that 80% of millennials and Gen Z trust chat GPT more than their doctors. And so we see people wanting the technology to be used in this way. But obviously that's technology that's not currently sort of FDA approved. or regulated in any way. But it's also pretty incredible how, one, how useful it is. And then just, two, how many people want to use it in this way. And in some ways, it's very much filling a huge need because it might take me six weeks to get an appointment with a relevant doctor, even in Boston, which is, you know, where the best health care in the country is. But I can get an answer

from chat GPT in a couple of minutes. Often that is quite helpful and accurate. And, And so it does feel like there's both this need to get ahead of this huge wave that's coming and also to kind of catch up to where we already are. And so I think you're in such an incredibly interesting role. Yeah. As we were mentioning earlier, the Nielsen data, there's Rock Health data too that shows that the silent generation, the oldest people, they're more than willing to give clinicians their data and they really trust clinicians to do something with that.

And so that's the other end of the kind of ageist bias of, oh, older people don't want to do this. In fact, they really do. the younger people, the Gen Z, we know that they get information about health care from their friends. We know that they get it from social media. We know that they maybe 50, 40, 50 percent of them are willing to give their data to clinicians, but also only 40 to 50 percent really trust the health care system as it is today. So that's a group that acts in a different way.

And I think our responsibility is to educate people, hey, if you want to be in charge of your own data, If you want to measure your own things, if you want to use large language models to get answers, then here's how you do it safely. And I think that education is actually partly our collective responsibility between you and myself and others is to really teach people what can you do with this data? What shouldn't you do with it? Where could you ask for answers? What are the risks if you ask something that's not a doctor for an answer and what should you

watch for? And I think that education is really important for us to get out there. And to get out there in an adult learning friendly fashion, some people want a lecture, some people want a pamphlet, some people want TikTok, how are we going to educate people? I think that's an area that I spend a lot of time, like, at night, lying in bed thinking about how can I make people more able to be their own agents? And that patient agency is so important to me. I really appreciate you've this cool, like, mom of teenager vibe because, like, you know, I understand that, like, social media is important. You have to reach people where they are and, you know, love it or hate it. Like that's where so many people are and we have to be realistic about just all the slump advice that people are getting. And I think you have such a cool willingness to go to those places. I want to back up because I think in addition to all the work you're doing, you personally are super cool. So two years ago, you were still practicing cardiologists in addition to all the things you did. You're an MD cardiologist by training. How did you make this jump into the world of politics and government and all those things? You know, my favorite phrase, everybody knows Plato, necessity is the mother of invention. And in my phrase for many years has been, desperation is the mother of adoption. And that's because 10, now 12 years ago in 2013, I used to care for adults with congenital heart disease.

So these are people who are born with heart disease as a baby. And they would turn 16. And as they became young adults, older cardiologists didn't know what to do with them, right? Because they're not a 70. to survive. Yeah, exactly. And they weren't 70 with heart disease. They didn't train in that an adult cardiologist. And the pediatric cardiologist were like, what do you mean you want to have a baby? Like, I don't get that. You're 30 years old. And they didn't deal with that. And so the field was really just blossoming when I was in training. And I love that age group, that 16th, the 34 age group, right? There's just so much growth that happens.

And then my patients kind of didn't want to come to me because they wanted to stay at home in Maine, upstate New York, California, wherever they were. And FaceTime was around. And they were like, why can't we just FaceTime? I was like, because I'm pretty sure I will get, like, arrested for this, you know? Like, I can't, this is not hippo-secure. And so I actually asked for one of the earliest telemedicine licenses at Mass General, where I was and started a Wednesday afternoon telemedicine clinic for all those patients who said, hey, if we're just having a conversation and you already have my studies, why am I leaving school, leaving my family, finding transportation, driving four hours, missing work, not making

money, it doesn't seem very patient-centric. And so it was my patients who introduced me to digital health. I kept doing that for years and kind of nobody got on board. Like there are 15 people who got on board and they were probably on stage with me at TEDx-Boston at Loop, right? But then COVID happened. And that was, you know, they say it's part work, part dedication, part luck. Not that COVID was lucky, but for those of us who were in this field, it was lucky that

we had already had that knowledge and were in the position to do something. I happened to be directing outpatient cardiology at Mass General 60,000 visits a year and we had to shut down completely. And in 48 hours, I was able to turn everybody on. We used the clinical research staff because they had nothing to do now. There was no clinical research. Sure. As tech support for all of our doctors. My kids were tech support for some of them.

