Augmenting Medicine with AI: Hassan Tetteh, MD, on Innovation in Healthcare

Dr. Hassan Tetteh is a decorated Navy captain and Associate Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, and adjunct faculty at Howard University College of Medicine. As a cardiothoracic surgeon, he was deployed in Afghanistan and on warships in the Persian Gulf. He’s also an unabashed medical “nerd,” part of a cadre of physicians board-certified in clinical informatics. Dr. Tetteh is the founder and principal of Tetteh Consulting Group, creator of The Art of Human Care book series, and a best-selling author of several books. He is board certified in thoracic surgery, general surgery, clinical informatics, and healthcare management and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives, and a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association. In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, it was noted that he has one of the coolest-sounding jobs in medicine – “Warfighter Health Mission Chief for the Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (or Jake).” Dr. Tetteh told us about the Center and his work there. We then start a dive into big data, Project Orion, and the JAIC’s suicide-prevention initiative and the idea of psychological autopsy and digital phenotyping. This is a wonderful conversation about not only living one’s life in full, but also the promise of technological innovation to help others do likewise.