The Innovators Jam

Eric Topol didn’t just practice cardiology, he became one of the most influential voices arguing that AI, wearables, and telemedicine belong in the mainstream. As founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, his research and bestselling books, including The Patient Will See You Now, pushed clinicians and regulators alike to rethink what patient-centered, tech-enabled medicine could look like.

Tom Lee started Epocrates, a mobile drug-reference app, as a student project. It went on to be used by roughly 40% of US physicians. He then founded One Medical to redesign the primary care experience, a company Amazon later acquired for $3.9 Billion. He is now building Galileo, aiming to make virtual-first care more affordable.

Rather than founding a single company, Dr. Krishna Yeshwant took his medical training into venture capital, becoming a managing partner at Google Ventures (GV). From that seat, he’s helped fund and shape the growth of numerous health-tech startups, bringing a clinician’s lens to investment decisions that most VCs never get close to.

While on a clinical placement in Vietnam, medical student Aengus Tran watched a short-staffed hospital struggle to deliver timely diagnoses. That moment pushed him to co-found Harrison.ai. Now, a clinical AI company that helps diagnose X-rays and scans at scale, with a team of 200 people.

After serving as chief patient safety officer at Stanford Healthcare, emergency physician Mitesh Rao kept noticing untapped opportunities in healthcare data. In 2018, he launched OMNY Health, a platform that gives life science companies structured, real-world health data and insights at a national scale.

Decades before “health tech” was a category, cardiologist Prathap C. Reddy set out to make quality healthcare accessible in India. He founded Apollo Hospitals, which grew into one of the largest hospital chains in the world. It’s a proof that physician-led innovation doesn’t always mean an app or an algorithm; sometimes it means rebuilding the infrastructure itself.

In 2025, physician-researchers Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas and Kiran Musunuru led the team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine that designed and delivered the world’s first personalized CRISPR gene-editing therapy — created in months, not years, for an infant known as “Baby KJ”.