00:00.97 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Hello and welcome to another episode of Leaders Perspective, where we speak with healthcare and technology leaders who are challenging conventions and pioneering impactful no innovation. I'm your host Ratnadeep, co-founder at Tech Variable. 00:14.36 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Today's topic is one that sits at the intersection of equity, innovation and transformation in healthcare. You know, we are naming it, Rethinking Health Tech with Open Source. And to help us explore this critical observation or conversation rather, 00:29.13 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee I'm honored to be joined by Bart. I hope I pronounced it correctly, Bart. 00:34.07 Bart um Yes, it's it's i don't challenge me with pronouncing Indian names, I would love you, but that goes around, I'll throw it away. 00:42.89 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Sure. So Bart is one of Europe's leading minds in digital health and a passionate advocate for open innovation, ethical AI, and equitable healthcare access. 00:53.54 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee He is the founder of Hippo AI Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to democratize medical AI by making algorithms and knowledge freely accessible through open source methodologies. 01:04.84 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee With a background in both like ah technology leadership and you know healthcare systems thinking, um Bart has worked across the globe to accelerate digital transformation that doesn't just scale, but scales fairly. 01:19.93 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee know Bart, thank you for joining us for this episode on Leaders Perspective. 01:25.32 Bart ah Thank you for having me, Rodney. 01:28.60 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee ah But I would ah like to start this with the big picture, right? The concept of open source has transformed software. But why does it matter so deeply, especially in healthcare care right now? 01:45.31 Bart Well, I think open source is giving the everyone the equality of opportunity, first of all, to um i call it. It's not about giving everybody a free beer, as we call it in Europe, but allowing everybody to brew their own beer. 02:01.87 Bart And healthcare is very cultural, so you don't want um something to be dictated top down for one certain country. You want it to be built up, bottom up within your community. 02:14.18 Bart And in order to do that, you need to have tools, you need to have technology independently from any big tech platform hyperscaler. And what open source allows us is to build independently, depending a bit on the license, but mostly build independently and giving everybody the opportunity to start transferring within their community. So I find this extremely empowering because it's kind of giving everybody access to the alphabet in order to write your own books. 02:46.32 Bart um There is no license fee that you need to pay to use the alphabet. um And there are some people here on the planet now that think it would be wise to um um license everything and in order to to kept it um to capture the value out of it. so I'm a strong believer in digital commons. That's another way how to express open source, because these are tools and assets that are under common ownership, ah public ownership, and that allows us to build. 03:17.92 Bart And that is what fascinates me, because everybody has their own ideas on what and how they want to build and solve problems. And um it accelerates innovation and it decreases the price of access. 03:31.59 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Yeah, love the alphabet analogy, by the way, you know, but bart to go deep, right? What do you see currently, or rather as a whole, right? What do you see as the core problem with the way digital health innovation is structured today, especially when it comes to, let's say, proprietary systems, right? 03:52.52 Bart ah Digital health can go in all demands. So you have biotech, pharma, health providers, the individual physicians. So that depends on on which area. But let's talk about the core substance. 04:05.88 Bart And that is mostly data that is needed. So in order to create, for example, open source AI, you will need to get access to uncopyrighted data. Now, 04:18.08 Bart Patient data cannot be copyright, as we know, from a legal perspective, nobody can own data. But the access to data is being regulated and is being captured by the industry. There's a regulatory capture ring there because the data extractions, meaning the results of applying machine learning on that data, 04:40.80 Bart um ah can deliver or create quite some value. And now that value is being extracted by corporates, by companies, investors, and being turned into assets, meaning that data is some sort of territory, and then you can start digging, and then suddenly you find gold, and then you start selling that asset in in that sense. So that is the the main current problem that we are... 05:10.19 Bart confronted with barriers that ah like don't give us access to these larger data sets that don't allow us to build in the open because there is this very greedy and short-term um hunger for initially extracting these values and turning them into what we call in the financial markets intangible assets. 05:32.90 Bart um So we're turning everything into asset classes. um And that is the opposite of open source. So we are confronted with um ah group that wants to extract the value initially and then let everybody pay a rent when you start using these tools. 05:51.37 Bart And you have others that say like, no, this is healthcare. And I want to increase access and I want to lower the prices and I want to guarantee that we give every single person on this planet universal access to all these life-saving innovations that we can extract out of data and make that available to all the builders to put it into application. 