In Conversation: Matt Lewis on AI in Healthcare

AI is reshaping healthcare at an unprecedented pace, fundamentally altering the way clinicians, researchers, and medical professionals approach patient care, scientific discovery, and operational efficiency. From ambient AI scribes reducing physician burnout to generative AI platforms accelerating medical writing and research, the industry is experiencing a seismic shift. But with this transformation comes critical questions: Who bears responsibility for AI’s ethical and legal considerations in medicine? How can AI be harnessed to enhance—not replace—human expertise?

We spoke with Matt Lewis, Founder, CEO, and Chief Augmented Intelligence Officer at LLMental to explore these pressing topics. A pioneering force in AI-driven healthcare solutions, Matt brings deep expertise in digital innovation, medical affairs, and the evolving intersection of AI and life sciences.

In this insightful discussion, Matt shares his thoughts on AI’s transformative impact, the responsibilities of those deploying it, and the future of augmented intelligence in medicine.

Q: As a leader in tech solutions, how do you think AI is impacting healthcare & medical affairs?

Lewis: We’ve never seen a technology that is as transformative as artificial intelligence is, on healthcare, life sciences and medical affairs. The general-purpose consumer applications, like ChatGPT and Gemini, have demonstrated utility across a wide variety of use cases; everything from assisting hiring managers in writing job descriptions to summarizing medical information for clinicians and patients alike. In the last year, we’ve seen an explosion of point solutions penetrate the ecosystem, including ambient scribes that lessen pajama time for physicians, so they can spend more time with their families and, on the life sciences side, a number of platforms that augment medical writing have strengthened scientific training. It’s almost as if the entire space is levelling up due to this transformation.

Q: Who should bear responsibility regarding legal and ethical considerations of AI in healthcare?

Lewis: AI is a human innovation; perhaps the most practical of all innovations ever designed by humans, and ultimately, it is the humans that leverage AI who bear responsibility for its implementation; who should use it, in what scenarios, with what populations, with what ethical and legal considerations, and taking into account factors like health and social equity, representation of demographic groups, etc. Just because AI is “in the mix”, doesn’t absolve clinicians, researchers, publishers, patients and anyone across the health and life sciences ecosystem from their responsibility to act in a manner that prioritizes safety, protects those at risk from harm, and takes into consideration all the learning we’ve accumulated in years past. As co-chair of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals organization’s AI Task Force, I’ve helped our group author and publish multiple guides for medical writers, scientific researchers, life sciences professionals and clinicians and others involved in medical innovation to act in a responsible and judicious manner with regards to AI. As a founding Board Member with the Foundation for AI & Health, we envision the “day after tomorrow” when everyone has adopted AI and are working to engineer an environment that is healthier by design.  Non-medical determinants of health, including social, economic, political, and information inequalities, are no less important in the age of artificial intelligence, and professional and parental responsibility is not lessened just because AI is involved in the clinical encounter.

Q: How is artificial intelligence changing research and education in life sciences?

Lewis: AI across most verticals can be seen as both a tool and as a transformative force. This is no less the case in life sciences. AI can be used as a point solution as those involved in research and development work on the development of new chemical entities for treating disease, identifying targets and candidates for their research in ways not previously possible. However, in addition, AI is accelerating the pace with which the entire field works, helping to eliminate traditional points of friction and inefficiency, enabling professionals to supercharge their effectiveness and focus on higher-value projects than has historically been possible.

Q: Have you used AI in your organizational projects?

Lewis: Yes, at LLMental, we are the first generative AI-native holding company, and all of our portfolio companies leverage an AI-first, disruptive innovation approach to the problems for which we solve. At Rhythmental we are building modern software that leverages traditional AI (e.g. machine learning) and modern AI (e.g. generative AI) to complement existing interventions in the care of people with serious mental illness (e.g. depression) to ensure they can quickly improve their quality of life and rebuild lives worth living. At Transformental, our services group is comprised of a team of expert consultants that is fully augmented, utilizing generative AI across our entire technology stack and solving for the problem of limited AI adoption in health, human services and life sciences organizations due to human factors, resistance and challenges with mental health and issues with workplace wellbeing. Across LLMental, we see augmented intelligence, the partnership between humans and AI, as best positioned to achieve outsized outcomes for people, professionals and our partners.

Q: How do you stay ahead of technology trends?

