What if the biggest lever in American healthcare isn't a new drug or device, but the plumbing behind it? At the inaugural Civic Health Forum, three leaders who have sat at the center of public health, hospital AI strategy and federal innovation policy sat down to talk about the systems that quietly keep people well, and what breaks when those systems go unfunded.

🔹 Susan Monarez, PhD, former Director of the CDC and founding leader of ARPA-H, makes the case for putting an AI-powered primary care tech stack directly into the homes of the 330 million Americans currently locked out of convenient, affordable care.

🔹 Girish Nadkarni, MD, MPH, Chief AI Officer at Mount Sinai Health System, shares how his team is already using AI to catch conditions like cardiac amyloidosis from a routine ECG, and why he believes the real bottleneck to prevention at scale is culture, not technology.

🔹 Nirav Shah, MD, Stanford University and founder of Civic Stratum, breaks down the return on investment hiding inside public health spending, from water fluoridation to soda taxes, and reveals a new open source, AI-enabled disease surveillance system built to replace the outdated infrastructure states lost funding for this year.

Moderated by Jay Varma, MD, SVP and CMO of The Fedcap Group, this conversation reframes prevention not as a nice-to-have, but as fundamental infrastructure, the kind investors don't blink at funding when it's labeled "AI" or "cloud," and the kind that could unlock a generational wave of philanthropic capital if public health can make its case.

StartUp Health community members had a seat in the room for this conversation. Video quality may vary due to live recording. Join the community to attend virtual and in-person forums like this live, bring your own questions to the stage, and get access to full recordings of sessions if you miss them.
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