Cognision

VP, Neuroscience & Digital Health

Brainformatika

Digital health advisory and consulting services focused on strategy, research, innovation, and medical affairs for healthcare & life sciences organizations, including startups and leading biopharmaceutical companies.

Digital Health Consultant

UConn Health

Inpatient, outpatient, & emergency psychiatric care.

Physician (Psychiatry)

Merck

Center for Observational & Real-World Evidence (CORE); data strategy, innovation, & partnerships; leading high-impact real-world data use cases across diverse therapeutic areas in support of research & operational objectives.

Associate Director (Data Science & Outcomes Research)

Roche

Using data science & real-world data to advance research, clinical trials, & patient care for neurodegenerative disorders (Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, & Huntington's disease).

Sr. Data Scientist (Neuroscience)

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Research focused on using machine learning, predictive analytics, & EHR data for clinical decision support.

Medical Informatics Fellow

Jackson Health System

Provided patient care on psychiatry, neurology, & medicine services across inpatient, outpatient, & emergency settings and 3 hospitals (Jackson Memorial Hospital, University of Miami Hospital, Miami VA Medical Center).

Michigan State University

Completed medical & neuroscience graduate coursework and clinical training. Conducted clinical research on Alzheimer's disease using multimodal data, including structural & functional neuroimaging, & machine learning.

Physician-Scientist (D.O./Ph.D.) Training Program

University of Pennsylvania

Conducted neuroscience research on human memory & spatial navigation using a virtual reality paradigm & electroencephalography. Analyzed scalp & intracranial EEG data using scientific computing & MATLAB.

Research Associate (Computational Memory Lab, Dept. of Psychology)

Brandeis University

Resident Advisor (Dept. of Residence Life)

Research Assistant (Computational Memory Lab, Dept. of Psychology)

🧠 Physician/Neuroscientist with 20+ years of experience in Healthcare & Life Sciences with Digital Health, Data Science, and Clinical Research expertise.

🏥 Passionate about improving healthcare and health outcomes via science, technology, innovation, and education with a focus on brain, mental, and behavioral health (including Alzheimer's disease, dementia, depression).

🧬 Additional interests in Health & Wellness, Preventive Health, Public Health, Lifestyle Medicine, Longevity Medicine, Precision Medicine/Health, Translational Medicine, Biotechnology, Social Determinants of Health

💡 ADVISORY & CONSULTING for innovative digital health, medical device, and biotech / pharma companies

💬 LINKEDIN COACHING for Clinicians, Scientists, and Innovators

---------------
DISCLAIMERS: The views expressed are my own and don't necessarily reflect those of my employers or other 3rd parties. Any health-related content shared is for informational and/or educational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice.

Fair Use Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976: Copyrighted content is sometimes shared on my profile under the "Fair Use" allowance for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, education, teaching, scholarship, and research. All rights and credits belong to the owners and/or authors of copyrighted content. No copyright infringement intended.

#healthcare #health #wellness #medicine #publichealth #neuroscience #science #mentalhealth #digitalhealth #healthtech #medtech #biotech #clinicalresearch #biotechnology

Igor Korolev, DO, PhD 🧠

Oshi Health

Founding Medical Director

Forbes

https://www.forbes.com/health/medical-advisory-board/michael-bass/

 Forbes Healthcare Advisory Board

US Digestive Health

Gastroenterologist

AngelMD

Co-Chair, Clinical Advisory Board 

GI Digital

Strategic Advisor

On Deck

Health Fellow,(ODH1)

Medtronic

Medical Consultant

CarePortMD

Medical Advisor

CapsoVision, Inc.

Expert Small Bowel Capsule Reader

Consultant

Union Hospital of Cecil County

Gastroenterologist | Medical Director, Oshi Health | LinkedIn Top Healthcare Management Voice | Forbes Health Contributor

Dr. Bass is a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine, with a sub-specialization in Gastroenterology and Hepatology. He believes technology can transform the current landscape of Healthcare. He's the founding medical director of Oshi Health, a venture-backed Virtual Care startup that provides comprehensive gastroenterological care. In addition, he's had advisory roles in multiple med-tech startups. 
     
    Dr. Bass believes U.S. healthcare was built on reactive strategy. Often the solutions are geared toward the symptoms rather than the root cause of chronic illness. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a societal inflection point. Technology has the potential to change the fabric of our healthcare system for the better. But, clinical practitioners must lead the charge because they understand what patients need. If we ignore their insight, we’ll build solutions for the wrong problems.

Key Achievements: 

✴️ First physician on the east coast, second globally to perform Virtual Pillcam ( Medtronic's SB3@home Pilot Program with Amazon)

✴️His Clinical research was instrumental in obtaining FDA clearance for a novel mode of delivery of wireless capsule endoscopy (The American Journal of Gastroenterology: October 2021 - Volume 116 - Issue - p S619-S620)

✴️Founding Medical Director of Oshi Health, the first comprehensive virtual platform for patients with Gastrointestinal Conditions 

✴️During the height of the pandemic, he developed and oversaw the First Responders COVID-19 Testing program with New Castle County Executive Matt Myer, in partnership with Labcorp.

