LESSONS FROM THE LEAP
Host: Ghazenfer Mansoor (CEO, Technology Rivers)
Guest: Dr. Kashif Piracha (Physician & Digital Health Entrepreneur)
Dr. Kashif J. Piracha, MD, FACP, is a board-certified internist and nephrologist whose work spans patient care, medical education, clinical writing, and digital health communication. With nearly two decades of experience in U.S. medicine, he serves as a hospitalist at Houston Methodist Willowbrook Hospital, caring for medically complex patients.
As Internal Medicine Clerkship Director at Texas A&M University College of Medicine, he trains future physicians and creates clinical algorithms, journal publications, and continuing medical education programs. A medical entrepreneur and digital creator, he develops medical content through Piracha Consulting LLC for healthcare organizations, educational companies, physicians, and the public.
In this episode of Lessons from the Leap, host Ghazenfer Mansoor, CEO of Technology Rivers, known for AI, SaaS, and HIPAA-compliant HealthTech development, and author of Beyond the Download, talks with Dr. Kashif Piracha, a board-certified internist, nephrologist, medical educator, and digital health entrepreneur. After nearly 20 years in clinical medicine, Dr. Piracha expanded into teaching, medical content review, and health education on social media. He believes medicine can no longer be practiced only inside an office or hospital.
The conversation explores artificial intelligence in healthcare and where it needs guardrails. Dr. Piracha warns against uploading personal health information to AI and argues that AI should disclose its sources. Ghazenfer explains how HIPAA compliant AI works, from BAAs with zero data retention to keeping a human in the loop. They also cover AI scribes, scheduling, and clinical workflows people will actually follow.
For founders, the message is clear: build with domain experts, clean data, and simple workflows that improve patient outcomes. As Dr. Piracha puts it, even the best care only matters if people can access it.
This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers, where we revolutionize healthcare and AI with software that solves industry problems.
We are a software development agency that specializes in crafting affordable, high-quality software solutions for startups and growing enterprises in the healthcare space.
Technology Rivers harnesses AI to enhance performance, enrich decision-making, create customized experiences, gain a competitive advantage, and achieve market differentiation.
Interested in working with us? Go to https://technologyrivers.com/ to tell us about your project.
[00:00:01] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Hello and welcome to Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host, Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneurs, founders, business leaders, healthcare entrepreneurs to talk about the bold decisions, pivotal moments, and the decision that shaped their journey.
This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation through AI and technology. We work with healthcare companies helping them create HIPAA compliant software products, creating clinical workflows and bringing technology and AI into the organizations.
Today on Lessons from the Leap, we are joined by Dr. Kashif Piracha, a board-certified internist, nephrologist, medical educator, and digital health entrepreneur, focused on making healthcare clearer and more accessible.
Dr. Piracha, welcome to the show. Tell us about your background, how you got to where you are today. This is your opportunity to talk and share your experiences.
[00:01:03] Kashif Piracha: Yes, thank you, Ghazenfer, for inviting me for this show. I’m really very happy to be here. And I think it’s a very good show that you got going and it’s exciting to be a part of it.
Yeah, so basically I was actually born in Karachi, Pakistan and I just received my early education in Pakistan. I did my medical school, King Edward Medical University in Lahore, Pakistan.
Then I moved to America and I’ve completed residency in internal medicine and fellowship in nephrology and gotten both certified in internal medicine and nephrology. I’ve been practicing now for almost 20 years.
Most of the time, my practice was just limited to clinical medicine. However, I’ve also been teaching medical students over the last seven years and teaching internal medicine to second and third year medical students. So that has brought some satisfaction and fulfillment as well.
In addition to teaching and clinical medicine, I’m also working on continuing medical education. I create continuing medical education content. I also talk about health topics on social media.
I have a following on social media, people who follow me for the content that I create. Basically, I’ve been trying to spread my wings a little bit and in addition to doing just the clinical medicine and teaching, I’ve been trying to impact healthcare in other ways, like on social media, continuing creating content.
