Damon Lanphear, chief technology officer at Artera
Photo courtesy of Artera
California-based Artera, an agentic AI company that aims to help healthcare providers with patient communication, announced today the appointment of Damon Lanphear as its new chief technology officer.
Lanphear formerly held leadership positions across three business units at Amazon – Amazon Web Services (AWS) Snow, AWS Managed Services and Amazon Devices – and oversaw technical strategy for Kindle and Scribe devices.
The new CTO sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss how he plans to apply his Amazon experience to advance Artera's technology strategy.
MobiHealthNews: What are your plans as Artera's new chief technology officer?
Damon Lanphear: I think the exciting thing that drew me to Artera right from the get-go was how well-positioned Artera is to help create a really delightful experience around patient communication and a really delightful experience around clinic operations.
We're at this amazing inflection point right now where, with the advances in LLMs [large language models] and foundation models, we now have the ability to go way deeper and way broader with respect to the nuance and the dimensionality that we can support for patient communications.
We all know that today patients are well-served with systems that allow them to sort of navigate through a set of options. We're all familiar with these. And now we're able to enter this phase where we can have patients tell more about their conditions, tell more about the specific scenarios, and in doing so, feel heard, have their needs met more directly. Clinic operators can actually focus on the patients who need the most attention. And so bringing that vision to life is my mission right now.
I think one of the key things for me and the big learnings has been through my career working with AI, and I've been working with AI probably since, you know, long before we were using the term "AI" more broadly in the mainstream media, dating back to maybe 2005/2006, it is understanding that getting very, very close to the customer, being able to understand their needs and being able to craft the system to meet those needs is absolutely critical to bring this vision to life. And I think what I love about Artera is how close Artera is to our customers. They support them from the first step in doing the implementation, all the way through the long-term engagement and using that as a vehicle to help drive these types of improvements and help realize this vision.
MHN: There is a lot with AI that you have to be cautious of. What are you bringing to Artera that you learned from Amazon, including some cautions around AI and making sure that things are done without hallucinations?
Lanphear: Referring back to the AWS and Amazon experience, one of the great things about having had that experience in my career is, you know, Amazon is very famously very disciplined around security and privacy for both AWS and its retail and its devices and operations. That understanding of how you systematically manage security and privacy at scale, and to be very thorough and deep in the translation of that, too. And there are a lot of different ways that security and privacy read on both you prompting the flow of information through your systems, as well as considerations around patient safety, and not the least of which is related to like your prompt engineering, but it's also all the systems that support in or around that.
And so much of what we do here and we've been successful at doing through our pursuit of FedRAMP High, which is in progress, and the work that we have done historically to our HIPAA posture, all of that sets the right framework for us to be able to say, how do we provide the same type of guardrails for the processing of information to maintain patient privacy, to make sure that we are keeping the conversations within the context of systems that we have direct observability and control over, ensuring that we can apply guardrails for patient safety that are well vetted with our clinical experts is all part of the design of our system and how we're carrying this forward.
One of the great things that we're doing with the development of AI scheduling, which we're deploying with customers right now, is working closely with them on their standard operating procedures and translating those standard operating procedures in a way that our LLM-based, agentic-capable solutions are actually following, and we can do that in a way that's verifiable. So we can actually give proof so that our operational partners on the clinic side can trust what we're doing, that we're following their clinical best practices, their standards of care, and have that be at the baseline from which we're building.
MHN: Do you have any ideas for what could be adjusted within Artera as far as technology goes?
Lanphear: Yeah, I mean I think there's definitely big, you know, I just touched on this concept of how standard operating procedures [SOPs] are brought to bear to help guide what LLM-based solutions are doing, and what is exciting in that space is that you have an opportunity to actually bring reasoning models to evaluate how those SOPs are represented.
So, for example, a standard operating procedure might be represented in a clinic as a binder, sticky notes or notes on a whiteboard. It might be in the minds of the people who are guiding the clinical operations staff. Being able to bring all of that context together in one place and accurately represent it, but also be able to inspect it and raise questions about, hey, how can we make this better? And there's really a special opportunity to do that here.
And the reason why that's so critical is because it helps to facilitate the ease of the onboarding and integration. So if you think about bringing a solution like Artera to bear on your clinic, there's going to be this integration phase. New technology. How do we configure it? How do I get it working? And if we make that easier and simpler to understand while maintaining trust, that's a huge win.