I mean, it was hysterical. And we got everybody up and running. We increased the number of visits to 74,000 visits by the next year. We reached more people because we were willing to go virtual. And so that opened my eyes to what was possible. And it was the first time I thought to myself, gee, I could really go from caring for one person at a time to maybe affecting thousands to millions if it's the right time to make that jump. And I thought it was. And the chief innovation officer

position at the ACC, American College of Cardiology happened to be turning over. So just really good timing and a lot of perseverance. Desperation was the mother of adoption for the whole world. And then we were able to grow something out of it. Yeah. So I'd love for you to just keep going on The American College of Cardiology, we talked a little bit about what you're doing on the FDA side, but what does it mean to be the chief innovation officer and what are some of the cool innovations? This is kind of like being Chandler and friends. People are all like, what exactly does that person do? So there's three things that I kind of do every day.

It's a mix of them. One is meeting with companies big and small. They can be established institutions like a Google. They can be a new startup. They can be a wearable company. And really start to understand what is the workflow? or the patient flow into which they best fit and then dive into that. And so that is born a little bit out of my FDA experience too, which is that all of these things sit on a shelf. Great things getting

adopted. 90% of them, not actually scaling. Because oftentimes you really need to combine your clinical and administrative knowledge about how health care works with the tech knowledge of how your tech works. And so that's really the goal we serve is to be that connector. The second is creating the AI-enabled clinician. Podcasts coming soon, note to self. But really helping educate clinicians because you can't just take a class in AI. That's not a thing. So on a regular basis, how do we keep clinicians up to date? And we don't just do for cardiology. We've been talking to the American Association of Family Practice. Everybody wants it, right? So if we create it, we can all share it. And then the third thing is my favorite. Some of the research we do in the background on creating new things. You know, I have an AI

agent with my own voice that answers questions about digital health and cardiology. And the reason we do these kind of things is we really want to experiment with what's possible, what's safe, what does it feel like? And we're working with researchers at NYU and AI and in Cambridge, the UK, on thinking about human AI interaction. Because one of our colleagues, Dan Craft, a good friend of mine presented today as well. And he showed this study that concerned all of us where these GI doctors were doing endoscopies and colonoscopies and they found polyps and then they found better polyps using AI. And then you took the AI away and they started missing polyps. And that was in like a two week or two month period. It's terrifying, right? Are we going to untrain ourselves? So the research

we do is how do you look at the human AI interaction and decide, hey, this is somebody who needs the AI because they kind of get it, but we could clarify it. This is someone who knows so much that they don't even need it. Like, why are we using the energy, the time, right, all of that? And could we detrain them if we start making them dependent? Or if you ask me about a knee, like, I shouldn't even use AI. I'm a heart doctor. I should just say go see the physical therapies, go see the orthopod, don't come to me. And so that human AI in direction is going to be really important in health care. We don't want to use AI all the time. We don't want to use it never. But we have no idea. when the right time is to use it to make the clinician better and the patient better.

What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain, and you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail first. free, you get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. How are you thinking about with the ACC, you guys are setting a lot of training policies and things like that? So how is the training that a cardiologist receives in, say, residency changing to reflect the world that they're going to eventually enter

as attendings? Yeah. Our colleagues at the med school, level, in fact, are already introducing innovation curricula. Oh, that's great. And part of that through med school and then, you know, residency fellowship, I give lectures on innovation is not just AI or just digital health. It's how is care delivery really being transformed? And that's the basis of all of this. So it doesn't matter exactly which technology you're talking about remote monitoring or an AI

algorithm. How is care being transformed? And the way I like to think of it as a pyramid. chronic management is almost everything that most people do, right? And so how do you do chronic management in the community where somebody lives to let them stay there, stay healthy? But then identify next level of the pyramid, a little more narrow, a little more urgent, rising risk, and ideally treat them in the community so they can stay there. And then when you get to the tippy top of that pyramid and you really have significant disease, yeah, you need a secondary, tertiary, quaternary hospital, you need resources. but hey, we've reduced the number of people who need those resources, who have tougher outcomes,

and we've gotten them to the right place at the right time. And so that reframing is kind of how a lot of us start to teach innovation. We don't teach one top or another. We teach care transformation. And in that, whatever the newest technology is, we'll now be able to teach that to them as well as we move forward. I love that. And it's, I think, very encouraging to know how on top of it, at least, on the cardiology side, all of this is, because this does feel like something that's happening

for the probably first time, the most exciting breakthroughs that are happening in health right now aren't physician or clinician or MD led. That's right. You know, it's these AI researchers in Silicon Valley and whatnot here in Boston. But, you know, there's a risk that those things start to get really divorced, right? You have really cool AI doing things, but no adoption in the clinical side. and doctors that don't understand what this is because the anatomy and physiology training that they've had is very far away from machine learning, which feels, you know, alien and futuristic or something.

