Dr. David C. Rhew – solli sessions Season 3

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AI, Access, and the Art of Translation: How Microsoft Is Reimagining Healthcare at Scale

Dr. David C. Rhew, Global Chief Medical Officer at Microsoft, on translating technology into outcomes, why AI must augment—not replace—care, and how upskilling is the industry’s biggest unfinished job.

In this episode of solli Sessions, Dr. David C. Rhew reflects on a career that spans clinical medicine, health services research, and some of the most influential technology companies in the world. Now Global Chief Medical Officer at Microsoft, Dr. Rhew describes his role as that of a “translator” — bridging rapid technological innovation with the real-world complexity of healthcare delivery to improve outcomes at scale.

From early frustration with unwarranted variation in care to leading global pandemic response efforts and shaping Microsoft’s healthcare AI strategy, Dr. Rhew offers a pragmatic, experience-driven view on what it will actually take for AI to deliver on its promise in healthcare.

What to expect from this episode:

From Clinician to Translator-in-Chief
How Dr. Rhew’s career — spanning medicine, research, and technology — has been driven by reducing unwarranted variation in care and translating innovation into real-world clinical impact.

Crisis as Proof of What’s Possible
How COVID-19 became a defining moment for collaboration, showing what healthcare systems, governments, and technology companies can achieve when speed, scale, and shared purpose align.

AI Before — and Beyond — the Hype
Why AI in healthcare is decades in the making, what’s fundamentally changed to unlock today’s generative and agentic capabilities, and why we’re only at the beginning of true transformation.

Reimagining Care, Not Just Automating It
How AI’s greatest value lies beyond admin relief — enabling earlier diagnosis, population-level screening, rare disease discovery, and more precise, cost-effective models of care. 

Augmentation Over Replacement
Why AI works best as a diagnostic partner and workflow redesign tool — combining human judgment with multi-agent systems to improve accuracy, efficiency, and patient outcomes.

From Awareness to Identification — and Fluency
Dr. Rhew’s call for health brands and the industry at large to shift toward AI-enabled patient identification and invest in upskilling healthcare communities, moving from fear to confident, responsible adoption.

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