Healthcare data is messy. Saria has spent her career trying to make sense of it with AI.
Saria, part of Business Insider's 2024 AI Power List, directs the machine learning and healthcare lab at Johns Hopkins University and is the founder and CEO of the AI startup Bayesian Health. She began her career in computer science and was getting her doctorate at Stanford when President Barack Obama signed the Hitech Act into law to boost the use of electronic health records — drawing Saria's attention.
She spent the next year using digitized healthcare data to develop an algorithm meant to better identify premature infants at high risk of developing deadly complications.
After a promising result, Saria dug deeper into research on how tech could use healthcare data in medical records to improve care for patients with conditions as varied as Parkinson's disease and cancer.
Then Saria lost her nephew to sepsis. Spurred into action, she decided to spin her research out of academia and bring the tech to hospitals with Bayesian Health.
The startup, which emerged from stealth in 2021, has raised $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz and other investors. It developed an algorithm that helped hospitals predict sepsis faster, leading to nearly 20% fewer sepsis-related deaths, according to a real-world study published in Nature Medicine in July 2022. Saria calls that research "probably my proudest achievement."
"We should not be practicing like we live in the 18th century with no science and no engineering," she said. "We should be up-leveling the way we deliver care to match the level of scientific innovation we see in the rest of our lives."
Now, top health systems like Cleveland Clinic and Northwell Health use Bayesian Health's tech, and the startup has notched partnerships with Epic, Oracle's Cerner, and Allscripts. While the company launched with a focus on sepsis, it's expanding to predict other complications, like pressure ulcers, and it's targeting more down the line, like deep-vein thrombosis in pregnant people.
"I see 100 conditions where this system applies," Saria said. "It's not just one or two — it's everywhere I look."
Saria has continued to research healthcare AI at Johns Hopkins. She's also made angel investments in more than 15 AI startups. For her work in healthcare AI, the World Economic Forum named her a Young Global Leader in 2018.
In response to less-than-ideal healthcare AI implementations, like Epic's widely utilized sepsis algorithm — which, according to a June 2021 study in JAMA Internal Medicine, poorly predicted sepsis compared to the performance the company reported — she's bringing together industry stakeholders to develop new tech. In 2022, Saria cofounded the Coalition for Health AI, which brings federal agencies and healthcare organizations to discuss best practices for using healthcare AI. She also helped the National Academy of Medicine develop its code of conduct for AI deployment, released earlier this year.
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