Live from the HIMSS conference, HITea with Grace serves up another candid conversation as Niki Panich, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Penguin Ai, joins Grace to dig into one of healthcare’s most persistent—and overlooked—challenges: women’s health. From gaps in research and care delivery to the opportunities for innovation, this episode explores where the system is falling short and where momentum is finally building.
Niki brings a sharp, strategic perspective to the conversation, connecting the dots between women’s health and the rapid rise of healthcare AI. As new technologies promise to reshape care, Grace and Niki unpack the real questions: Who are these tools being built for? What data are they trained on? And how do we ensure they don’t reinforce the very gaps we’re trying to close?
Of course, no conversation about AI is complete without governance. Together, they get into what responsible AI actually looks like in practice—from oversight and accountability to the policies and guardrails needed to build trust. It’s a thoughtful, forward-looking discussion that blends innovation with realism—and a clear reminder that better health outcomes start with more inclusive, intentional design.
[00:00:04] Welcome to High Tea with Grace, where we spill the tea on HIT. I'm thrilled to be here at the HIMSS conference, interviewing the industry's greatest leaders about trends in space. So tell me, who are you and what do you do? Dr. Niki Panich, I'm a family physician women's health dog, been a practice for almost 20 years, subspecialties in obstetrics, pediatrics, and menopause. But I'm also a CMO Data Geek.
[00:00:29] Dr. Niki Panich, I did a Master's in AI and Business at Stanford and then got really involved in health technology, thinking about how can we change the system, how can we change workflows using innovative technologies. Dr. Niki Panich, I still practice. It's exceedingly important for me to do that so that I really understand the problems that I'm trying to solve with technology. Dr. Niki Panich, you can achieve a certain level of scale when you see patients one on one and there is nothing more valuable than the physician-patient relationship.
[00:00:57] Dr. Niki Panich, the trust, the ability to really affect change is amazing. When you build a technology, you can take that same level of impact and grow it across scale. And so that's what really motivates me to be a technologist as well as a physician. Dr. Niki Panich, I love it. Well, we're so thrilled to learn from you today. I know you work at Penguin AI right now. So tell me a little bit about what Penguin AI is and does.
[00:01:20] Dr. Niki Panich is a healthcare-native platform for agentic AI. So we can do things like help providers organize their charts. We can do summarizations. We can visualize hundreds of pages of data into one beautiful page to give clinical insights.
[00:01:39] Dr. Niki Panich, we can optimize things like prior authorizations, coding, administrative burden. We know physicians spend 16 hours a week on administrative work. And so any time that we can give physicians back to either spend time with their families, spend time on their own health, work-life balance, and reduce the cognitive load of administrative tasks, anything we can do like that with technology has a great impact on patient care.
[00:02:08] Dr. Niki Panich, it has a great impact on physician well-being and reduces physician burnout. Dr. Niki Panich, I love it. So tell me about the career path that brought you to your role today. Dr. Niki Panich, I started out in a very traditional career path. I trained in family medicine with a subspecialty in women's health. And I practiced for about 10 years in a very traditional way. Then Triple Aim came out, patient-centered medical home, and I got very involved in data, panels. Why would a physician care about their quality?
[00:02:36] Why would you look at the impact of what you're doing? How could you integrate into community to really impact a local population? And so I was very involved in building out patient-centered medical homes. Then I started to think about my patient population and the fact that patient labor, low birth weights were really high amongst the population. And it actually drove me nuts that the answers were likely sitting in my charts, but I didn't have the skill set to be able to do anything with it.
[00:03:03] So I went and did an AI degree and a business degree at Stanford to really try and open up technology and how AI could really impact clinical workflows. And so that's how I ended up at Penguin. Very, very cool. Now, I'm very interested to hear about women's health from you. Women's health doctor. I mean, that's pretty amazing. So tell me, like, what are some underrated challenges in this space that you feel are just not really being talked about or noticed?
