How Standards Drive Innovation

In this episode of Hard Problems, Smart Solutions, host Will Crawford, Head of Advisory Services and CTO at Newfire Global Partners, converses with Dr. Paulo Pinho, a practicing physician and seasoned health informaticist. Dr. Pinho shares his diverse career journey, combining clinical practice, payer technology, and entrepreneurship.
 
In this episode, you will gain insights into:

• Why interoperability remains elusive despite decades of effort (hint: legacy systems + fragmented incentives).
• How standards like SNOMED, LOINC, and ICD-10 evolved and why they often fall short for real-world care.
• What clinicians really need from AI tools (and why trust, not just tech, is key to adoption).
• How ambient listening and NLP are reshaping clinical documentation and enabling better decision-making.
• Why data equity matters and how biases in healthcare documentation can quietly undermine even the best machine learning models.
• Concrete examples of innovation: from COVID test standardization to fall risk modeling using multi-source data.

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast

00:18 Meet Dr. Paulo Pinho

00:36 The Evolution of Healthcare Standards

02:44 Challenges in Data Standardization

06:32 Advances in Medical Knowledge

12:23 AI in Healthcare: Opportunities and Challenges

23:54 The Role of Coding Systems in Healthcare

26:19 Success Stories in Healthcare Technology

40:04 Equity and Access in Healthcare

43:31 Advice for Clinicians and Non-Clinicians in Health IT

48:35 Conclusion and Future Topics