06:14.41 Bart I belong to the second group. 06:18.71 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Interesting, very interesting, you know. 06:19.20 Bart So it it is a battle of um ah capturing value. It is ah a very old um ah battle that is being in all industries. But there is one difference here, like data monetization or the data economy, as you know it from all other industries. 06:32.96 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Hmm. Hmm. 06:37.22 Bart I have no issue when BMW or Daimler would monetize the data that is produced by the cars and then turning that into private assets. Now, the difference here is that in health care, to create that data, 06:52.19 Bart um the ah data holders um used my tax money and my insurance fees and the bills that I paid for ah to create that data. 07:02.66 Bart So we can discuss if that is the case, if we as society have paid for um generating that data in that sense, in that pure sense, throughout in Europe public healthcare systems, 07:07.71 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank 07:16.24 Bart then should we allow others to extract the value out of the data and propertize this and and turn it into a property, into an asset class, that when we want to get that information back for our treatments and we need that extraction, like the the the innovation out of the data, 07:39.14 Bart um If we don't open source this, we probably will pay 10 to 50 times more as what we should pay for it, because somebody has monopolized that specific ah data extraction or knowledge. 07:53.65 Bart So it it is ah fight between those who want to capture everything and those who believe in the openness and freedom um of that of these um and these insights. 08:07.39 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee right so ah as as you speak but i can i can understand that you know ah you're very very passionate about how you know these closed ecosystems create structural inequities right you know you know we can go in other directions for example you know can okay one of the things that i'm really intrigued on especially within the paradigm of you know open sourceness or non-open sourceness for example right can you expand on how vendor lock-in and proprietary platforms may be actually harming the healthcare ecosystem particularly in underfunded regions or you know kind of even emerging economies right 08:50.28 Bart um I don't see, to be honest, that much global platforms yet as we see them in in other industries, like if you go to Booking.com or Airbnb or Uber or all these, you don't have a global healthcare platform in in that sense. 09:07.59 Bart but you do have gatekeepers around the data in that sense. And um so you have um not technical platforms, but you have some sort of legal platforms that are also acting as a gatekeeper. 09:13.35 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Mm-hmm. 09:22.66 Bart And we know there is one industry that veryry comes close to to that we're discussing, and that is the scientific publishing industry. Now, if you take the scientific publishing industry, 09:34.77 Bart and you looked at how we as a society pay for public research, and the researcher, the author, the creator of the research has to print or to publish his results in a paper 09:45.90 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 09:50.46 Bart Then when he does that and he wants to publish into one of the um ah high impact scientific publisher papers, then he gives away his rights, like he has copyright like ah rights for himself, but he cannot earn money with it. And he gives away the copyrights to that scientific publisher where... 10:09.57 Bart the creator is not paid for, where the peer reviewers are not paid for, a where the the copyrights and the gatekeeping is being done by these large scientific publishers. Now, some people could contest that you need that sort of transaction in order to create revenue streams so these ah papers get distributed. 10:32.77 Bart Well, in reality, the opposite is happening. was two years ago in Guatemala and met brilliant researchers. 10:36.57 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 10:41.02 Bart And Guatemala is a low-income country, so they don't have access to all the um tools that we have here in the West. um And if they want to publish their research, um then... 10:54.45 Bart Now, if you want to make that accessible to an Opus Access publication, meaning you pay the scientific publisher $10,000 in order to make that paper downloadable for free, 11:07.51 Bart Then when you do an open access publication, more people will start looking at your ah paper, more people will start citing you. 11:14.35 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee you 11:15.59 Bart So your impact as a researcher increases because you have the means of paying $10,000 in order to publish. Now, these Guatemalan researchers told me they cannot pay for that. 11:28.12 Bart like Their university has no $10,000 and the prices are not particularly different. um The other thing is that they don't, even in certain university settings in the Global South, don't have access to these papers, because the smaller universities there or um institutes don't have access or don't pay the licenses for the scientific publisher fees, which is why we see... 11:54.20 Bart i have seen their creation of Sci-Hub, which is an a illegal website that allows us to download all these papers ah for free. 12:00.69 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee you 12:04.63 Bart ah But it gives people in the Global South access to a knowledge. Now, in that same analogy, We can think that the current um capturing and not being open and closing that down is leading to really global inequalities between the global the the West and the global South even, because we are putting the same gatekeepers, the same barriers in front of the Now it's not a PDF that is being published, now it's a trained AI model that is being published. 