AI Catches Cancer Early, But There’s Still A 17-Year Adoption Gap In Health Tech – Holly Taylor

About this episode

Holly Taylor was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer after selling her last company. Her rare form usually gets caught at stage one—99% survivable. Stage three? Different story. 

That personal experience drives everything she does at Lucem Health, where she's general manager of strategic partnerships focused on early disease detection using AI to find patterns in patient data before symptoms even start.

Cervical cancer went from deadly to 99% survivable once pap smears became normal preventative care. Same approach could work for pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, type one diabetes—if we catch them early. But Holly's not just throwing AI at the problem. 

Episode Highlights:

• Clinical research background spanning 15 years taught Holly to measure what matters and use data to make ruthless decisions without emotional attachment to ideas that aren't working.
• Cervical cancer survival jumped to 99% once pap smears became standard preventative care, proving early detection transforms outcomes for diseases like pancreatic cancer and type one diabetes.
• Healthcare represents 20% of GDP and employs more people than any other industry, which means disruption requires purpose and partnership with overwhelmed physicians and health systems.
• Keet Health scaled from 11 engineers fresh out of UT to 6 million patients and 30-40% of physical therapists nationwide by protecting innovation culture even as the company grew fast.
• Type one diabetes screening using BERT transformer models aims to prevent 60% of kids from ending up in life-threatening diabetic ketoacidosis before diagnosis.

Holly cuts through complexity with data-driven decisions and refuses to waste time on solutions that don't work. At Lucem she's focused on contracting that 17-year medical adoption timeline by building programs that educate patients and physicians while respecting the reality of stretched-thin healthcare teams. 

Her magic wand wish? Fix healthcare reimbursement chaos so systems can focus on patient outcomes instead of survival mode.

Watch the full episode on YouTube https://youtu.be/oQpYlp35zmk

About Holly Taylor

Holly Taylor is a healthcare entrepreneur and executive with more than 30 years of experience at the intersection of patient care, healthcare delivery, and technology innovation.

She has founded and led multiple startups to successful commercialization in population health, clinical research, and digital health. Her ventures have delivered innovative solutions reaching millions of patients and tens of thousands of providers. Her career is guided by the belief that meaningful innovation uses technology to improve both clinical outcomes and the human experience.

Holly currently serves as General Manager of Strategic Partnerships at Lucem Health, where she stewards the commercial success of the company’s early disease detection programs.

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