That's very true. You know, the other thing. The other thing I think about a lot, though, is who's coming up next, right? And I look at kind of my daughters and what they do. And Girls Inc. is a group that teaches STEM to kind of middle school, high school students. And I went there maybe a year or two ago now to help teach them about large, sandwich models. And they were kind of paying attention, kind of not. There was one girl who was like chewing her gum so loudly and then her curls got stuck in her gum. And she was trying to like,

and I was just, you know, sometimes you're talking, you're distracted by that one person in the audience. This kid, I just kept starting her. I was like, you were not listening to me. And then we got to the activity part. And we were just going to create a dessert using chat GPT was the thing we had up on on the screen. And I started like trying to teach them how to generate a prompt. All of a sudden this girl perks up. She like rips the gum out of her hair, like throws it out on her way up, and she goes, let me help. This is a fifth grader, mind you. She then asks her class for all sorts of input. They got who had a dairy allergy, who had what, who liked their grandma's recipe, who didn't speak English. And they created like several models of tres leeches recipes for like the dairy free

and the gluten free and the grandma. And they did it in Spanish and they did short versions and long versions took them 15 minutes. It was, I just watched it. And I was like, this is not a digital native. This is a human who has literally been brought up knowing nothing else, but this as a way to interact with the world. And so when they come, I have no idea what I'm going to teach them by then. Maybe I'll be retired. But, you know, I think that there is a lot of hope in the future. And right now, therefore, a lot of the focus is teaching them the ethics, teaching them the boundaries, teaching them responsibility. Some of that, unfortunately, they're going to learn on their own,

teaching them cybersecurity. So I think a lot of that's what we need to teach the younger people. And then for now, there's a lot of us, you know, older people out there who are still practicing and doing things. And so a lot of our job has to be, okay, how do we adapt while we're still doing this so that we're relevant to the population we're trying to care for? Yeah, on a very different scale. I have a two and a half year old daughter.

And so when we were choosing her preschool, which she's about a month into, it was very much like, what are the skills that are important to us, you know, as we think about the sort of working world she will enter that's still 20 years away. And it feels like whatever it is, it will look nothing like today and nothing like the world. I mean, my husband and I enter. It is hard to predict what that's going to look like. but I'm excited to see it. I laugh because, as I was thinking about your two-and-a-half-year-old,

she's not going to need the thing we're creating now. At ACCC, we're creating a prompt generation guide for practicing clinicians. How do you write a good prompt to make large language models work for you? We're creating guides for wearables. How do you take that wearable daughter and make it relevant to your health care provider, right? And how does a health care provider understand that? all of those things may not be necessary in the future. For now they are. Definitely. Yeah. And I think just because this is the Woot Podcast, just continue on that thought. How do you think about wearables? And there's a ton of technology that's historically been in this wellness space. And there was a bit of a brick wall between that and the healthcare space. And just like the pandemic accelerated the acceptance of Zoom for telemedicine and sort of new ways of accessing care, I think there's been a convergence of these spaces colliding. And, you know, maybe even going back to two years ago

when you were a practicing cardiologist, how do you think about the role that wearables play? And how should patients who have all this data about themselves bring that to a doctor when the doctor doesn't yet understand what a wearable is and what to do with that data? So you're really hitting the nail on the head with the challenge, which is I think wearables are in fact the only way we are going to achieve population health goals. We can't achieve population health without the use of wearables. And I say that fully biased as a cardiologist, knowing that cardiometabolic risk factors are in fact our largest driver of longevity. And this is what I was talking about earlier today in my TED talk. In order for us to do that, we need to really partner with our patients.