12:40.47 Bart And instead of open sourcing this and making this available to all, people tend to capture this and to make it something that is monopolized and only accessible for those 12:40.65 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Mm-hmm. 12:52.55 Bart who can pay access to the API and have their credit card and then start consuming. and And I think it's it's ah inequality by design. like It is a system designed for inequality. 13:05.06 Bart And there is now this whole discussion about equity. And if you look at the World Health Organization, it's like in every second sentence, 13:11.57 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 13:14.44 Bart They talk about equity, but if you look further, what do they understand about equity, then it's more a top-down redistribution instead of a bottom-up equality of opportunity. 13:28.06 Bart Now, i I think the intentions are good to see like, well, we are on top and we have good intentions and we redistribute, but... It is a system that always is going to be based on asymmetries of power and information, and you're kind of feeding all the ones that don't have access, and you create very strong dependencies, and you control them. 13:51.09 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Mm-hmm. 13:51.46 Bart It's a sort of, I provocatively call this digital colonialism in a sense, um It is the same way of thinking. And I think I contest this. I think we have seen what happened with software. um we The open source movement with software empowered millions of Indians to start their own business companies, they are their own software companies, to start building software independently. And look now, like the biggest CEOs in Silicon Valley are all coming from India. 14:21.81 Bart Surprise! One could contest if We didn't have access to open source software 20, 30 years ago if that whole ecosystem of intelligence, human intelligence, that learns how to code, learns how to apply technology, would even exist. 14:38.05 Bart ah Because we would have been dependent from Microsoft and Unix and all the other closed-off companies back then that didn't give access to code. so We need to learn from the past and we need to learn and apply these tools instead of being always guided by some equity promises and fight back for freedom because at the end it's a a fight for freedom. 15:03.59 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Absolutely, absolutely. So, but is it, is it fair to say that, you know, open source is not just a technical model, but it's also probably an ethical one? 15:15.97 Bart yeah What is ethical in that sense? What is ethical for me is not ethical for you, because ethics are based on principles, norms and values. And we don't live in a world where all these values and norms are the same. And I hope we never end up in a world where all these norms and values are the same, because that would mean that we homogenize culture and across the globe and live in some sort of totalitarian state, because we kind of dictated from top down how culture and norms and values should look like and um so i i think that um in terms of what what is ethical one could question and that's what i sometimes do is challenging all these people that come with ethical ai and ah exclude the discussion about open source and then i ask is it ethical when society pays for data 16:09.10 Bart and with their insurance fees and with their tax money, and then the data holders, meaning the hospitals, the public research institutes and others, are transferring these data extracts into something that becomes a private ah intangible asset. Is that ethical? 16:27.20 Bart Because nobody asked us if we want these extractions to be open or closed. I did a survey once and I had like 860 people answering that survey um when I said like if we consent um for um institutes to use our data, so you always need um um to get informed consent from the patient. If we consent ah to use our data for research, um um should then that research lead to open research or can that research lead to privatized research? Now, the majority of the survey but was definitely telling, well, if I can decide I want it to be open, I want it to be 17:15.09 Bart accessible for the public for i wanted to become a digital common good the a smaller portion of those who answered i wanted to be transferred into private assets most of them had a background in investment where vps general managers people who sit on top of the chain but not the researchers not the doers not the one who are confronted with all the barriers of innovation so i i think that um 17:20.40 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Oh. 17:43.70 Bart We need to become much louder, much more pushing back um against those who want to control others ah by gatekeeping data, gatekeeping um information. And I give you a ah perhaps a good example um of, because it's always better to it talk about with less abstraction, but coming with real practical examples. 18:11.54 Bart Now, during COVID, ah during the global pandemic, there was um here um um in the Charité in Berlin, where i live like I live in Berlin, but there was a big research institute, Charité, and they kind of published as a first the protocol for doing a PCR test, which is one of the tests we used 18:22.07 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 18:33.37 Bart um for detecting if you were COVID positive or not. Now, he published that protocol as an open protocol, meaning it was free, it was not patented, everybody could use it. And what we saw in Germany was um many different suppliers um um offering that PCR test, competing with each other, 18:54.96 Bart meaning that the price was reflecting the market and the demand and the supply of these tests and the price dropped and to for a pc artist to about 60 euros now We have similar tests, PCR tests, where the protocol is being privatized by a single company, for example, in the field of breast cancer detection and certain types of breast cancer. 