Sep 17, 2026 · 1 hr 7 min · 12 segments
In this episode, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast, Sabrina Hsueh and Li Zhou host Haider…
Haider WarraichGuest
Sabrina HsuehHost
Li ZhouHost
When we read your resume, you have been a cardiologist for more than 150,000 people in rural North Carolina.
You have been Director of the Heart Value Program at VA Boston, and you have been the Senior Clinical Advisor at FDA, and now Program Manager at Upper Edge.
So for our audience here, which also have a diverse background, could you just give us some ideas of some of the inflection points in your journey that shaped how you think about medicine and AI today? and maybe even for your own career paths under reflection? How did you think that brings you today?
So, you know, I think the first inflection point in my career was, so I went to medical school in Pakistan and I came to the United States after medical school and to do residency training and research.
And I thought I was going to come to you know, the richest country in the world and so much of what the issues in health and that we're going to have a utopian healthcare system, that everything's going to be great.
And that so much of what I'd struggled with or so much of what I'd seen we could do better in a place like Pakistan, I would never have to think about again.
And I was really shocked to see that so many of the things that we're talking about are around poor access to care, variation in quality of care, how expensive medical care is.
And that was something that certainly I could not have anticipated when I first moved here.
I would say that the second big inflection point in my career was when I joined the FDA.
So I was asked to join the FDA as a senior advisor to the FDA commissioner, and my focus was on chronic disease.
But the problem that I saw in that role was that, first of all, it was very hard to get people to really care about chronic disease at that time, even though seven of the 10 most common causes of death were from chronic disease.
And the problem with chronic disease isn't that, oh, we don't have enough good treatments for chronic disease.
So for most of the things that we do, most of cardiovascular disease, I think it can be argued, is preventable.
But there's this real implementation gap between what we know works for patients and what they actually get.
When we read your resume, you have been a cardiologist for more than 150,000 people in rural North Carolina.
You have been Director of the Heart Value Program at VA Boston, and you have been the Senior Clinical Advisor at FDA, and now Program Manager at Upper Edge.
So for our audience here, which also have a diverse background, could you just give us some ideas of some of the inflection points in your journey that shaped how you think about medicine and AI today? and maybe even for your own career paths under reflection? How did you think that brings you today?
So, you know, I think the first inflection point in my career was, so I went to medical school in Pakistan and I came to the United States after medical school and to do residency training and research.
And I thought I was going to come to you know, the richest country in the world and so much of what the issues in health and that we're going to have a utopian healthcare system, that everything's going to be great.
And that so much of what I'd struggled with or so much of what I'd seen we could do better in a place like Pakistan, I would never have to think about again.
And I was really shocked to see that so many of the things that we're talking about are around poor access to care, variation in quality of care, how expensive medical care is.
And that was something that certainly I could not have anticipated when I first moved here.
I would say that the second big inflection point in my career was when I joined the FDA.
So I was asked to join the FDA as a senior advisor to the FDA commissioner, and my focus was on chronic disease.
But the problem that I saw in that role was that, first of all, it was very hard to get people to really care about chronic disease at that time, even though seven of the 10 most common causes of death were from chronic disease.
And the problem with chronic disease isn't that, oh, we don't have enough good treatments for chronic disease.
So for most of the things that we do, most of cardiovascular disease, I think it can be argued, is preventable.
But there's this real implementation gap between what we know works for patients and what they actually get.
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