Dr. Ashkan Nasr DO; MPH

🎓 Excited to share a major milestone!

I’ve officially completed the AI in Healthcare program at Harvard Medical School.
As part of the program, I developed a capstone project focused on using AI to support clinical reasoning and physician decision-making — and I’m excited to share that my project was ranked among the Top 5 out of approximately 500 projects in the cohort. 🏆

As a hospitalist and medical educator, one of my biggest takeaways is that the future of healthcare isn’t about AI replacing physicians. It’s about developing AI that strengthens clinical judgment, improves efficiency, and ultimately helps us deliver better patient care.

🚀 I also want to connect with others building in this space.

If you’re a physician, healthcare professional, researcher, engineer, entrepreneur, or developer with an idea for an AI healthcare innovation and would like help developing it, I’d love to hear from you.

And if you already have experience in healthcare AI, machine learning, product development, or digital health and are interested in collaborating on future projects, please reach out as well.

There are a lot of problems in healthcare worth solving — and some of the best ideas happen when clinicians and technologists build together.
Drop a comment below or connect with me. 👇

Book.askdoctorash.com

Dr. Ash | AskDoctorAsh™
#HarvardMedicalSchool #AIinHealthcare #HealthcareAI #ArtificialIntelligence #DigitalHealth #HealthTech #MedicalInnovation #PhysicianInnovation #AskDoctorAsh

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 3

Dr. Ashkan Nasr DO; MPH

I spent 45 minutes last week on a peer-to-peer review.

Not with a physician. With an algorithm’s decision — reviewed by a “peer” who, per AMA data, had a 1-in-6 chance of actually practicing in my specialty.

Meanwhile, my hospital is actively evaluating AI tools to support clinical decision-making. Same week. Same floor.

We are being asked to fight AI with one hand while trusting AI with the other.

This is the contradiction that no one in healthcare leadership is talking about clearly enough.


Here is what is actually happening right now in 2026:

On one side, health insurers are deploying AI at scale to manage prior authorizations and deny claims. Payer AI denial rates have risen sharply — from 5.6% in 2019 to over 7.4% by 2022 in Medicare Advantage alone, and the trajectory has not reversed. The AMA’s 2025 survey found that 61% of physicians believe insurer AI is actively increasing prior authorization denials.

On the other side, states are now piloting autonomous AI to perform clinical functions without physician oversight. Utah’s pharmacy AI pilot — launched in January 2026 through a startup called Doctronic — allows an AI system to renew prescriptions independently for any adult in the state. No physician approval required. The state’s own medical licensing board called for it to be suspended on safety grounds. The state overruled them.

We are building AI to prescribe. Payers are building AI to deny. And physicians are caught in the operational wreckage between the two.


The liability question is the one that should be keeping your CMO and legal counsel up at night — and it remains almost entirely unresolved:

When a hospital’s AI recommends a treatment, the payer’s AI denies it, the physician overrides the denial after a 45-minute peer-to-peer, and the patient has a bad outcome — who holds the liability?

Right now, there is no clean answer. And health systems are scaling these tools anyway.


If you are in hospital leadership and your organization is implementing clinical AI in 2026, you need a defensible strategy across three specific areas:

1. Liability architecture. Who is responsible when AI recommendations are followed — or overridden? This needs to be documented before deployment, not litigated after an adverse event.

2. Revenue cycle defense. Physicians are already spending an average of 13 hours per week on prior authorization tasks (AMA, 2025). As payer AI scales, that number will not go down without a dedicated, AI-assisted denial management infrastructure on your side.

3. Physician protection. The administrative burden of managing two competing AI ecosystems — one prescribing, one denying — will land on your clinical staff. That is not a wellness problem. It is an operational design problem.

The hospitals that win this decade will not simply be the ones with the best AI. They will be the ones that build the strongest operational and legal moat around their physicians.


I’ve been on both sides of this: the peer-to-peer call and the AI evaluation committee. The gap between those two rooms is where patient harm lives.

Which of these three gaps — liability, revenue cycle defense, or physician protection — is the biggest blind spot in your organization right now?

#HealthcareLeadership #AIinMedicine #PhysicianEfficiency #ClinicalAI #MedicalDirector #HealthcareOperations

2 months ago | [YT] | 2

Dr. Ashkan Nasr DO; MPH

Huge news fam! 🎉 I just officially enrolled in Harvard Medical School's AI in Health Care program and I am FIRED UP! 🙌

You guys have watched me talk about AI in medicine for a while now — and I'm taking it to the next level. I'm going straight to Harvard to learn from the best so I can bring it all back to YOU.

Here's what this means for the channel:
✅ Real insights from Harvard faculty on AI in clinical practice
✅ How AI is changing hospital medicine RIGHT NOW
✅ What every physician needs to know about using AI safely and responsibly
✅ Behind the scenes of the program as I go through it

This community is a huge part of why I keep pushing — so consider this one for us. 🫶

#AIinMedicine #HarvardMedicalSchool #AskDoctorAsh

4 months ago | [YT] | 13

Dr. Ashkan Nasr DO; MPH

80% of doctors know AI is the future. Only 27% are using it. Why?

A massive new study across 50 countries just revealed the real bottleneck in clinical AI adoption.

Published today (May 13, 2026) in Nature npj Digital Medicine, data from over 1,000 physicians shows a massive gap between awareness and adoption. The problem is structural: only 17.7% of us have received formal training on how to use AI in medicine safely.

When physicians get formal training, they are 3.4x more likely to integrate AI into their workflows. When hospitals invest in the tech, adoption jumps 8.4x.

As an internal medicine hospitalist, I see this every day. We are drowning in documentation and inefficient systems. AI can fix this — but we need the practical knowledge to deploy it without compromising patient safety or medico-legal defensibility.

