Welcome to Digital Voices. We're 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 you're host Ed Marx. 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 great guests like Dr. Janade Kalea. Janade, welcome to Digital Voices. Thank you so much. Ed, for inviting me. Really appreciate it. Now 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 Janade's actually lifting up 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 podcast. 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 am 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 mom, the biggest fan as far as that is concerned. My wake up song is from Pork Minor, remember? And then of course, I have a bunch of rock bands from Pakistan and India. The biggest one is Janul that I listened 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 by? If you save a life, it is as if you save a life of all my time. That is my machine and 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. It is a very cool, very cool. We will 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 quotes. 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 uptown near Gujarat. And I don't know if you're familiar with Gujaratis, Gujaratis are essentially a businessman. 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 and 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 a green card as a whole family because we applied. And I came to US trained at UD Southwestern for my fellowships, the residency at St. Louis University Hospital. And more and more importantly, actually I did two years of research work under Osama Zedab, which is my mentor at the University of Wisconsin. So long journey, but very fruitful. Yeah. And I know you're married, where you married previous to coming to 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 practice family introduction. And then yeah, she was perfect. I mean, she herself is a master's in health management. And she actually was amazing. And grateful to her to stick around with double fat tree fellowships. And then of course entrepreneurship, which is more insane than you know neurocredible care fellowship. 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 up 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 Medics School and I started loving it. Before that, believe it or not, I used to. Even I write outside high school. I was a professional teacher and not only I was a professional teacher, I actually hired other teachers to teach. So I already had a business going organic chemistry. That's what I used to teach in the MCATs by going. 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, the research in general, which lacked significantly in my mind. So essentially, identifying myself from a physician to physician scientist 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 to physician scientist, physician scientist to entrepreneurship. And I used entrepreneurship as a different category than business. I mean, running a clinical practice as a business, haircuts, haircuts along as a business, but entrepreneurship is very different. You alluded to the fact that you had chosen neurology. Go a little bit deeper. Why did you get into it? Because that's going to lead into a save life AI, which we want to talk about as well. Again, I'm a fairly spiritual person. I was a little more religious, but I'm not. And hopefully somebody's grace is actually passes me through the most important thing that is important from an upbringing perspective is from my parents to be ethical. So we're very, very grounded. Not by the way, not the whole time he's not even that religious. FYI, but we were grounded in ethics, which is nothing to do with religion, but religion starts with ethics. And so, but the idea was that you need to have a set of good beliefs that you operate under. And then even if somebody doesn't exist up there, it doesn't matter. You operate that you have, 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 realized is that that the operating thing needs to be fully conscious and available. That's a more. Yeah. And then when I was reading through this, what I realized is that that most of even biggest religions are text based essentially. And then when the adven, because we were doing AI for vision, like, yeah, image analysis, stroke and everything, but the minute I saw a chat, you be the two and then three. 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 with you. It's a very strange turn. I mean, it is. And the way I defined it is a non-human intelligence, code and code and 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're actually literally talked to someone. How do you differentiate that human and an animal? Because they communicate, right? Terry, 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 why airport has signals of hands, paddles and everything. Because we miscommunicate with language. So what I'm saying is that that communication is a different problem, but language, poetry, songs, is 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 this is the wrong way of thinking, which I'm not going to discuss, but the idea was that that this 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.ai. So tell us the origin story. So origin story is very simple. I'm a stroke physician. I came to US. We wanted to go back and serve the countries because by the way, my whole medical school field is $500 for five years, $500. 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, because it was more of a philanthropy approach. So I said, I mean, I would rather build it myself. So I actually spent a 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 all low and million countries. My thought was that I am actually trained as a director of the new ICU with 26 beds ICU back in the advocate, I don't know quite such a job. But now I forget. I was director of new 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 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. You're going to get steroids. You're going to get this. You're going to get antibiotics and avarice. That's so fucking easy. Taking care of the patient is the art 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 newer intensivist, when you're sitting there, you have to understand who's going to get chopper then who's going to get ambulance then who's going to stay at a peripheral hospital who's going to get, you know, who where we're going to start on another neurology service, we're going to, you know, enhance to 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 and everything, I set it up from a first principle thinking. So everything was designed, 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 beginning a very good business model. And then one thing that I learned, 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 says, USB C battery pack. It is basically a nano pack on which my model works from lead 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 the 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 a topia Uganda and Nigeria or other places. And then of course, once you think of a product release or everything you do, all of the 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 to a de-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 side and all 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 rock and beat every game. 