Sarah Fuentes Molina
Appearances
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
And the products that we're developing leverage health system and patient data to diagnose disease, achieve more precise surgical outcomes, and essentially realize the future of the four tenets of health tech, personalization, participation, precision, and prevention.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
Oh, absolutely. That's a wonderful question. Thank you, Scott. So I would say we are going to see an exponential increase in AI leaning into healthcare. Currently, I'm closely watching the application of machine learning and AI, especially generative AI for healthcare data. Digital health and AI solutions are expanding rapidly.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
exponentially, and our advancements over the last two years are set to significantly enhance our ability to expedite the development of new drugs and treatments, improve patient outcomes and streamline health care delivery. It's really quite astonishing and an exciting time to be in this space.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
But to your question, while AI solution developers fully understand the technical fundamentals, many lack familiarity with established health principles, regulations, and standard clinical practices. And this gap can lead to the creation of solutions that have not been thoroughly evaluated for their impact, including safety for patients and health systems.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
And that lack of understanding on both sides, I see leading to hesitation from healthcare leaders to invest. So hiring executives who come with that skill set and can build it in-house is going to be invaluable.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
100%. And I think that juxtaposition, that nexus is the most interesting and exciting space in healthcare for me right now. And there are all sorts of applications that are going to be so important to establish that shared understanding. You may have seen in the news last week that DeepSeek AI just came out and that has essentially changed the game for open source AI.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
And what that means is AI that you can own on your own systems. And there are many obstacles for AI in healthcare and privacy and data control is one of the most important ones. And this now makes it possible for innovative players in the healthcare space to actually engage with AI on their own terms, as opposed to having to partner with companies like Anthropic.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
And that increased amount of control that we have, that reduced long-term operational cost is going to mean that the field more people believe the fight is winnable and are going to be getting involved. And therefore, we are going to need more people at that nexus to help understanding from both sides and to foster that innovation.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
Of course, thank you. As you said, my name is Sarah Fuentes Molina. Prior to my current role, I served as Chief Growth Officer for TriazMD, a Chicago Pacific Founders portfolio company specializing in musculoskeletal surgical management. There, I oversaw growth in business operations, marketing, data analytics, and commercialization.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
I'm going to go right back to deep seek and open source AI. It's so exciting because deep seek and Open source generative AI is giving us so much more control and reducing long-term operational costs. It's dispelling the notion that only open AI and anthropic and the ethics of the world can do this.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
And so that means it's worth for us as healthcare leaders to look for ways to increase control and decrease costs and not just let the big players accrue all of the value. On some level, if you're a health system, 10 years from now, you will be paying for AI to help in both clinical and non-clinical ways.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
The exciting question that I see is, are you going to pay to develop these capabilities internally and in a way that's tailor-made to your population and your organization's needs? which is now a possible?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
Or are you paying for a startup somewhere to achieve a venture scale outcome where they develop a generic solution that they can sell to many organizations and overcome a long competitive sales cycle, essentially higher cost for less value? That's the space that is most exciting for me now because we're going to be able to build this on our own terms.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
Absolutely. A common refrain that I hear from my peers and from other health executives is we are in the tech business and we can't get involved in that game. We're going to have to outsource that. But the reality is that you're in health care and this is what the industry will look like in 2035. Just as health care today includes, you know, big, impressive buildings.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
We're not in the real estate business, but we still purchase land and design those buildings instead of attempting to perhaps retrofit a rented space. And that's a great analogy on how important it is to take the initiative and not wait for those giant enterprise companies like OpenAI to commercialize innovations.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
And the pep talk that I give here is that we assume that a technology company is going to be better at health care than will be at tech. But medicine is not easy enough that they can develop that capability quicker and better than we can develop a tech capability ourselves. So get started now building this capability in-house.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
And to your point, there are outstanding teams available that partner with health systems and life sciences. In fact, one of the companies that I currently work with, Hoplabs, specializes in these sorts of partnerships to help you figure out how AI can serve your use cases. and translate that research-grade innovation into scalable real-world impact for your organization.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
So you don't have to be the expert all alone, and you don't have to depend on the behemoths in the world and the McKinsey's and the Bain's. They can even assist in vetting and hiring in-house AI talent, which is a challenge for businesses that don't have that skill set in-house already.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
So my recommendation to any health care leader is to work with experts like these and to not be so risk averse because you've been burned by the epics of the world of the past that you don't invest where you need to to future proof your organization.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
My previous leadership roles span growth in marketing, essentially guiding healthcare enterprises from Fortune 500 companies to startups towards market expansion and revenue growth. I served as an entrepreneur in residence for venture-backed startups in the health tech space out of Stanford Healthcare's Innovation Lab.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
Absolutely. They can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I am Sarah Fuentes Molina, or you can always reach me at hi at sarahfuentesmolina.com. And I'm Absolutely open to talking about this. I love talking to other leaders about how they can implement these new innovations for their organizations.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
And I think the big takeaway here that I want everybody to remember coming out of this is that you can spend a million dollars on a generic AI solution that doesn't meet your needs and never will. And you'll be tweaking it for years. Or you can build it in-house for half the cost and half the time and get exactly what you need. And I want every leader to be empowered to be able to do that.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
Thank you so much.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
AI & Healthcare Innovation: Sarah Fuentes Molina on Digital Health Strategy 2-14-25
And I've led the go-to-market launch for business lines at life sciences and medical services companies like Johnson & Johnson, Fitbit, which is now part of Google, and Kaya Health. Currently, I advise a select group of health companies and startups at the intersection of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and healthcare services, including surgical and digital health.