Because I think, and I firmly believe, that in 2026, medicine can no longer just be practiced within the confines of an office or a hospital. We live in a world where information is so readily accessible that actually there is a lot of misinformation there too.
So one of the things that I’ve been trying to do is to create authentic content that actually can help make a difference between misinformation and actual authentic information.
Because I think a lot of times I’m coming across people who really don’t really know that the information that they are receiving, how authentic it is, that’s creating a big problem.
What I’m trying to do is to make a big digital impact that actually can really make a difference in a much larger segment of society than can just be treated in a hospital or in an office.
[00:04:19] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. No, thanks for sharing. So I saw on your profile the medical content reviewing. That’s one of the things you do.
And then you talk about a lot of misinformation. So is that the content reviewing, is it for the hospitals or is it usually for the people who are putting it out and helping? Or is it a translating between what we see versus what patients should know? Can you talk a little bit more about that?
[00:04:48] Kashif Piracha: So basically what happens is that there are many websites that are dedicated to creating and publishing medical educational content. And basically what they do is that they have medical writers. These are journalists who specialize in health topics.
And they write content on health topics. And basically what these websites do is that they hire physicians to actually proofread the content and make sure that it’s authentic and medically accurate before they publish it on their website, because obviously any reputed website is not going to want to have misinformation generated and published on their website, which can lead to more harm than doing any benefit.
So that’s what I was doing. I’ve been working with a website where they have medical content and I was acting as the reviewer for that medical content to check it and make sure that it’s up to date and it has verifiable information.
[00:06:07] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Okay, so that part is another one. So in today’s time, people are now tapping into ChatGPT, Claude, and loading their information, asking all this advice, or sharing their symptoms, asking AI about all the recommendations. And obviously those are not the medical recommendation, but at the same time people are believing a lot.
And as those contents are being created on those sites, I’m sure a lot of that content is also coming out of the AI. So where do you see this thing, and how do you solve that problem where there’s a lot of misinformation even in AI? So do you see that across? And then what’s the best way to address that?
[00:06:55] Kashif Piracha: Yeah, first of all, I definitely don’t want anybody to upload their personal health information to the AI because that’s a very risky proposition. Because once you upload your personal information, then who knows? It can be stored forever and who knows who is going to have access to that?
So I definitely want to dissuade people from ever uploading their personal information. A lot of people just look up their symptoms. That’s anonymous. You’re not giving your own personal information.
And to a certain extent, I’m a big believer that not everything is all bad and not everything is all good. And most of the things that we deal with in our daily lives are somewhere between more good and less bad or more bad and less good. But I don’t really believe in all or any kind of hypothesis.
So there are some good things about looking up your symptoms on AI. I’m not going to say that everything is bad. AI can definitely give you some idea about the seriousness of your symptoms.
And one of the ways, even though I’m not advocating for it, patients have told me that they looked up their symptoms and that the AI told them that it’s a very serious symptom. “You should go to the ER.” And patients are making these decisions about whether to go to their doctor’s office or urgent care or ER based upon some of the information that’s given by the AI.
The only problem is, is there any doctor who is proofreading that information? That’s the only problem. AI in itself is not good or bad.
The only problem is who is reviewing the information to make sure it’s accurate. And if there’s nobody making sure that it’s accurate, then you get into a situation where you don’t know what’s true and what’s not true.
And I think basically what we really need going forward is that we need to have some sort of a mechanism by which every information that’s churned out by AI has to be a legal requirement that they disclose their sources from where they are getting that information.
So the consumer has the ability to go and check and make sure that the information is accurate. And as long as the AI is disclosing their sources and people can check it out, then I think it will increase the confidence people have in AI and actually it will increase the confidence the doctors have in AI as well.
So it’s all about acting responsibly with safeguards. So the only time you run into a problem is when you have technology with no safeguards.