Save this post to share with your clinical leadership team.
Check out my instagram @askdoctorash.media

#AIinMedicine #ClinicalAI #PhysicianEfficiency #HealthTech #MedicalAI #HospitalistLife #InternalMedicine #DigitalHealth #AIAdoption #PhysicianLife

4 months ago | [YT] | 4

Dr. Ashkan Nasr DO; MPH

The Problem: You’ve seen the deep dives on YouTube, but healthcare moves fast. You need rapid, actionable updates on how AI is transforming clinical practice, operations, and the business of medicine — without sifting through the noise.

The Solution: I’ve launched the @askdoctorash.media Instagram channel to bridge that gap. This isn’t a copy of the YouTube content. It’s a dedicated, daily feed of high-yield, physician-vetted AI applications, workflow optimizations, and critical analyses of new tech.

What you get daily:

• Verified AI in Medicine — Evidence-based breakdowns of new tools. If the data is weak, I’ll tell you. We focus on critical thinking, not hype.
• Clinical Efficiency — Quick wins to reduce documentation burden and streamline your day.
• Strategic Insights — Operational and medico-legal perspectives on integrating AI safely into practice.

Your action plan:

1. Follow @askdoctorash.media on Instagram right now.
2. Check the daily posts and stories for bite-sized, verified updates.
3. Keep coming back to YouTube for the full deep dives.

The ROI: AI in medicine is evolving daily. Instagram gives you the daily pulse. YouTube gives you the full picture. You need both.

www.instagram.com/askdoctorash.media?igsh=MXJ1ZnY4…

See you there.
— Dr. Ash | Hospitalist · CEO, Askdoctorash Medical Consulting & Media

4 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 11

Dr. Ashkan Nasr DO; MPH

Hi everyone, welcome to my new YouTube Community! Now you can post on my channel, too. To get started, tell me in a post what you'd like to see next on my channel.
Visit my Community: youtube.com/@Askdoctorash_Media/community

4 months ago | [YT] | 5

Dr. Ashkan Nasr DO; MPH

We keep asking whether AI can outperform doctors. A new Nature Health study (May 1, 2026) flips the question: do PATIENTS perform differently when the listener is an AI?

In a preregistered, randomized, between-subjects experiment of 500 adults, participants who believed they were chatting with an AI chatbot — versus a human physician — produced symptom reports that were ~8% less suitable for an initial urgency assessment (Cohen's d = 0.34, P<0.001). Same prompts. Same conditions. Just a different perceived listener.

Clinical perspective: Self-triage AI is only as good as the history it gets. If patients withhold or compress information when they assume the other end is a machine, even a well-validated model will mis-triage. This is a behavioral failure mode that won't show up in benchmarks where the input data is curated. It's also a reminder that FDA clearance — and even strong model accuracy on vignettes — does not equal real-world clinical performance.

Strengths: preregistered, randomized, peer-reviewed, decent sample size. Limitations to weigh: simulated rather than real clinical encounters, GPT-5.2 used as the rater of report quality (LLM-as-judge), and a single recruitment platform. A useful signal, not a final answer.

The takeaway for clinicians and health-system leaders deploying patient-facing AI: design the front door for trust and disclosure. Coach patients on what to share. Audit what gets lost.

#AIinMedicine #DigitalHealth #PatientSafety #ClinicalAI #HealthTech #LLM #EvidenceBasedMedicine #InternalMedicin

4 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 4

Dr. Ashkan Nasr DO; MPH

A new milestone in AI-guided cardiology just landed — and it deserves a closer look from clinicians.

On April 28, 2026, the U.S. FDA cleared (and CE Mark approved) Abbott's Ultreon™ 3.0 Software — the first optical coherence tomography (OCT) platform in the U.S. and Europe to integrate high-resolution intravascular imaging with AI-automated plaque analysis during percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).

Why it's clinically meaningful:

• A single 1-second OCT pullback produces cross-sectional coronary images at higher resolution than IVUS — and with low-or-zero contrast, which matters for the ~25% of CAD patients who also have chronic kidney disease.

• AI characterizes plaque morphology and supports the interventionalist in selecting optimal stent size and landing zones, then performs a post-procedure assessment to confirm restored flow.

• With over 600,000 PCIs performed annually in the U.S. and 885,000+ in Europe, even modest gains in precision and consistency could translate into meaningful patient-level outcomes at scale.

The bigger story is one we're seeing across specialties: AI is moving out of "future tech" framing and into bedside decision support. Our job as physicians isn't to compete with these tools — it's to understand them well enough to deploy them wisely, recognize their limits, and keep the patient at the center.

I unpack tools like this — clinical use, workflow impact, and ethical trade-offs — on my YouTube channel. Search "AskDoctorAsh" on YouTube, or DM me.

— Dr. Ashkan Nasr, DO, MPH

Source: Abbott press release, "Abbott receives FDA clearance and CE Mark for next-generation Ultreon™ 3.0 AI-powered coronary imaging platform," April 28, 2026.

#AIinMedicine #DigitalHealth #InterventionalCardiology #InternalMedicine #HealthTech #FDA #ClinicalAI

4 months ago | [YT] | 10

Dr. Ashkan Nasr DO; MPH

​Happy Holidays to my incredible community! 🎄 As the year winds down, I wanted to take a moment to thank you all for your incredible support, thoughtful comments, and for being part of this journey. Whether you’re taking a well-deserved break or working through the season, I hope your holidays are filled with joy and relaxation. See you in the New Year with more exciting content! ✨

8 months ago | [YT] | 17

Dr. Ashkan Nasr DO; MPH

🚀 Bridging Medicine & Technology | Dr. Ash – Attending Hospitalist, Educator & AI in Medicine Advocate 💡

1 year ago | [YT] | 3