AI Challenge

Dr. Mandana Ahmadi is a scientist, healthcare AI strategist, and operator working at the intersection of AI systems, healthcare infrastructure, interoperability, and clinical workflow integration. Her work has focused on the practical deployment of trustworthy AI in healthcare, including agentic AI systems, privacy-preserving architectures, longitudinal patient context, and integration with existing EMR and hospital environments.

She has experience spanning healthcare AI operations, evaluation frameworks, and regulatory pathways, including certification processes for deep science and automated clinical healthcare technologies across UK and European healthcare ecosystems.

Mandana is particularly interested in how open standards and interoperable agent-based systems can accelerate safe and scalable AI adoption in healthcare. Her perspective combines scientific rigor, systems thinking, and operational experience in real-world clinical environments.

Dr. Theresa Cullen, MD, MS, is the Pima County Public Health Director where she oversees the public health data modernization initiative for Pima County. Dr. Cullen retired as a Rear Admiral from the U.S. Public Health Service in 2012 after a 27 year career; during this time, she was the Chief Information Officer for Indian Health Service for five years. She was subsequently the chief medical information officer and director of health informatics for the Veterans Health Administration. She also worked at Regenstrief Institute where she was the associate director for Global Health Informatics, Her professional career as a physician has included positions within the federal sector as well as academic institutions, spanning multiple interests with the common theme of improving health equity and helping diverse communities achieve health justice through the integration of data and analytics. During the 2014-15 Ebola crisis, Dr.  Cullen  worked as a volunteer physician with Partners in Health in Sierra Leone, where she helped manage a maternity Ebola unit.

For two decades, Ben Cushing has been a leader in emerging technology solutions across multiple industries and is committed to radical innovation in healthcare. Before joining Red Hat, he served as the Chief Technology Officer for MDLogix, a behavioral health IT firm supporting Johns Hopkins Medicine. There he architected and brought to market a behavioural health cloud platform for use with employer, healthcare, and education markets.

In addition to supporting analytics and operations at the National Institutes of Health for 6 years, Cushing had the opportunity to practice a scaled agile framework with Accenture where he led the technical architecture and design for the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Electronic Health Management Platform, an industry leading Health Management and Care Coordination platform serving 9 million patients.

His tenure at Accenture began with the acquisition of Agilex, where he designed LSI solutions, developed systems to automate the Post-9/11 GI bill, and supported in-theater data collection and analytics tools. While at Agilex, Ben architected and led the development of a mobile Software Development Kit, still in use today by the VA to produce more than 60 applications.

For over 25 years, Brad Genereaux has been driven by a single goal: making digital health technology work better for physicians, nurses, and patients alike. As a digital health and medical imaging leader, he turns emerging technologies — reasoning, speech, and vision AI — into real-world clinical solutions that scale safely, securely, and without friction. He's a passionate advocate for open standards, open models, and open source, as he believes transparency and collaboration are what move healthcare forward.

Evelyn was awarded the Order of Australia medal (AM) in 2024 for her significant contribution to medicine through health informatics and digital health transformation. Evelyn has worked as an international collaborator in various health and nursing informatics projects for 40 years. Evelyn began her academic career in 1992 and was a volunteer member of the Standards Australia's IT-14 committee 1992-2007, representing Australia at past International HL7 and ISO meetings, and worked as a HL7 Australia and openEHR educator during that period. Evelyn is widely published based on research and expertise covering many facets of health informatics, especially standards development, health and nursing terminology, health information governance, electronic health records, i.ncl. knowledge management, ontology and semantic interoperability and AI. She compiled and edited - Hovenga EJS, Grain, H  (eds) (2nd Ed) Roadmap to Successful Digital Health Ecosystems, 2026 Elsevier - DOI: 10.1016/C2025-0-00319-8

Evelyn is a founding fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (FIAHSI), Geneva, Founding fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health- past HISA & ACHI-(FAIDH), Fellow of the Australian Computer Society (FACS) and Fellow of the Australian College of Nursing (FACN).

Dr. Robert Lario is an enterprise systems engineer, researcher, AI practitioner, and enterprise architect with more than 35 years of experience in artificial intelligence, healthcare IT, interoperability, enterprise architecture, knowledge representation, and standards-based system modernization.

His work in AI spans more than three decades, including early development of neural networks for image classification and the design and implementation of production rule expert systems more than 35 years ago. Throughout his career, he has focused on bridging symbolic AI, statistical learning, knowledge engineering, and enterprise-scale operational systems.

Dr. Lario currently works for University of Utah Health and supports the Indian Health Service through Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) assignments sponsored by the university. He previously supported the Department of Veterans Affairs in a similar capacity.

His work focuses on translating advanced informatics, architecture, and AI concepts into practical systems that improve healthcare delivery, patient safety, operational performance, and enterprise decision-making. His expertise spans HL7 FHIR, DICOM, BPM+ Health, UML, BPMN, DMN, UPDM, UAF, domain-specific languages, semantic modeling, multi-level knowledge graphs, explainable AI, and AI-enabled clinical and operational workflows.

Dr. Lario’s work integrates symbolic reasoning, ontologies, graph technologies, machine learning, and enterprise architecture principles to create scalable and governable systems capable of supporting real-world healthcare modernization initiatives.

He holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from the University of Utah, where his research focused on the representation of clinical knowledge, an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a master’s degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science.

A founding contributor to BPM+ Health and an active participant in HL7 and OMG standards initiatives, Dr. Lario brings a practical, standards-oriented perspective to evaluating AI innovation. His work emphasizes explainability, interoperability, governance, traceability, clinical usefulness, and the responsible deployment of AI-enabled solutions in operational healthcare environments.

Dr. Hsiu An Lee is the Vice President of R&D at Taiwan Health and Bio DataBank Technology Inc. (THBC) and General Secretary of the Asia-Pacific Association for Medical Informatics (APAMI). He specializes in HL7 FHIR interoperability, healthcare AI, biomedical data integration, and digital health transformation. Dr. Lee has led multiple national-scale healthcare informatics and FHIR implementation projects in Taiwan, including smart hospital, genomics, and real-world data initiatives. He is actively involved in international health informatics collaborations and serves as a reviewer, advisor, and speaker in the fields of healthcare interoperability and AI applications.

Dr. Shafiq Rab is a clinician-executive with more than 25 years bridging medicine and enterprise health IT, having served as System CIO/CDIO at three major academic health systems — Tufts Medicine, Rush University System for Health, and Hackensack Meridian Health.

His career is anchored in interoperability and standards. He was a founding steering committee member of the HL7 Da Vinci Project and led some of the earliest production FHIR deployments in U.S. healthcare — including the first FHIR APIs integrating Epic with Apple, and early implementations of CMS Blue Button 2.0, Bulk FHIR, and Data at the Point of Care for real-time quality-measure reporting. He also delivered the first native Epic genomics integration in the United States and stood up the nation’s first cloud-native health system.

Dr. Rab has been recognized as CHIME’s John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the Year and CHIME Innovator of the Year, and has served as a trusted advisor to Epic, Apple, AWS, Microsoft, CMS, HHS, and the VA. He chaired the CHIME Board of Trustees in 2019. Among his national firsts: AI-driven stroke detection that cut treatment time from 120 minutes to two, and the first U.S. deployment of 5G in healthcare.

Across his roles he has consolidated dozens of EHRs onto unified Epic platforms, reduced IT operating costs by up to 30 percent, and built workforce pathways that placed students and community members into health-IT careers in Chicago and Boston.