But if you put safeguards in practice, then AI can solve a lot of problems because as you already know, we have a terrible shortage of doctors in our country and a lot of people don’t have access, easy access to a doctor or easy access to medical information. And some of that gap can be filled by AI, but again, it has to be used responsibly.
[00:10:39] Ghazenfer Mansoor: No, no, good points. I think the most important part is, as you said, AI is giving you responses, but there has to be some reviewer.
So I think, and this is one part of our work, which is building healthcare software products, we always talk about… there always has to be a human in the loop. Without that, AI is not ready. So in our business…
So I think a couple of examples, for example, we build the personal health predictive in applications, but once AI generates, then the doctors review it, they can edit it, and before it goes to the patient…
[00:11:20] Kashif Piracha: To a patient.
[00:11:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor: You have to approve it. And the second part, I think the one that you were earlier mentioning about uploading the data, yes, it is very risky to upload any healthcare information on AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, whatever is that, because by default, that data is being trained by the LLMs.
However, there is a process, as again as we work on these, build these HIPAA compliant clinical workflow applications, there is a process that needs to be followed where you first have to sign BAAs with the LLMs so that they commit to zero data retention and commit to no training of data.
In that case, we can use the LLMs, we can load the data. But at the same time, I think the bigger part is a hallucination.
A lot of AI data, as you load all of the data, AI is not gonna process all of that data because context is very limited in AI and Claude and ChatGPT. So when you are loading a lot of that data…
[00:12:21] Kashif Piracha: So thank you…
[00:12:23] Ghazenfer Mansoor: There is a way of tokenizing the data, bringing it in… Bring it into a small change before you actually do the search and give it to the AI.
So that approach, it’s a standard approach. It’s called RAG, retrieval augmented generation, which is used for processing a large set of data. So this combining with BAA and healthcare specific, other HIPAA compliance specific approaches will make it HIPAA compliant.
So the AI applications are being done, HIPAA compliant applications are being done at this time. It’s just that you have to follow the right process. It’s not like a traditional development.
[00:13:05] Kashif Piracha: Yes, definitely. I’m sure there’s a lot of progress that’s being made and it will continue to be made because as you will go forward, the consumers are going to demand safeguards themselves, because the whole thing about misinformation, only good that has come out of this is that the fact that there is a lot of misinformation out there is widespread, people know there is a lot of misinformation.
So that’s a good thing. So when people know that there is something going on, then they take steps to protect themselves from it. So if nobody knew there was misinformation, then everybody would accept any kind of information.
But now that a lot of people know there’s misinformation, they are going to require that the software and the technology that is being generated and built have built-in mechanisms and safeguards to make sure that it’s authentic and there’s no fake information.
So I think HIPAA compliance and other safeguards that are being put in place are definitely a step in the right direction. And I think as time will go on, this is only going to become more and more important.
And we hopefully will get to a point where every software and every technology becomes HIPAA compliant and has all these safeguards built in them.
[00:14:39] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So you mentioned you teach as well, and so obviously you have dealt with both sides, on the bedside as well as in the classroom…
[00:14:47] Kashif Piracha: Thank…
[00:14:48] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Teaching students how to approach real world clinical problems. How has your approach changed, teaching approach, after being in a field yourself?
[00:15:03] Kashif Piracha: Well, you take into account your own experiences. Once you are practicing medicine… so there’s a lot of difference between studying medicine and practicing medicine. And that’s not just for medicine, that’s for many walks of life.
You can study textbooks and when you go into the actual field and you try to implement the knowledge that you gain from the textbooks to real scenarios, then you realize that everything is not exactly what it is made out to be in the textbooks because there could be other factors to take into consideration, restrictions, limitations and stuff like that.
One of the benefits of teaching after practicing yourself is that you know what the workflow is like and what are the differences between just textbook knowledge and actually taking care of patients.