Lewis: Paul Graham once said that a startup founder needs to “live in the future and build what’s missing”. I am a techno-optimist and firmly believe that our best days are ahead of us and that the synthesis of humans and AI affords us the best hope to fix the thorny problems across society that have long eluded sustainable solutions. I am a true believer when it comes to augmenting human potential, and spend as much time as possible reading (newsletters, Substacks, books), listening (to friends, colleagues, experts, advisors, partners) and “building” (which for me, is a mix of GPT development, generative AI experimentation, strategic advisory to startup CEOs, designing, dreaming, whiteboarding, writing and speaking). Abraham Lincoln said: “The best way to predict the future is to create it”, and I spend a large amount of time working to ensure the future we inherit is one we’ve designed, not one we wake up to by default, and then say: “How did we get here?”

Q: How do you envision the future of healthcare in the age of AI and new-age technology?

Lewis: Roy Amara, the past President of the Institute for the Future, is famous for saying: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Having been in healthcare and life sciences my entire career, and in medical affairs the past 24 of those years, I would agree wholeheartedly and also suggest that we are just at the inflection point, where many leaders are passing out of the “hype cycle” and starting to see the tremendous benefits of AI for their processes, their platforms, and their people. The next few years will be fascinating to watch as, like a wave crashing across the shore, where augmented intelligence transforms everything it touches, from bench to bedside. From the patient’s perspective, this is the best time to be alive. From the perspective of a life sciences CEO, especially on the startup side, it is as well. But with any transformation, there will be massive opportunities and significant challenges. It is imperative for those reading this article, if they haven’t already, to begin augmenting their own experience and intelligence to ensure that they are future-ready for the coming wave. I have said that a week in generative AI is akin to a quarter of news in the “real world”. As such, 3 years in the GenAI world is a lifetime to most industry professionals. By then, many experts in AI are predicting super intelligence, or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), an AI smarter than the smartest human who has ever lived, and freely accessible, like air, will be available to the world. Thinking beyond that point is possible but not pragmatic.

Q: Any advice you would like to give future tech leaders?

Lewis: My advice would be to be bold; the phrase that “fortune favors the brave” has never been truer. We are entering one of the most disruptive periods of human history, and augmented intelligence will march through our established institutions, processes, and enterprises with a singular goal: improved outcomes. The time for “doing it just because we’ve always done it that way” is ending. The time to change, to reach for the stars, figuratively and literally, is just beginning, as AI enables humans to grasp our full potential.

In the world to come, you don’t need to have been a data scientist, a developer or a technologist to be a technology, information or AI head. Those skills are helpful, relevant, for sure, but not essential. Senior leadership, in the enterprise environment, in government and in the startup ecosystem, often lean more heavily on their social capital, their strategic muscles, and their ability to understand the drivers of the organization’s success than traditional engineering expectations. Building expertise across multiple disciplines and gaining practical experience from the customer’s perspective (both internal and external) will be increasingly important in the days to come.

Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need to grow. Strength is not pretending to be what you are not. Strength is being vulnerable, being authentic, having agency and learning as fast as you possibly can, through whatever means you are able to access. Steve Jobs said, “Asking for help is a superpower”. As a teenager, before Apple was built in his garage, he picked up the phone in his house and called the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Bill Packard, and asked him if he wouldn’t mind sending Steve some spare parts so Steve could learn how to put together a computer. The rest is history.

To better understand the intersection of AI and medical affairs, we spoke to Matt Lewis, Founder, CEO, Chief Augmented Intelligence Officer of LLMental. Matt is a visionary leader, digital innovation catalyst, artificial intelligence expert and a serial impact-driven founder who has consistently been a force multiplier for health and life sciences enterprise value and patient outcomes. He contributes to the professional artificial intelligence community as Co-Chair of the ISMPP AI Task Force, having served on HCA’s Foresight Committee as AI Workstream Lead, as the Architect of MAPS’ Generative AI White Paper, as a member of OpenAI’s Forum, Gartner’s Peer Select AI Community, and as AI expert for Taylor and Francis’ CMRO journal. Matt is also a frequent keynote and boardroom speaker and a podcast guest.

Biography: Matt Lewis is a visionary leader, digital innovation catalyst, artificial intelligence expert, and a serial impact-driven founder who has consistently been a force multiplier for health and life sciences enterprise value and patient outcomes. He contributes to the professional artificial intelligence community as Co-Chair of the ISMPP AI Task Force, having served on HCA’s Foresight Committee as AI Workstream Lead, as the Architect of MAPS’ Generative AI White Paper, as a member of OpenAI’s Forum, Gartner’s Peer Select AI Community, and as AI expert for Taylor and Francis’ CMRO journal. Lewis is also a frequent keynote and boardroom speaker and a podcast guest.