✴️ Linkedin Top Healthcare Management Voice 

✴️ Linkedin Top Working with Physician's Voice

✴️ Linkedin Top Healthcare Voice 



Michael Bass, M.D.

Elon Musk just said Robots won’t assist surgeons. They’ll become surgeons.

His claim about Optimus: superhuman precision, unlimited scale, every procedure, for everyone, built in factories. Not trained but made.

As a gastroenterologist, I sit with the reality he’s pointing at. The bottleneck in care is workforce. There are only so many elite surgeons and proceduralists. Skill does not scale.

But medicine is not just precision.
It’s uncertainty, context, anatomy that doesn’t look like the textbook, scar tissue that shouldn’t be there, patients who can’t be sedated the same way, pathologies that break the algorithm.

Robotic superhuman precision might solve access. But it doesn’t solve interpretation,complications, or the moral weight of risk.

If we get to factory-produced surgeons, two things must be true.
	1.	The model has to understand variation better than any human alive.
	2.	Clinicians have to stay in the loop to decide when the machine is wrong.

The future isn’t robots replace doctors.
It’s robots remove the mechanical bottleneck and humans own the uncertainty.

If Optimus can do a perfect colectomy in a rural county where patients currently drive three hours for basic care, that’s a win.
But if we pretend automation can replace judgment, we’re walking blind.

LinkedIn Top Voice | Gastroenterologist I Medical Director @ Oshi Health

Big news in cancer diagnostics today. Abbott  is buying Exact Sciences in a deal valued around $23 Billion dollars. That number is so big it almost distracts from what’s actually happening underneath it.

I’ve been watching this space for years, and the signal here is loud. Cancer screening isn’t a niche innovation lane anymore. It’s becoming infrastructure. And Abbott just decided it wants to own the pipes.

Exact brings more than $3 billion in revenue and high teens growth. Abbott’s diagnostics business jumps past $12 billion. They’re willingly absorbing near term earnings drag because they see what everyone in GI and oncology is already feeling in clinic. Earlier detection is where the world is moving.

What stands out to me is the ecosystem they’re buying. Cologuard. Cologuard Plus. Oncotype DX. Multi cancer early detection blood tests. Molecular residual disease monitoring. Genetic risk tools. It’s the entire arc of the cancer journey, from the first hint of risk to the decisions made after treatment. And now all of that sits inside a company with global reach.

From a GI perspective, this is going to push screening even further upstream. More patients detected before symptoms. More noninvasive testing. More risk stratification before anyone gets near specialty care. The funnel shifts and definition of early changes.

When companies make bets this size, they’re not betting on a product. They’re betting on a direction. The direction here is obvious: Earlier signals, broader access and scaled prevention.

Open article: Abbott bets on cancer screening with $23 billion Exact Sciences deal by reuters.com

A logo of Abbott at the company’s booth at the 8th China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai, China, November 6, 2025.REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

Abbott bets on cancer screening with $23 billion Exact Sciences deal

The FDA  just reversed one of the longest-running myths in women’s health.

It rolled back the black box warnings on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) ,the ones that linked estrogen to breast cancer, heart disease, and dementia.

Those warnings came from a 2002 study that was later found to be deeply flawed and misinterpreted. But the fear stuck.
For more than twenty years, an entire generation of women avoided treatment that could have changed their quality of life.

Now, the FDA is finally catching up to the science. When HRT is started before age 60, or within 10 years of menopause, data now show it can reduce all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and even Alzheimer’s risk. That’s a full-scale reversal of what many of us were taught in training.

I see this as a case study in fear-lag versus evidence-lag. Fear-lag is when old anxieties shape modern practice. Evidence-lag is when good data take years to filter into behavior. Medicine is often caught between the two.

In my own practice, I’ve seen something else the studies rarely mention: gut symptoms can begin or worsen during hormonal shifts. New bloating, shifts in motility, heightened food sensitivities.

When estrogen levels drop, the microbiome shifts, bile flow changes, and the same nervous system that governs digestion becomes more reactive.

Yet because menopause has long been treated as a “lifestyle phase” rather than a medical inflection point, these connections are rarely discussed. 

The FDA’s rollback is a signal that the narrative is shifting.

graphical user interface, text, application, chat or text message

Elon Musk and Jensen Huang described two different futures for healthcare. Only one reflects what’s actually happening in medicine today.

At a recent conference, Jensen Huang argues that AI makes clinicians more productive, not redundant. His evidence is radiology . A decade ago, experts predicted AI would eliminate the specialty entirely. The opposite happened. AI absorbed high-volume pattern recognition. Radiologists focused on diagnosis, complexity, and clinical judgment. The result was better accuracy, greater access, more jobs.