And we can't be paternalistic or maternalistic anymore. It's a partnership. And the phrase I used earlier today is it's not consumerism, it's patient agency, and it's really my job and my colleague's job to teach our clinicians that and to get them to accept that culture change. Because the level of science that you create here at WOOP, that other wearables create, it's real science. That science needs to be respected. And I think there's a, you know, sometimes I call it a wall, sometimes I just call it a gap. There's a gap between medical remote monitoring that's getting closer and closer to the patient in the community. And there's a rise of wearables being just technically more and more exquisite such that the only thing left to bridge those two is some form of infrastructure

to help the wearable data get into what we consider the medical field spectrum world. I think some of the novel AI algorithms generate is going to help us pull said data together with your electronic health record data or with other things to start being really one ecosystem. I think we're on the verge of it. So if you ask me this question in three years, I sincerely hope we're going to be there. Because again, I don't think we can achieve population health without the active and broad use of wearables for our patients. I love that you said that, obviously very aligned with that. That's why I've been here for 13 years.

I think one thing that I found very frustrating for a really long time was like I would want to talk to my doctors about my whoop data and they wouldn't be receptive. And I think you are very much on the bleeding edge of being excited about this data and also taking the time to understand how to make sense of it. For our listeners who are on wearables and maybe trying to bring that in and their doctors aren't as caught up, do you have any advice for them on how to feel heard and all of that? And also just how to think about it because, you know, the wearables aren't saying, this is your diagnosis, like go have this conversation. It's often more subtle things like here's definitive proof that your sleep is getting worse, but I don't really know what that means or what I'm supposed to do about it. Or, you know, my resting heart rate's been creeping up for the past three years. Should I care about that? You know, those kind of moments where there isn't a diagnosis behind that, but there is maybe something that's notewy.

Yeah. Yeah, that's worth addressing. I would say for a moment put yourself in the average clinician's shoes today. The majority of this country is still based in fee for service, if you will, and not value-based care. I hope that will continue to change, but it's going at a slow pace just because we're a capitalistic market. And so the amount of time your doctor has to spend with you is shrinking or your nurse. And it's not because they don't want to spend time with you. It's because they are being asked to do more with less. hospital margins are decreasing, clinical practices are closing, secondary hospitals are struggling. So just remember that there's a lot of forces that make them not necessarily able to spend the time with you that they want. Now, with that in mind, you likely have one or two things that they really want to make sure to check with you. And you may have the same or different things in mind. And so what I like doing is really messaging your doctor not with, here's a hundred sheets of my print-down.

of what I see, right? Here are all the graphs read them. Because that's overwhelming. We're not sure what to do with it. And it's a little bit scary if you're legally responsible now for 100 sheets of something in which something may exist, right? And now it's been given to you. But rather, if you could be really concise, I know you probably have things that you want to go for with me at our upcoming annual visit. The two things I've been focusing on are my sleep and blank. I do have some wearables that I use. And they are finding the following for me. I'd love if there were a moment for me to talk to you or someone on your team about that when I come in. Now that's you recognizing, hey, I want to be a partner in this.

I know what my goals are. This is what's happening. And it's not like, oh, my God, my sleep is awful according to this, tell me what to do. That is a very long conversation. But if it is a focus conversation, or I've already tried the following things. I'm already trying magnesium before, right? Whatever the running thing is, right? Say that you're using it.

so that they know what you're already kind of doing. And I think that will probably get you a better reception from your clinician during that visit. And then the other thing I'll say is give your cliche a bit of a break if they look super hairy like they're running around all day. Like that may not be the day. It may be, hey, Doc, I wanted to talk to you about my, you know, wearables. But maybe I'll just follow up with you about that in a couple weeks. Or, you know, can I see someone on your team who does this? Or remember, it's a partnership, but they want to help if you can. can give them guidance right now, that would be great. It's not true for everybody. I'm talking about the somewhat reluctant, busy clinician. Many clinicians are more than happy to take your information,

but they'll tell you the same thing. Don't throw 100 papers at me. If you could somehow help me with this process and coalesce some of it for me, that would be great. Yeah, I think that's great advice. And I think sort of the meaty takeaway for people is to help the doctor understand what your actual concern is and to go a level deeper than just my loop sleep scores are lower. But, you What is that actually manifesting for you? I love that, the symptoms. That's right, Emily. And I will say, you know, whoop is a leader in wearables.

