What Sixty Years of Health AI Teaches Us About the Agentic Moment
Speaker: Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD, FACMI
Affiliation: Chief Medical and Science Officer, Health Universe
Date: October 1, 2026
Watch the recording on YouTube
What can six decades of health AI teach us about today’s agentic systems? Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD, FACMI, traces the field’s development from ELIZA and expert systems to neural networks and large language models, connecting that history with healthcare’s transition from paper records to electronic health records.
Abstract
AI capability has repeatedly advanced faster than healthcare’s ability to evaluate and govern it. Today’s large language models continue to present familiar problems—including hallucination, poor calibration, and unclear accountability—and can behave more like brilliant but unsupervised interns than trustworthy clinical partners.
Point-in-time oversight models are poorly suited to technology that changes weekly. Agentic systems that can plan, verify, and escalate may offer a safer path, provided evaluation, security, and governance are built in from the beginning. Drawing on Health Universe’s approach to clinical AI, this talk explores how continuous evaluation could replace one-time approval, task interoperability could complement data interoperability, and coordinated agent ecosystems could replace monolithic systems.
The talk also considers how patients can become genuine participants in their care and why clinicians should help shape the standards that will determine whether agentic AI earns medicine’s trust.
Speaker bio
Douglas B. Fridsma, MD, PhD, FACMI, is Chief Medical and Science Officer at Health Universe, where he helps advance the integration of AI tools into clinical environments. He previously served as President and CEO of the American Medical Informatics Association and as Chief Science Officer for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
A nationally recognized leader in biomedical and health informatics, Dr. Fridsma has contributed to health information exchange, interoperability standards, workforce development, and clinical informatics education. He has held academic appointments, served on industry and standards boards, and speaks widely on health information technology and innovation.
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