[00:03:31] Women's health is just starting, just starting to get some of the attraction that it needs. Only 5% of global health research, 5% addresses specifically women's health. We are 51% of the population. It's about, I think there was a McKinsey study recently that said it was a $1 trillion problem that is not being adequately addressed. And I can give you some examples.
[00:03:57] There are studies that show that if a woman presents to the emergency department, she's 10% less likely than a man to have her pain asked about. And then it takes 30 minutes longer for women to be offered analgesia. This is objective data measured in observation studies. Another example, endometriosis. It takes on average 8 to 12 years for a woman with endometriosis to be diagnosed.
[00:04:22] That means that this poor woman is living with undiagnosed pain, often told that it's in her head or that she's crazy. And it's a real condition. We just don't have great tests for it. And so, you know, there's a convoluted pathway. It's a diagnosis of exclusion in many cases. And so there's, you know, seven other things that get ruled out first. It's just so unfortunate. And these women suffer unnecessarily in agonizing pain.
[00:04:50] Near and dear to my heart, maternal mortality. This one is a big one. And this was one of the things that really prompted me to get my business degree at Stanford was to think about how do we solve this? How can we use technology to identify women that are at risk? Because 87%, 87% of maternal mortality is preventable. That's crazy. It is mind-blowing in this day and age. And I get it.
[00:05:19] Women are focused on their baby. They are focused on, you know, being a caregiver. They're not thinking about what their blood pressure might be doing or if they're bleeding too heavily or what have you. And I just feel like we need tools to give women the signals to encourage them to seek care, to encourage them, you know, or we need people in their homes doing outreach. And we need to think about innovative models to meet this need because 87% preventable maternal mortality.
[00:05:45] We should not, moms and babies should not be dying in this, you know, in this day and age. Absolutely. It's insane. What innovations are exciting you in this space? Like what innovations are getting you up in the morning, giving you hope? Yeah. I mean, it's exciting to see groups like Mithy where we have access to women's health providers in scalable ways. There's new platforms that have come out. Sword, which originally was an MSK provider, has a bloom device specific to pelvic floor.
[00:06:15] But now they've expanded into fertility. They've expanded into menopause. And we're finally seeing platforms that are covering the entire life cycle for women. Because if you have gestational diabetes, for example, you are 50% chance of having type 2 diabetes later in life. We know that women with gestational hypertension are at higher risk for cardiovascular disease. So being able to keep track of those risk factors 20 years later on one platform is going to serve women in meaningful ways.
[00:06:45] And so I'm excited to see the development of women's specific platforms and technologies to be able to look for these signals. I love it. Now, we are here at the HIMSS conference. What trends are you hearing about in the hallways here? Whether it be women's health or AI or whatever else you're hearing. So I would say last year people were talking about AI in single-use cases. Have you used an agent for this? Have you used an agent for that? You know, if you did a survey of physicians, some had started to use ambience scribes.
[00:07:15] Now I would say it's fairly universal. Everyone has used AI in some way, either personally or professionally. What we're hearing about this year is what is your AI strategy? How are you going to implement end-to-end? It's not about point solutions anymore. It's about platforms. And that's what Penguin brings to the table, is a platform. So if you want to plug in this agent, that agent, have a digital worker that does an end-to-end process, you can do that.
[00:07:41] And I think one of the key things is that we need to be thinking about digital workers who are different than employees. We need to be watching every step. We need to build that trust, and we need to have transparency. And so trust, transparency, ROI. Three themes that we're seeing in agentic AI that are different from last year that require a platform to deliver on it. And what trends are you hearing in the governance side of the house? Huge, huge.
[00:08:06] So we're starting to see new credentialing coming out from NCQA, from URAC, from CHI. We're starting to see some new standards that are going to be set. And that is going to enable the adoption of the technology. It is very welcome. It's funny. I always say people think they buy Penguin for the agents in the digital workers, but really what they're buying is the underlying data architecture, the structure, the governance, the bias detection.