And then you can help the students because you can actually tell them that this is what they’re reading, because that’s what you read yourself. And then you can tell them that this is the way things are going to be implemented so they can see for themselves the difference in the approach.
I always try to look at my experiences in patient care and try to make that a part of the education that I’m providing to the students. So that’s really helpful because that way they can see a few steps ahead about what it’s going to be like once they’re going to be dealing with live patients without any supervision.
And I think that really helps the students mature much faster. And I think when these students go into their real life and start dealing with patients, they are better equipped.
So if you have a teacher who actually has done what you are going to do, then I think you are in a much better place as a student to learn from them. And it will make success come to you much easier than if you had a teacher who did not have practical experience.
[00:17:23] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Okay. So you also have experience in consulting content, digital health technology. So in your view, where are the opportunities at the intersection of medicine and technology?
[00:17:40] Kashif Piracha: So the opportunities are everywhere. Technology has been a part of medicine forever. We have so many medical procedures done with devices and all these devices have technologies behind them, engineering.
So basically, we’ve got a lot of equipment that we use, echo machines and all sorts of equipment that have a lot of technology behind it. Now, that was the traditional technology.
Now, we are taking into account AI as well. I think one of the benefits that AI can potentially provide is also to take the data and to try to predict what might happen in the future. Now it may not be accurate, but what we really need is that in healthcare, we are always one step behind.
So what happens is that I’m hearing a lot of stuff that metabolic syndrome and obesity is gonna be the next tsunami, and that fatty liver disease and other diseases like that are going to be so prominent and all that. These things have been going around for ages. There’ll be so many million diabetics by the year 2030.
All of these predictions are a little bit helpful because then people who are making the decisions about health policy can actually make policy keeping in mind what’s going to happen five, 10 years down the road.
What we really need is some authentic technology that can predict some of what we are going to be facing in the future so we can make better preparations. Because the problem I’m seeing in medicine is the epidemics and they happen and then we react to them.
Our response is reactive after the epidemic or problem has already happened. But what I want is that as clinicians, we need to be proactive. So we have a way of guessing ahead of time what it is we will be dealing with five years down the road.
So we can put some policies now to make sure that situation is not going to be that bad. That’s the kind of technology that we really need. We need technology that will help us become more proactive rather than reactive.
And if this can be done in a way that’s authentic and has reliable data behind it, then I think that can make a world of difference.
[00:20:51] Ghazenfer Mansoor: That’s a really good point. I think…
[00:20:52] Kashif Piracha: In India.
[00:20:53] Ghazenfer Mansoor: I’m sure there’s some there, but a lot of those need to be built.
[00:20:55] Kashif Piracha: So thank you.
[00:20:57] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So while we are on it, I have a question about AI. So AI is changing how healthcare… in fact AI is changing every field, especially healthcare, how healthcare is moving. So where do you see AI can genuinely help patients and physicians?
And where is the border line? And where should we be more cautious?
[00:21:29] Kashif Piracha: Yeah, so process improvement, right? So process improvement and communication are two ways where AI can make a big difference. So as you know, there’s always going to be questions.
Patients have a lot of questions. They call their doctor’s office for information. And communication is a big part of any doctor-patient interaction and you want to make sure there is clear communication.
Because if you don’t have good communication, then things fall through the cracks and that impacts patient outcomes. What you want to do is that the communication has to be good and precise. That’s one of the ways in which AI can help.
Some of the communication gaps can be actually fixed by the AI. Then again, like I said, when it comes… AI is already making doctors more efficient because a lot of doctors are already using the AI software that can generate a note after a doctor-patient interaction. So doctors don’t have to write the whole note themselves.
It saves them time and the conversation can bring into the note a lot more details than if the doctor had written the note themselves by hand. So it’s already making things more efficient.
Some of the ways I can think is that in explaining things to the patients, doctors may have limited time. They may not be able to give enough time to every patient as they would have liked because they have a bunch of patients to see.