19:20.93 Bart And then somebody exclusively got access to a data set that allowed them to create the PCR protocol for detecting that specific cancer. Now, in that case, that same sort of test, there was a bit of difference. i need to be nuanced, but it is... 19:37.63 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank 19:39.60 Bart 80% similar will cost you instead of 60 euros, 5000 euros. So that's the difference what we're paying because somebody has exclusive access to that specific protocol. 19:53.26 Bart And that means 5000, that means that you exclude a lot of people from not having access because they cannot afford this. We can go further into the whole vaccine development during the time where I was fighting for open source vaccines because I didn't understood when this would have been a global pandemic as we have been told, 20:17.70 Bart why Were we treating the world as one because we all were affected? And why did we, or in Germany, refuse to um create a patent waiver and allow others to get access to these vaccines, the mRNA vaccines? 20:31.92 Bart Now, there was a team in Houston under the doctor Peter Hortes who then created an open source vaccine, something people said was never possible. 20:39.80 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank 20:42.10 Bart And it were two two Indian biotech companies that were able to take that open source asset. And they did run the clinical trials in India and brought that vaccine to market. 20:52.35 Bart So that's the example that we need, ah because it means that open source really allows local producers to produce the life-saving goods that we need to build our local community-based healthcare systems. 21:04.20 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee you. 21:08.25 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Right. No, thanks for that part. You know, I was in fact about to, you know, ask you about a few few examples, real life examples where it took it has made a real impact. This is a perfect example of that, right? 21:21.81 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee But on the same side of the coin, you know, whether it's AI models, data platforms or, you know, modular digital tools, right? Where within these three areas, have you seen any impact at scale I mean, whether it's in Europe or in US or anywhere around the globe. 21:44.32 Bart What do you mean at scale? back like well there was up they are There was a project um that created the biggest open source asset in healthcare, and it was the Human Genome Project. Although it was biased because most of the data came out of the Western populations. 22:01.38 Bart but There was a ah battle between the Open Science um Consortium, where there was an investment of, I think in total, it was like 16 billion of investments to sequence the first human genome back then. It was in the 90s. 22:18.86 Bart And there was at the same time a biotech entrepreneur called Craig Venter, who was doing the same, but he wanted to patent the human genome. Now, imagine if you would have patented the human genome. That means that every researcher would have been paying licenses to Craig Fenter's company. 22:35.87 Bart Now, that didn't happen. And the reason why it didn't happen is policy. There was an agreement between the US and the UK that was signed in 2000 between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton that forbids people to patent the human genome. 22:43.49 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee you. 22:51.68 Bart So they turned and into an open source asset because If you're not allowed to patent it, it becomes a common good. And if it's a gen know sequence code, well, it's digital because you cannot write it down on paper or anything. 23:05.86 Bart So there was a um a first example that um showed and demonstrated that we can create policies 23:09.67 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank 23:13.98 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee you. 23:14.17 Bart that allow us to advance society as a whole and accelerate scientific discoveries based on these open assets. Now, the the discussion that people would say that open source would not lead to to um wealth creation or monetization, there are many papers out there that looked what happened after these policy changes that turned the human genome into a common good. 23:42.09 Bart And what you saw is that Until now, it's created in the US only already over a trillion dollar on economic value. So it is not because you demonetize something and make it turn to... I'm not thinking about open sourcing everything, but you need to have the core assets open source in order to accelerate. And that's why I make that analogy to the alphabet. Imagine that from a Western perspective, and we talk always here about Gutenberg, who was the German invented the printing press, although the Chinese already invented the printing press before, but like that's our story. 24:09.47 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Yeah. 24:18.93 Bart Imagine he would have then patented the alphabet, the printed alphabet. be we probably wouldn't have advanced a society that fast because everybody who would be writing a book, for each word, each letter, you need to pay. So who can write books? Well, only those who have access to these sources ah the resources to buy the licenses, meaning you are exclude others. So I think you get the principle, and if you compare it to what happened in software, 24:46.94 Bart and you you compare that to each other, I think everybody should agree that the open way is the more inclusive, ah more ethical, and for society, the fastest way ah to accelerate innovation and at the end to save human lives. 