Tom Mihaljevic and Elad Walach

In this episode of Incumbents and Insurgents, Eric Larsen hosts Tom Mihaljevic, M.D. (CEO and President, Cleveland Clinic) and Elad Walach (Co-Founder and CEO, Aidoc) for the series’ first in-person pairing of an Incumbent and an Insurgent. They explore why AI applied to poorly structured health systems fails without standardization and manufacturing discipline; how 370,000 annual deaths from diagnostic errors could worsen as the standard of care accelerates beyond the system’s capacity to implement it; and why Aidoc’s recent clinical-grade foundation model for medical imaging may mark the beginning of comprehensive AI-driven disease detection. They also discuss what Cleveland Clinic learned building a world-class hospital in Abu Dhabi from scratch, why executive leadership is the single best predictor of AI implementation success, and whether U.S. healthcare’s fragmentation is incompatible with the diffusion of transformational technology.