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    Episode 044 · October 28, 2025 · 35m listen

    Why AI Literacy Matters for the Future of Healthcare with José Acosta | Ep. 43

    José Acosta
    Former Command Surgeon
    US Pacific Fleet

    Episode Summary

    In this episode of The Med Device Cyber Podcast, host Trevor White and guest Christian Espinosa talk with José Acosta about the critical role of AI literacy in the future of healthcare. Acosta, with 40 years of experience as a surgeon and early technology adopter, emphasizes that AI literacy extends beyond basic prompting to understanding the underlying mathematics, accuracy limitations, and privacy implications of large language models (LLMs). The discussion highlights the current state of AI in diagnostics, particularly imaging, noting that while AI tools show promise and even FDA approvals, they lack the near 100% precision required for therapeutic applications. The conversation delves into the security vulnerabilities of AI in medical settings, addressing concerns about poisoned training data, output tampering, and ensuring models are purpose-built for their tasks. Concerns are also raised about human oversight, particularly regarding "AI scribes" and the risk of increasing patient load without adequate diagnostic time. The episode advocates for a measured approach to AI integration, stressing the importance of high-quality training data, robust governance, ethical considerations, and continuous education for medical professionals to effectively leverage AI while mitigating risks.

    Key Takeaways

    • 01AI literacy for medical professionals goes beyond simple prompting and includes understanding the underlying mathematics, limitations, privacy, governance, and ethics of large language models.
    • 02While AI shows promise in diagnostics like medical imaging, it currently lacks the near 100% precision necessary for therapeutic applications in medicine, even with existing FDA approvals.
    • 03The security of AI in medical devices is paramount; concerns include poisoned training data, tampered outputs, and ensuring models are securely built for their intended purpose.
    • 04Over-reliance on AI tools like ambient scribes without proper human oversight and critical evaluation can introduce patient safety risks, such as inadequate diagnosis time and misinterpretations.
    • 05The evolution of AI in healthcare demands a measured approach, emphasizing high-quality training data, robust guardrails, and continuous user education to effectively integrate these tools safely and securely.
    • 06Future medical education should prioritize teaching effective AI prompting and usage to prepare healthcare professionals to leverage these tools optimally and avoid being replaced by those who can.

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    • In this episode of The Med Device Cyber Podcast, host Trevor White and guest Christian Espinosa talk with José Acosta about the critical role of AI literacy in the future of healthcare.

    • AI literacy for medical professionals goes beyond simple prompting and includes understanding the underlying mathematics, limitations, privacy, governance, and ethics of large language models. While AI shows promise in diagnostics like medical imaging, it currently lacks the near 100% precision necessary for therapeutic applications in medicine, even with...

    • The discussion highlights the current state of AI in diagnostics, particularly imaging, noting that while AI tools show promise and even FDA approvals, they lack the near 100% precision required for therapeutic applications. It's most useful for medical device manufacturers, cybersecurity engineers, regulatory affairs professionals, and...

    • AI literacy for medical professionals goes beyond simple prompting and includes understanding the underlying mathematics, limitations, privacy, governance, and ethics of large language models.

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    Pre-fills with: "AI literacy for medical professionals goes beyond simple prompting and includes understanding the underlying mathematics, limitations, privacy, governance, and ethics of large language models."

    Hello and welcome to another episode of The Med Device Cyber Podcast. We're joined here today by a very special guest, José Acosta, who I recently met on a trip to Boston where we had some really interesting conversations about new applications for AI in healthcare and seeing some of the wonderful things that can happen as a result of this new technology, while still understanding there's a little bit of a safety balance we need to have in place, as well as, of course, security. I'm also joined by our co-host, Christian Espinosa. José, how are you doing today? Yeah, Trevor, I'm doing great. It's great to see you and it's great to meet Christian. And you're back in New Mexico now in Albuquerque, is that right? Correct. I live in New Mexico. I work in St. Louis and parts in between. Awesome. And then Christian, you're coming in from Phoenix today, right? I know it's kind of hard to pin down where you are in the world at any moment. I'm in the Tempe area. Yeah. Phoenix area. Yep. Tempe, Arizona. I used to live in the St. Louis area, Jose, back in the day. Used to teach at Washington University a little bit and lived in Illinois. Pretty interesting. Christian, the first time I went to St. Louis was back in 1979 and I was transferred from a college in Puerto Rico to WashU. So, I was there from ''79 through ''81, and all the summers in between. Cool. So, you're an advocate for AI literacy, Jose, it sounds like. So, when we talk about AI literacy, from what lens are you referring to? I know we talked a little before we started recording, but maybe you can elaborate a little bit. Sure, let me give you a little bit of my background and that way it'll kind of give context to where I'm coming from in terms of AI literacy. I graduated 40 years ago from medical school, trained as a surgeon, trained as a trauma surgeon and served in the Navy for the next 30 years and the vast majority of that was at the bedside. But towards the end of my naval career, I moved from the bedside to the C-suite, finishing as the command surgeon for the US Pacific Fleet. So, retired several years ago, always have been an early adopter. And so, that kind of gives you a frame of where I'm coming from. When I talk about AI literacy, it really focuses mainly on large language models, but you could extend it to the other tools in AI. And what I'm really interested in as a physician is that the students that we are training for the future understand the technology way beyond just a simple prompt. They understand some of the math that's used for the prediction, that individuals understand where these models are not accurate, and get an understanding of privacy in terms of leakage of information that's put into one of these large language models. So, it's the entire spectrum from understanding the technology, some of the basic tools, understanding that all these models are somewhat different, understanding how to interface with them with the correct prompts, understanding governance, which is very important, and ethics. So, you see it's a lot of things, not just

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