And so a lot of other companies out there are looking up to you. I appreciate that call out. And actually a fun personal story is my stepfather has AFIB. And he got a whoop when the new MG product came out back in May because we have an ECG. And last time he went into AFIB, he used it. He took an ECG. and there's an export PDF that you can send the ECG trace to your clinician. And so without going in for an emergency visit, he was able to say, I have this ECG, here's what I'm feeling,

and then kind of get to the follow-up kind of more interventional care a lot faster. And so it was really cool to see that because my team worked on that for about three years. And then all of a sudden it was like very close to home. And so we are thinking a lot as we get closer and closer to health as opposed to just wellness. and that ECD feature is an FDA cleared feature, so something that we partnered, not you and I directly, but the FDA and WOOP, to bring to market, we were really thinking about how do we not just leave you with a sort of fun fact you have AFB, but actually help you transfer to care because WOOP isn't going to treat your AFIB.

That's right. But the idea is to bring that awareness. I mean, that is, so first of all, congratulations to you and your team, because that is A-FET. The second is, yes, with the FTA approved technologies, I think there is such an opportunity to really help the clinicians. And your CEO, Will and I were talking about this the other day. In that pyramid I talked about earlier, the middle of that pyramid of health care is the rising risk population.

And that's where these FDA-approved wearable technologies can really help us identify somebody in their daily life, wherever they are in the community, and get them to the right care sooner. And that's really what we're trying to do. And so, again, when I say we need it for population health, that's a perfect example of how we can actually enact a care pathway based on the alert of a wearable. And one thing I'd love to end on, you mentioned the smaller AI startups that might be listening. And for all of those people who are building and vibe coding in this AI health intersection,

I've seen so many cool products come out and it's like AI on your EHR. And I've heard stories where people are like, the AI read my, you know, my ECG, my MRI, whatever it was, before my doctor did. And, you know, it was all this people having really incredible experience. Obviously, those are, in some ways, giving profound, unregulated care. What advice would you give to those startups about how to interact with the FDA in this moment and how to work with your team? I'll start with FDA.

I'll do my team and then I'll give my personal take. For the FDA, as early as you can start talking to the FDA about what you're creating, you're not just going to get advice on, am I going to be approved or not? You're going to get advice on, here's where regulation falls. Here's where payment codes fall. Here's where clinicians tend to use things. Here are gaps we see. Here's where you're unique.

We are really at the FDA trying to be very holistic in our approach to companies. And the earlier you come, the more we can help you to make that process easier. So that's my general advice from the FDA. And again, I don't speak for the U.S. government. This is just me and my position. The second, for the American College of Cardiology, we are really excited to see all of these companies and entrepreneurs. and sometimes they're actually clinicians who, you know, partner with an engineer, really excited to see this.

But I will say the path from that to scaling to be used in medicine is a long path. And many may not make it. However, if you really want to do that, do two things. One is go deep. Go deep and be really good at the thing you do. Don't try to do a little bit of everything. Everyone else is trying that too. And it makes it a very hard market.

it for you. Go deep and be better at whatever that technology is that made you decide to build a company around it, right? That's number one. Number two is, please don't think that your platform that you create is going to be like the end-all be-all of all user experiences. I hear from so many people like they're going to love my platform. The truth is the majority of your deep technologies will be adopted by somebody else and used in their platform. That's probably your best way out right now. I'm not trying to stop the diamond in a rough from being like the next Google or the next whoop, right? But I'm just saying the majority of people. So go deep, be really good at your tech.

The reason that you exist should always remain kind of your North Star for the company. And the second is, yes, think about usability. But don't think that you are going to control the entire user experience and people are going to come to your platform. Because by and large, we have seen that that is not per se happening. Now, I'm talking to you here at Woop and you're able to do that. But it's really hard. It's really hard. And it takes a long time.

and it just may not be for everybody. So just keep your eye out for that. Well, Ami, it makes me very excited that you are leading these two incredible institutions, or at least these departments within them, because I do think that sometimes, you know, government and these big institutions get a bad rap for moving slowly. And I think you're just very much on top of the trend and going to make everybody safer and healthier because of it. So thank you for the work you do and thank you for being here today.

Thank you so much for having me. I will end with one thought, which is it is delightful. to be across the table with you. I think the number of women in technology is growing. It's not growing at a fast enough pace, but whatever side of this field you're coming from, whether it's the tech, whether it's clinical, whether it's business, the more women we see in this field,

I think the faster we're going to grow. It's really been a great experience to share this stage with you. Oh, thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at whoop.com. Call us 508, 443-4952. If you think about joining whoop,

you can visit whoop.com, sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members to use the code will, W-I-L, to get a $60 credit on W-W-Acessaries when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.