But provided with some basic information, AI can help explain things to patients in more detail, and that will save the clinician’s time and that will improve the patient’s satisfaction and that will make sure that the communication is more robust. But there are many other ways in which AI can also help.
AI is already helping doctors with patient scheduling. Patients are scheduling appointments through AI software. I think the sky is the limit, but I think the applications are just going to continue to grow.
Like I’ve been saying from the beginning, we just have to make sure that there are checks and balances in the system, so make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
[00:24:23] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Well, no, you have a good point. So we have seen a lot of those applications and some of those we also build, describing AI and scheduling.
The VICE is the one of the ones we are seeing more demand for, where rather than people typing in, you call in and then… but behind the scenes the AI system, a VICE scheduling, we did that, and a document processing.
There are a whole lot of things, whether it’s insurance benefits, the claim benefits, opinion. A lot of those opportunities, the workflows, people are automating those workflows and we’re seeing all these different types of needs in healthcare.
So I think while we are on it, clinical workflows, we were talking about it. What do you think in your perspective, what needs to be done right from the clinic side, physician side, hospital side, in order to get that workflow done right? Is there anything they need to make sure it’s done right?
[00:25:30] Kashif Piracha: Well, we just need the standardization, right? Because there are many different hospitals. There are many different hospital systems.
There are many different electronic health record systems. There are many different electronic medical record systems.
So what’s going to happen is that if every single one of them has their own way of dealing with AI, then that will create a problem, because then some things that were done in one system are not being done in the other system.
And again, there will be some inaccuracies, there may be some errors, and those are the things that we don’t want to happen. So what we want to create is a standardized system where information is processed and recommendations are made in a way that’s standardized across different health systems.
While we are not there yet, it’s always a goal that we should keep working toward. But again, from a hospital side, the workflows are something that need to be put into place first.
Then the most important thing is that somebody needs to be monitoring to make sure that those workflows are being made a part of decision making. Because a lot of times what happens is that workflows are put into place, but then if you put a very cumbersome workflow into place, that’s not easy to follow.
People will find ways to go around it, and then your workflow is actually as good as nothing. So you have to make sure that the workflow actually achieves what it’s designed to do.
The whole point of having a workflow is to go from a starting point to an end point in an efficient manner so that the outcomes are good and the process is not so cumbersome that a lot of time is wasted.
So you want to do things in an efficient manner, but at the very same time, you want to make sure that the outcomes are going to be good. You don’t want to make systems more efficient where at the end of the day, the outcomes are worse. So there’s no point in actually developing those systems.
So I think what everyone has to do is to make sure they focus on their workflows and make sure they are efficient, but also that they improve patient outcomes. Once you have a workflow like that that you have developed, then things will become much easier. But again, you have to make sure that the workflow is being followed.
[00:28:18] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, absolutely. So I think we’re talking about multiple things. User experience, that’s the key part.
You wanna make it something that patient doctors can easily use, not super complicated, because then there’ll be even training and it’s gonna be a big effort to even make that change.
So that’s always… and secondly, building the right thing. If the workflow… if you solve it technology just for the sake of technology, which we have seen.
And I think that brings another comment, many times the people who are building the tech, they are not from the domain. And that’s where those gaps do come in.
Having somebody like you on the healthcare side, on the company side, guiding the firms how to build, because you are the subject matter expert. So having a subject matter expert that really knows the workflow can help guide that process and that makes it easier.
[00:29:20] Kashif Piracha: Please come in.
[00:29:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So in my book Beyond the Download, which was more focused on mobile, how to build mobile apps that people love using share every day. These are the things that we also talk about in Drug.
You have to build the app that actually people are willing to use because you have to solve a specific problem. Just building an app, there are so many. Same is the case on a healthcare workflow side.
Similarly, if the user experience is not good, if it’s not super easy to use, people are not gonna adapt it. They will just give up. Not everybody is really tech savvy.