25:04.94 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Yeah, I agree. Thanks for that part. it This is really interesting. um I mean, ah but one of the other things ah that that was you know coming to my mind when when you were explaining historical you know incidents and and know success stories. right ah Look at Tech Variable, we are currently working on you know cutting edge stuff like agentic AI, machine learning models, generative AI, all those sort of stuff. 25:32.86 Bart Mm-hmm. 25:34.16 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee right so So this question kind of ah really resonates with me in terms of you know how do you see, as as someone who is a strong advocate of open source, like how do you see agentic AI systems and open frameworks ah complementing each other. right can Can modularity be the key to you know sustainable, locally adaptable and scalable innovation? 25:59.83 Bart Well, at the intro, you mentioned Hippo AI, but you didn't mention the other company that I've been building now since December, which is called Isaray. And with Isaray, we are exactly doing that. We're building an open source framework for Argentic AI, and we're grinding this with an Argentic AI marketplace. So we want to give the whole world access to join the marketplace and then we do quality manage these agents and we certify them in order to get them medical compliance the whole platform um will be released as an open source development and framework ah because we want to create open standards and open protocols ah for agent communication for agent to tool calling 26:45.34 Bart all these things what we will need for building that pipe dream of agentic AI automation. 26:49.61 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 26:51.54 Bart There was one challenge though that we didn't solve globally, is the data standardization. um If people talk about agentic and then don't talk about data standardization, they have no clue what they're talking about. 27:06.54 Bart So you can um have three different um EMR systems that all talk FHIR and all have the same interface and all publish the same API, but all three have different proprietary databases and then the database is mapped to the FHIR server whatever they use. 27:27.10 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 27:30.65 Bart It will always as be a mapping and an interpretation of the FHIR standard and the data underlying data model will not always be the same, meaning that In the underwriting data model, you sometimes have deep dependencies between data and other data that is connected to each other. So yeah it's not that you have total freedom to write in that database and then write in a FHIR format on the database. No, FHIR translates it then into what the proprietary database needs. now 28:04.01 Bart We have done testing with Isaray to three different yeah EMR systems, all different all the same FHIR interface, and three similar, um exactly the same agents. 28:16.57 Bart And we we we run these agents on these systems, and you'd get three different outcomes. 28:17.30 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 28:22.45 Bart So if you get three different outcomes, how you going to enable agentic automation? You won't. You will always have the human in the loop. You will always have the the mean that you need as a human to control it because you don't have the ability to replicate that what others have been publishing in scientific papers and why the agent has been certified for. So I think what we will see in the next 10 years is a push for as well data standardization. 28:54.28 Bart And I became a huge fan of the open EHR or open air movement which is a decades-old um open movement that has created an open description of clinical data bases or repositories that have even a semantic description and allows us to exactly do that so 29:01.11 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank 29:19.61 Bart If we want to talk about frameworks and open source and open AI and all these things, there is even a stronger need if we want to build something as the internet was built on, which is an open ecosystem based on open protocols, based on decentralized. Everybody can run um an IP like and a web server and then becoming and and a host or whatever. 29:43.73 Bart um then we need to push even more for open standards and then we need to drill that down even to a database level how painful that also might sound but I think this is the only way to find the alternative and the alternative would be the emergence of a new global player that is scaling globally with their proprietary database 29:55.17 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Oh. 30:07.79 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee a 30:09.13 Bart and we all become super dependent. And they decide if, again, we get access to that data or not, even though I would be running a hospital and I would be running ah using their platform, they still would be able to decide if I get access to my data or not. 30:27.57 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee So, but, you know, let's be honest here, right? The health tech ecosystem is still largely resistant to open source adoption, right? I've heard your views on the barriers that keep these health systems, you know, vendors or investors to embrace it openly, right? 30:44.50 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee I can understand it. it will It is, of course, a combination of the mindset. In fact, even monetization, um you know, models, policies even, right? But one of the important aspects we also, I would like to understand from you is what role do founders or developers, change makers play in creating a culture that favors openness and transparency? 