In this episode of the Me, Myself, and AI podcast, Philips’s chief medical officer Carla Goulart Peron shares how artificial intelligence is reshaping health care — not by replacing clinicians but by expanding access, improving diagnostics, and freeing doctors to focus more time on patients. Drawing on her experience practicing medicine in Brazil’s strained public health system, she explains how technologies like AI-assisted imaging and remote collaboration can bridge critical gaps in care. Carla also explores the challenges of trust, bias, interoperability, and women’s health data in the next era of AI-enabled medicine. She offers a grounded, global perspective on how technology can make health care more human.
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Transcript
Allison Ryder: How is one clinician thinking about applying AI to health care in additive ways that improve access to care, clinician confidence, and patient experience? Find out on today’s episode.
Carla Goulart Peron: I’m Dr. Carla Goulart Peron from Philips, and you are listening to Me, Myself, and AI.
Sam Ransbotham: Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review exploring the future of artificial intelligence. I’m Sam Ransbotham, professor of analytics at Boston College. I’ve been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 13 seasons of podcast episodes. In each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policy makers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.
Our guest today is Dr. Carla Goulart Peron, chief medical officer at Philips. Philips is a health care technology company behind imaging systems, patient monitoring, and a growing suite of AI-based clinical tools. What I find fascinating about Carla’s perspective is that she started her career as a physician in Sao Paulo’s public health system, where demand far outstrips resources. She’s carried that lens into the C-suite. She’s now leading medical strategy for a company that’s betting heavily on AI to close gaps in care. Carla, welcome to the show.
Carla Goulart Peron: Thank you very much, Sam.
Sam Ransbotham: Many listeners might still associate Philips more with consumer electronics, but can you tell us about the company in terms of health care and the kinds of things you’re doing?
Carla Goulart Peron: It’s a company that has [been around for] 130 years and has been in many areas, but the last few decades, Philips shifted into health care fully. We started with imaging — so the diagnostic area, X-ray, CT, MRI, ultrasound — and then we [went] into the interventional therapy, into the cath labs. We also are very much present in the ICU and any area of the hospital where you are monitoring signals coming from those patients. [We’re] also heavily invested in monitoring things outside of the hospital. And then the last piece, but not less important, [is] definitely AI that is supporting all those areas of care and then keeps growing [as] a very hot topic right now.
Sam Ransbotham: As you were listing these technologies, I was thinking, “Those are classic applications where AI has made huge advances with imaging and these sorts of things.” I mentioned earlier, you trained as a physician and you worked in both the public and the private sector, sometimes in the same day, I think, switching back and forth. What did that experience teach you about where health care breaks down in a way that maybe technology can help?
Carla Goulart Peron: You are right. In the morning I was working in the public sector in Brazil, where scarcity of health care workers, technology, information sometimes is very much present, so [you] need to work within the best of your capacity to offer care for those patients. But it’s universal health care, which means everybody has access. So there is a benefit there too.
Sometimes in the afternoon or in the night, I was working in the best of the best hospitals in the private sector, with everything available. I think that teaches you a lot of resilience, personally, as an individual, as a physician, but also gives you the chance to try different things and learn from those experiences. But [it] also makes so much clearer to an individual like me how much technology can actually build a bridge and help support more patients [who] are expecting to get access to health care overall … because it’s expediting the way we’re seeing those patients, because it’s connecting the data points of information, or even allowing collaboration across the specialties that may not be present in the public sector.
Sam Ransbotham: Was there a specific moment that you said, “This is something that technology could really help with or could help fix?” Was there anything that made you think technology might be the answer?
Carla Goulart Peron: Many times. I love sharing an example of ultrasounds [from] when I [was] coming out of residency, actually, and starting to see patients on my own. [The] ultrasound is one of the biggest diagnostic tools that we use in the OB-GYN practice. But we [did] not always have access to those machines in the hospital setup. Sometimes we had access to those machines, but we are not qualified to use them.
Technology [is coming] into reality today — I’m very jealous about the people [who] are learning today [in] their own clinical practice — in a way that you have clear collaboration. So you can really open the technology, open the ultrasound machine, get access to an expert [who] can be anywhere [on] the planet, let’s say in the same city, just to make it easier from the clinical practice perspective, to guide you, to see what you are seeing [in] that same imaging, help you to capture the right imaging, and expedite the technology. In some other places, like the ones that were practicing in the public sector, I would need to transfer that patient, sometimes to another facility, which means call an ambulance, be stuck in traffic, just to get the image captured and then [take the] patient back for you to be able to take a final diagnostic and initiate therapy. I mean that was like wine and water, unfortunately, between those two worlds that I was living in.
Sam Ransbotham: You mentioned the traffic. Not too long ago I was in Sao Paulo, and that was a big thing I remember there — just how long it took to get from one place to another.
But actually, ultrasounds [are] expensive machines that can’t move, but then there [are] also the other parts that information can move. I think you were sort of making a distinction between those. You’ve got some aspects of what you’re doing that seem to rely very heavily on sophistic