And I think the last part that you touched indirectly is the data part. So if your data is not… you have to have the right data in order to have the AI giving you the right results. So AI can answer what you already give as an input.
AI is not gonna guess from public data. So yes, whatever is the source, whether it’s PubMed, whether it’s your internal data, when you’re creating these workflows, it’s important to have the data mapped right.
Data has to be clean, data has to be mapped, and you have to have your workflows because technology will implement your workflows. They’re not just gonna create a workflow that nobody uses. So that’s how once it’s your workflow, your data, that’s where the technology and AI can make it really successful.
[00:30:44] Kashif Piracha: Yeah, exactly. Basically, all of us have our own workflows. That goes without even saying, every single person in this world who has a job has a workflow, right?
They have their own workflow and I don’t care what kind of job it is. Every job has a workflow. You go there, you do some work and you get paid for the work that you have done.
And whatever work you are doing is done in a particular manner, there are things you start with, there are things you do in the middle, and there are things you do at the end. That’s your workflow. And every day you do the same.
You don’t start with the things at the end and put them in front of everything else. So the thing is that people don’t realize, but every single thing we do has a workflow. Even getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth is a workflow, even though you don’t look at it like that.
The only thing is that, again, what happens is that workflows are created, but then technology changes. Let’s take the example of this, doctors using AI technology to get patients’ doctor note written. Now, in the old days, the doctor had to type up everything himself.
But now AI can do some part of that and that has changed the workflow because it has made things more efficient. You can include more details in the note and it will take less time and the doctor can see two more patients every day because of the time saved.
At the end of the day, two or three extra patients are getting the benefit of being seen by the doctor because of the workflow and the doctor also is a little bit more satisfied because they don’t have to waste time or spend more time writing the notes. So it became more efficient, but it improved patient outcomes, which is why it’s a success.
But again, 20, 30, 40 years from now, there’ll be some new technology that can make it even more efficient. So that’s the whole point about workflows. You start them, but then new technology comes in and you have to make sure you incorporate the new technology so your workflow becomes more efficient.
[00:33:09] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely.
No, thank you. Thank you for your insight. So we have been talking with Dr. Kashif Piracha, who shared such valuable insights with us. Dr. Piracha, where can people find more about you and your work? Is there a website, is there LinkedIn?
[00:33:26] Kashif Piracha: Yeah, definitely. I’m most easily available on LinkedIn. That’s where most of my content that I create is available on LinkedIn.
And I’m happy for anybody to reach out to me. I read every message I get on LinkedIn. You don’t need, like some people on LinkedIn, you send them a connection request and LinkedIn says, “You need to have their email first before you can connect.” So I don’t have any barriers like that.
Everybody’s welcome to send me a connection request and a message on LinkedIn and follow me and my content and tell me what are your interests. And maybe I can create more content about what people want me to talk about.
And I’m sure you can, in the footnotes of the podcast, you can include my LinkedIn link for people to click and access my profile and get connected to me. I’m really looking forward to people reaching out after they see this podcast. Thank you for this opportunity.
[00:34:41] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, absolutely. We will include the LinkedIn link in the podcast description. So just a couple of small questions, we call it a rapid fire round, just small one liner questions. So what’s one habit that keeps you grounded?
[00:34:59] Kashif Piracha: The one habit that keeps me grounded is always to remember that one of the reasons I became a doctor was to make sure that I provide benefit to my patients and I should never ever lose sight of that fact.
So being a doctor is a responsibility and that responsibility is something that’s very important to me and anytime any crisis, any difficult situation comes in, I just have to make sure that I do things that are in the best interest of my patients and I never lose sight of that fact.
[00:35:37] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Entrepreneurship or medicine, what challenges you most?
[00:35:42] Kashif Piracha: Well, I’m doing both at the same time now, entrepreneurship and medicine. Medicine is a bit less risky because a lot of it is fact oriented. You read about things, you apply them.