31:10.22 Bart um Well, I think it's a print it is a principle that you will need to embrace. Now, the good thing is, there is good news as well, that in the US, what investors have been seeing, that startups that build in the open, not everything, you yeah always have an open source strategy. It's not that you, every time, on on ah every night you would share your code, that is not how open source works, but... um you you at some point you will open your software code when you think your development is mature enough in order to perhaps ah grow a community around that code now what research has shown um and what investors in the u.s already applying is that 31:54.50 Bart ah companies that apply open source not when you do a b2c business to consumer app that is not the case but like in mostly the b2b or infrastructure parts open source startups grow faster and that they are um they are not slower they're not losing money no they are faster the second thing is that they have lower r and d budgets And the third part is that they have better talented people because um if you know the DNA of a developer and you say as a startup, hey, we're going to develop in open source, you will see their eyes sparkling because mostly they have been profiting themselves from using repos from other developers. So open source startups are more successful. So in any case, or to answer your question, like, 32:42.94 Bart How could they? like, well, follow these principles just for your own interest because going to be more successful. 32:50.15 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Okay. 32:50.63 Bart The other thing in healthcare, as you said, like healthcare care isn't really widely, like open source, widely adopted. And that is because the market has been regulatory captured through regulation. 33:01.77 Bart So as we now see that um we have um software as a medical device that needs to be certified and there was a lot of levers there. 33:12.77 Bart the development of open source is challenging and and then the certification and turning it into a certified medical product is more challenging. 33:22.25 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 33:23.17 Bart so the larger industry has been influencing policies to make the life of that what is could make um their life to hell um um make our lives more to hell in in having more regulations that are anti-open source but it's not impossible and if you just now look at what happened in the large language model space where um Three years ago, we were all still dependent from the APIs of OpenAI i and GPT-2 or 3 at the time. 33:57.18 Bart And then suddenly, with the the arrival of LAMA for Meta and then Mistral and DeepSeq in China and all these things, We saw the emergence of and a new wave of open source innovation in a speed that I haven't seen in my whole career. 34:15.37 Bart And now a lot of these things that have been developed can be reused when you want to build your medical products. um And that means there is a way to do that. um And um I think there is only an advantage for 34:27.36 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank 34:30.80 Bart people to build on open source. There will be challenges in terms of regulations. I don't say it's it's a a very easy path to follow, but the more we start working together, the more we start sharing also perhaps open source on regulation. like It's not only code or data, but perhaps we can start working on open sourcing regulatory compliance documents, templates. like if 35:00.96 Bart If there was a friend of mine, or not a friend like somebody um um I really appreciate in Berlin, um um he is the the founder of ah a company called Open Regulatory. 35:13.29 Bart and he hass been pushing the ah He's selling regulatory compliance services, so he's helping companies to become regulatory compliant. He started digging into that world and it said like it's a complete rip-off because you sometimes need to download an ISO standard PDF document. 35:32.92 Bart And if you downloaded it from the ISO standardization body in Germany, you pay $2,000. But then you go to Estonia and it's only $500 for just downloading a PDF. 35:43.69 Bart So... 35:44.37 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee I don't 35:44.55 Bart I think that whole field can be disrupted also through open source because he started to publish open source assets, open source assets in terms of how to regulate. And if if we as a community, as a global community, start seeing that we all would profit from sharing these ah ah methods, tools, documents, templates, um it will be much easier for us to comply with the regulations even when we build in the open. 36:14.61 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Yeah, I agree. I agree. You know, that's the way to go going forward. But this has been one of the most energizing and thought provoking conversation I've had you know for a long time. Right. 36:25.48 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee You have challenged us to rethink not just how we build technology, ah but Why and for whom? that's Those are the two important things that I take away from this podcast. 36:36.31 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee But before we close, but you know what message would you like to leave with healthcare innovators, today's generation's healthcare leaders who are still stuck in the old ways of doing things? 36:51.11 Bart Well, I would be a bit i' not selfish, but i've built iser I'm building Isarae and we're building an open ecosystem for a Gentic AI in a marketplace. So I want my marketplace to offer opportunities for Indian innovative companies to onboard the agents, onboard the AI stuff, 37:09.48 Bart We quality management and they can start selling in Western Europe ah through a digital global marketplace. That is my pipe dream. ah one to be I want to see competition. 