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 value. Number two is that that we have implemented this in multiple places in no income countries. And they are actually utilizing it. Number three is that that while we were doing this, we learned the law and language model portions. And we were able to enhance both the vision model and the language model. And now we're developing multiple fast iteration of it. As a matter of fact, we have over once we're pre-trained LLM for just writing at the application. So we had now, you know, iterating very fast. We actually have signed contracts significant here in US now officially. So we are on track for breaking even by end of March. And then of course, we have significant expansion opportunities in the winner region with other partners, hearts medical solution. They're out of go-ah cover. Honestly, the one line I would say is that start crawling. You will 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, etc. And then once you get into this model of the continuously learning. And for me, especially was, you know, I am actually very open. There's a mistake. So what everyone doesn't say is 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. Yeah, 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 save life. 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 the UI, value and investment, which has two factors, soft auto, I and hard auto, I always calculate that. That's the mode 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 the UI part. So that's something that we sort of always give you first when we are looking at save life AI in terms of future projections, how we've been a better different products. But the second biggest auto, I'd have a mode that people don't understand. And that's where clinicians need to really take high stakes into these developing processes is because we are emerging. So I was vice president of clinical strategy of the one, which is a telling medicine company. So now I have AI, I have telling medicine. And I know how to move people from a neuro intensive is 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 and 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 providers journey. And that is where the biggest mode in AI will be in my opinion in the future as we democratize from deer foundation models. No, super. We will put information about savelife.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 drain? 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, learning a startup. I'm doing it a little bit more. Of course, my chances are very low. One is music. As a matter of my escape is essentially I drive with a volume blast 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 knapper. And I think that really reenergizes me significantly. So I can literally take a nap for 10 minutes and micro naps or something recharge move on. So those are my three ways to recharge for creativity. Leadership is interesting and it's also changing in the age of AR. 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 is or the founder is on top of that. So my initial problem was not leadership. It's fairly user experience with Miracle to go care director, tele director, tele ICU and then of course working in different organizations. That was fairly done. It was 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 that perspective changes and more importantly perceptions. So that's home. Yeah. Well, what are one or two things that you have learned the hard way along your journey? Things do at times take time. You just have to be patients actually. That would be say that you know, patients is extremely important. And that's where my wife comes in. She always reminds me again and again that anything worked doing in life at least take seven years. Medical four years, three years of residency. I mean, even in any other career in your life, you where you come in, it takes seven years. And I know it's just a real odd situation with this VC funds and all of that. And my investors asked me, well, he's saying three years. I go, yeah, go with them. 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 the second big of course is with the patients is resilience. That's where the second important thing is. And that's where I keep teaching my leaders should know. I think the biggest the best book I word is would correct. If you have, if you're going to spend money behind a founder, which is again, or least saving investors, essentially the founder co-founder is even deep in everything. But the point, the definition of great is essentially doing hard work persistently for a number of years. And that's great. The doubt basically tying out and everything. And that's I think is my biggest lesson that I've realized. And I'll keep telling physicians entrepreneur that you need to be patient because for you, in by the way, just give yourself the average physician lifetime income is going to be $25 million with the $5 million savings at the end. Maybe just of course some people do go better and all of that at the end of the day. And if you're thinking you're going to make a startup for the $15 million or $100 million or $500 million with doubt, medical school, residency, fellowship, like come on. So anyways. Yeah, let's 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? They 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 the ADHD supposedly. And my mother was extremely strict and I'm extremely grateful to her for that. But one side did, but she understood because when I commit, I commit. I mean, there's a small story. And the first grade actually I failed on the midterms because there was a midterms. And then my mom was like, are you crazy? It's a story. 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 extreme distraction and beautiful distraction with these AI images that it is. You just need to refocus patiently and everything. So that's the more. 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 value? And he would say, 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 as a look to date, you have, you got 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 everything as with calculation that he instilled in me that always calculate value and then always very different hats, time value, money value, opportunity costs as a value to all of these things. So my parents were amazing and they did a separate street and just be honest. Yeah, and I love that. And you're so much with that. 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 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'm maybe in the meetings or something. And then we go over 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 allowed to. Like every Wednesday or so, 12 noon, I take them for lunch outside. Then the reason behind it, my mom loves cooking and she gives it, wants 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 it. 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 your of the company. And then sharing with us about your your roots in Pakistan, India and coming over to the United States. And I liked how you know, you talk about your three identities as a healer, scientist and entrepreneur. And then talked about your career, talked about savelife.ai, 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. Ting Kerr, humans, whatever you get, humans involved or something about that. And then what I like, we talk a lot about leadership. But the thing I picked out the best, Danade is it's okay to nap and it's important. So you're a neurologist. So you we know, it's, 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 this is sort of an art situation and we calling it as an AI bubble. This is a circle between in video, when AI, MD, 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 I'm Microsoft. So I'm going to tell you right now that it's cares as a shit out of me now personally, because it's never used to believe me. There's a, there's a click that happened this year because we have reasoning models. We have degrees. So my last thing would be that please learn artificial intelligence. How to use these 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 air out here. Dr. Jean-Nade Kelly, thank you for being guest on Digital Voices. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices. We hope today's conversation sparked ideas, reflection and connection. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple and Spotify podcasts so you don't miss an episode.