Entrepreneurship is definitely much more risky, but that’s where the adventurous side of your temperament and personality comes into place, with which you can experiment things and some things go well and… but it keeps you a little bit… The excitement part and adrenaline rush is a little bit more with entrepreneurship.
So I think we should have a fair combination of both and everybody should dip their toes into both to try to get a feel for themselves. But I think at the end of the day, we have to keep both of them going so we can have a very balanced personality.
[00:36:39] Ghazenfer Mansoor: What’s one health myth that you wish people stopped believing?
[00:36:47] Kashif Piracha: Well, there are so many myths out there. I think one of the myths is that… this is in itself a myth that you can get credible health information online from ChatGPT and Claude and stuff.
This is itself a myth because a lot of people are just getting this information and they’re not looking for the sources from where the information was generated.
So I want to break this myth that you don’t accept every medical information you receive from social media without any documented sources. Only accept the medical information that has references at the end of it with the resources attached because…
And one of the good things is that, in the old days, reading journal articles was just very cumbersome. The doctor has to go to the library, they have to pull the article, then you have to read the article. It was not accessible to the common man.
But these days, PubMed, a lot of articles on PubMed are actually free that anybody can see. And they have an abstract where they have the summary of all the findings.
So don’t accept any and all information. Make sure the information that you are getting has sources behind it. And do your due diligence.
Just don’t blindly accept anything that everybody says. Because remember, I want people to remember that your health, you are the primary person who is going to be most affected by your health.
So you can’t leave everything to your doctor or to your nurse practitioner, you have to take responsibility that you are doing your due diligence.
[00:38:46] Ghazenfer Mansoor: What one skill should every physician develop?
[00:38:54] Kashif Piracha: Communication, I think that’s the most important thing. Clear communication, it’s not that easy. It seems very easy that you can talk about things, but medical information is complex.
Medical jargon is pretty complicated and it’s not that easy to explain it to people so they can understand. I think physicians who do a good job communicating medical information and breaking it down into a simple way to describe it to patients so they can understand are much better doctors than the ones who don’t do it.
[00:39:31] Ghazenfer Mansoor: In your view, what’s the future of healthcare?
[00:39:35] Kashif Piracha: But the future of healthcare is definitely very bright. We have a lot of very good research going on in genetics and we have a lot of research going on in aging and a lot of fields. We’ve made a lot of progress.
In fact, even though I’ve been out of medical school for 26 years and the diseases that I was reading about in medical school that were completely untreatable with a very short mortality, diseases in which patients would pass away within three to six months.
Now, we’ve made so much progress that a lot of those diseases have become like chronic diseases and people are living with them for years and years.
I think the future of healthcare is very bright because we are going to have the treatments and cures for a lot more diseases that we don’t have right now. I think the biggest challenge about healthcare is how do people access that care?
That’s what we need to worry about because we can have one of the best treatments available, but if there’s no way for people to afford it or there’s no way for people to access it, then even the best treatment cannot really help anyone if you can’t put it into practice.
So we have to make sure that people have a way to access healthcare. But overall, I’m very happy that we made a lot of progress and I’m very excited that we’re going to continue to make a lot of progress.
[00:41:13] Ghazenfer Mansoor: This has been a really great conversation. Thank you, Dr. Piracha, for joining us. And for everyone, this episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers.
At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation through AI and technology. If you want to learn more about it, head out to our website, technologyrivers.com, or you can learn more about the podcast and more about me at my website, ghazenfer.com, g-h-a-z-e-n-f-e-r.com.
[00:41:40] Kashif Piracha: It takes.
[00:41:43] Ghazenfer Mansoor: .com. Thanks for listening to Lessons from the Leap. If you like this episode, like us, subscribe to us, and I would love to hear from you. Thank you, everybody.
[00:41:59] Kashif Piracha: Thanks everyone.