37:17.43 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee So, 37:19.66 Bart I want to see everybody in the world to have the opportunity to contribute and to be part of that global marketplace. um As I said before, we're building into the open. 37:30.98 Bart So we just as well on isarray.ai, we launched a white paper that is also fully open sourced, licensed in the Creative Commons by attribution license, which is quite insightful for a lot of people because we be kind of open opening up the framework on how to build all this. 37:46.56 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 37:53.03 Bart So if my if there's one message to the leaders and to your audience, I would say like join, let um read, um and learn together ah with all of us. like I'm always everyday learning. I think that's the greatest thing about open source is that Everybody's learning from each other and this is not something where one single person is the leader. 38:15.22 Bart um It's all of us. So um everybody's welcome to to join us, to go on Israel.ai, to leave their email and then to read the white paper and to join us. 38:21.27 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 38:24.66 Bart And the second message is push back. like We live in Europe. I've been fighting for open source um to to allow open source to be ah allowed in the AI act. 38:38.97 Bart The original AI act was strongly lobbied by um companies such as Entropic AI and OpenAI who love closed ah source AI and want to build the next Google closed um world dominated platform. 38:53.48 Bart um And they created a lot of um fears. AI is going to destroy the world. The Terminator is around the corner. And all these things that then give the regulator the regulatory regulators the legitimacy to say, we are going to save you from that evil, so we're going to regulate ah But that is a typical scenario of regulatory capture, because what you are doing is the big industry players and the policymakers, they're kind of going into a marriage, and um they don't care if there's higher regulations because they're big enough in order to set up these compliance teams, so they will comply. 39:32.84 Bart But if you work in a distributed mode like open source communities do, it will be very, very hard to comply. And that is by design that is exactly done in that way. 39:42.92 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 39:43.58 Bart And that means that on a daily basis, I am pushing back to all these people coming with AI is dangerous, AI is killing democracy, AI is creating fake news, ai is is creating disinformation and all these things. 39:55.22 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you. 39:58.31 Bart Get literated and learn about history, what that means. when somebody is able to define even what information or what is disinformation is. like There is no such thing as information and disinformation. 40:12.46 Bart There is always a perspective on information that you can share. But if you give people the power to start defining what the truth is, what information is true regulatory means, 40:24.66 Bart I think our world will not improve. ah because ah come from Europe, we have seen this in the past. We had a Catholic Church who was defining what the truth was. And if you said the sun is not turning around the earth, we are turning around the sun, which is what Galileo Galileo did, you were locked up because you were spreading disinformation. 40:38.04 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Hmm. 40:45.38 Bart The scientific discovery process is about open sharing ideas and thoughts, and that cannot be regulated. And the AI Act, and that's my biggest opposition in Europe, is regulating the research and the the research and development of AI, which goes into the core principles of development. So they have somehow the means to control language, and I find it extremely scary. 41:09.24 Bart much more scarier than the rogue fictional AI story about the Terminant is going to destroy us all. 41:10.13 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Yeah. 41:16.73 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee yeah ah Agreed, agreed. 41:17.67 Bart Just imagine in the Terminator movie, imagine, because everybody saw that movie, there was a company Cyberdyne and they were trying to break in and smash the computer that was going to destroy the Earth. 41:18.56 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee But, 41:29.66 Bart Imagine we would have a different scenario. And in that movie, there was an army of 100,000 people with open source AI that was attacking Cyberdyne. Do you think Cyberdyne would even have a chance? No. 41:42.67 Bart If 100,000 people are augmented with AI, they win against that single AI. And that's what we need to do. 41:49.09 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Absolutely. But honestly, one of the key takeaways of this ah podcast is your brilliant analogies, right? You know, there's ah nothing better to explain something than analogies and you have nailed it, you know. 42:02.86 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee I think you can find Bart on LinkedIn. He's available as Bart Doherty and you can engage with his startup as he mentioned and also his foundation. He's doing some brilliant ah work in the health tech and especially in the agentic AI and open source community, right? 42:21.55 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee ah 42:22.31 Bart And my vehicle ah handle on is OpenMetFuture. 42:22.23 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Thank you again, Bart. 42:25.82 Bart That tells it all. 42:27.15 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee Wow. See, you have it now. So it's pretty simple. It's pretty simple with Bart, as you can see. Thank you again, Bart, to all our listeners. If you found today's episode valuable, please subscribe, share it with your network and keep the conversation going. 42:36.61 Bart you, Ratham. 42:42.28 Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee This is Ratnati Bhattacharji and you have been listening to Leaders Perspective, Rethinking Health Tech with Open Source. Until next time, stay curious and stay open, as Bart says. 42:53.05 Bart Fave.