[00:08:33] I can tell you down to a code level if something is being approved more for a white woman in her 50s than an African-American man in his 30s. And that's important. We don't want to be propagating bias in the data or in our models. And so having the ability to have what I call glass box transparency, meaning that we can see every single step of a decision making process is paramount.
[00:08:56] If you could be given a wish that could come true in the future, like what innovations do you hope really take off in the next five years? What do you hope we're hearing and talking about at HIMSS 2030? So part of the reason that I decided to do a data science AI and business degree is because I think we are on the forefront of precision medicine. But not just in terms of dosing of medications, integration of genetics, pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, you know, how do you metabolize drugs, that sort of thing.
[00:09:25] But how does your environment affect what you're doing? What exercise level is right for you? What's your strength training? Food is medicine. Air we breathe is medicine. So taking a completely holistic approach to health and expanding it to being beyond. It's not a disease. It's a wellness progression.
[00:09:44] And so I'm really excited about the ability to integrate all of these different forms of data into who is Nikki as a person and how can I optimize my lifestyle and age well and live the best version of my life. While my listeners love to hear about trends in the space, they also love to learn from women leaders like yourself about what drives you. So what are some hobbies or things that you do to work your best and make a difference in your day-to-day life?
[00:10:12] One of the things that's really important to me is exercise and time outside. I spend a lot of time in the mountains. I spend a lot of time in green space. That recharges me. I also am a musician, so I'm a singer and a pianist. And so I love to use that creative side of my brain. Don't ask me to draw. My stick people are horrible. But, you know, music is a big part of bringing my best self to the world. And also, yeah, exercise.
[00:10:40] Spending time disconnected from screens. I think that's really important. I talk to my team a lot about the 20-20-20 rule, which is every 20 minutes you need to look 20 feet away and have at least 20 seconds off of your screen. We try to do walking meetings where we can because we know that moving actually promotes blood flow to the brain. You know, it's thinking about how can you bring some of these things that you know are in your leisure part of your life into your work life to optimize what you're doing.
[00:11:08] Now, challenges always come our way as women leaders. And so what are some things that you do to just stay resilient through the challenges, through the obstacles? What keeps you going? My patience. My patience. That is the driving force behind all of this. It's the stories of people that I've had the privilege to share in. And it's thinking about how could I have made that person's life better? Or, oh, we did this little thing and wow, it had this tremendous impact.
[00:11:35] And so it's thinking about how technologies and how systems and systems level change can actually drive the best outcomes for people. If you could give your younger self a piece of advice, what would you tell her? It's okay to be curious. Stay curious. And it's okay to transform yourself over time. I mean, I was in my 30s when I was doing my AI degree and my business degree and I was terrified to go back to school.
[00:11:59] I realized that I, although I could type because I'm a pianist at the speed of somebody talking, I had to write with pen and paper because that is how my brain was trained. And so my classmates, they're all typing on their Mac computers at Stanford and there's me writing by hand because that's how I translated information. Keep learning. Keep being curious. Push the envelope of what's possible. Dream big. And do. Don't be as scared to do. Love it. Now, where can my listeners find you online?
[00:12:29] I bought my own blog that I started. It's usually linked through my LinkedIn profile. So Nikki Panich, MD, and also on the Penguin AI website. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciated learning from you. This was a complete pleasure. Thank you for having me. And thanks to you folks for joining me too. Check out the Hi Too With Grace podcast for more interviews with great guests like Nikki today. Cheers. Like a Girl Media is more than a media network. It's a community.
[00:12:56] We want to meet you and amplify your voice and the voices of outstanding women innovating in healthcare. Interested in starting your own podcast or hosting an event near you? Connect with us online or in person. We're here to support and empower you. We're here to support and empower you. We're here to support and empower you. Bye. Bye.