Healthcare has become increasingly sophisticated at tracking what patients do. But understanding why they make certain health decisions remains a major challenge.
In this episode of Health's Beat, host Sandy Vance talks with Dr. Sema Sgaier, Co-Founder and CEO of Surgo Health, about how behavioral science, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics can help healthcare organizations understand and act on the human factors behind patient decisions.
Sema and Sandy chat about responsible AI adoption, transparency, patient trust, and the growing opportunity to make healthcare more personalized by understanding people as individuals rather than simply collections of diagnoses and medical records. The next frontier of healthcare AI is not knowing more about what patients do. It is understanding why they do it.
In this episode, they talk about:
Why healthcare data reveals what patients do, but often not why
How AI built on behavioral science reveal hidden barriers to adherence
What a breast cancer study revealed about patients discontinuing therapy
Why personalized interventions can outperform one-size-fits-all outreach
How AI interviews can uncover deeper patient insights
Why clinical trials need to consider recruitability and retention, not just eligibility
How behavioral data helped address maternal health transportation barriers
Why transparency and trust are essential to responsible healthcare AI
A Little About Sema:
Dr. Sema Sgaier is CEO and co-founder of Surgo Health, a Public Benefit Corporation building the Behavioral Intelligence layer for healthcare: revealing why people make the health decisions they do, predicting what they will do next, and shaping behavior for better health. Surgo’s suite of products includes Derin, which talks to people at depth and scale to reveal the why behind their health decisions, and BehavioralPulse, a proprietary behavioral data foundation built from primary research and modeled to population scale. Together they help life sciences companies, health systems, payers, and public health agencies act on what actually drives outcomes, from clinical trial design to care delivery and program strategy.
Sema previously co-founded Surgo Foundation and Surgo Ventures, and was Initiative Lead at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she brought innovations in data, consumer insights, and product introduction into large-scale health programs globally. A neuroscientist by training (Ph.D., NYU; genomics fellowship, Harvard), she has authored 60+ publications, has written op-eds for The New York Times, The Economist, and Harvard Business Review, and serves on the boards of United States of Care and Results for Development.