Elon Musk recently claimed that Optimus will eventually perform superhuman surgery, implying that robotics could replace surgeons altogether. Jensen is describing a system that already exists. While, Elon is engaging in a thought experiment.

Jensen seems to understand the underlying reality of medical care, its messy. Surgery isn’t a factory assembly- line. It’s context and improvisation . Anatomy that varies with every patient. It’s managing bleeding, adhesions, infections, and comorbidities in real time, decisions shaped by years of experience that can’t be reduced to an algorithm.

Will AI and robotics advance surgery? Absolutely. They’ll improve safety, automate specific tasks, reduce variability, and expand access. But full  replacement seems unlikely, especially in Elon’s timeframe. 

Look at what’s actually happening in healthcare right now. AI thats moving the needle: augments and removes administrative burden, accelerates diagnosis, and raises what human clinicians can achieve.

In the long term AI expands capability and reach, but humans remain essential because medicine fundamentally deals with edge cases, uncertainty, and judgment under biological conditions that don’t behave like manufacturing processes.

Pancreatic cancer kills faster than we can treat it. But UCLA may have just cracked the first real blueprint to stop it. And it’s forcing the entire field to rethink what’s possible.

Pancreatic cancer is the one that outruns you. By the time you find it, it has already learned how to hide and spread. As a gastroenterologist, its my biggest fear. I’ve had to tell families their loved ones cant be cured. There’s almost no clues to diagnosis,untill its too late. It builds dense biological armor that keeps even our strongest treatments out.

That’s why this new UCLA data hit differently. Researchers tested an off-the-shelf CAR-NKT cell therapy that wiped out pancreatic tumors in preclinical models. It worked even after metastasis had already occurred.

The therapy bypassed the tumor defenses that usually defeat traditional immunotherapies. It’s manufactured from donor cells instead of patient-specific engineering. And it can be produced for around $5,000 per dose instead of the $300,000-plus we’re used to.

That shift alone changes the math. It turns a niche, elite treatment into something thousands of patients could access from a single donor. And it expands the ceiling on what we thought cell therapy could do for solid tumors.

For me, this breaks the “nothing more we can do” mindset that defines too many pancreatic cancer conversations. I’ve sat with families who deserved better tools than the ones we had. This data suggests those tools may finally be on the horizon.

We’re still early, and human trials will decide the truth. Science hasn’t solved pancreatic cancer quite yet. But it opened a door that’s been locked for decades.

Nursing just got downgraded.

The Department of Education revised its definition of a “professional degree” and nursing didn’t make the cut. That means advanced nursing programs lose access to higher federal loan limits and certain loan-forgiveness pathways.

This lands at the worst possible moment.
We have a nursing shortage. We have burnout at levels the system has never seen. We have hospitals running entire units on travelers because the pipeline is thinning. And now the policy response is to make graduate nursing education harder?

If you shrink the on-ramp, you shrink the workforce. And when the workforce shrinks, burnout accelerates. It becomes a loop.
The system is already fragile. Nurses are already stretched. Patients feel it. Clinicians feel it. And the gap between what policymakers say and what frontline teams live through keeps widening.

Open article: Nursing Excluded as 'Professional' Degree By Department of Education by nurse.org

Nursing Excluded as 'Professional' Degree By Department of Education

A group of high-school kids in Georgia may have just done something the rest of us in healthcare have struggled with for decades. They built a CRISPR-based test that can potentially detect Lyme disease within two days of infection. For a disease that hides in plain sight until it’s too late, that timeline alone would change everything.

 Their data is early, and it’s all proof-of-concept in simulated serum, not real patient samples. But the idea is bold, the mechanism is sound, and the imagination behind it is exactly what healthcare keeps saying it wants but rarely creates the conditions for.

These students didn’t have grant cycles, committee reviews, or a four-year regulatory roadmap. They had access to the tools, a good teacher, a clear problem, and the psychological permission to try something big.

Every clinician knows early Lyme is a diagnostic minefield. Patients bounce around with vague symptoms, get false reassurance, and lose precious time as the disease digs in. If something like this pans out, we could pull whole trajectories back toward health.

What these teens really built wasn’t just a test. They showed what can happen when talent gets paired with modern tools instead of bureaucracy.

If healthcare wants breakthroughs, we should be paying attention to where the breakthroughs are actually happening. In labs without titles. In minds without constraints. In students who didn’t know they were supposed to stay in their lane.

Novo Nordisk just made a quiet but important move in the GLP-1 space.

They introduced a new self pay program for Wegovy and Ozempic. The first two doses are now $199 a month. After the introductory phase, the price shifts to $349 a month instead of the usual $499.

More people will try these medications for the first time. Especially patients whose insurance plans still refuse to cover GLP-1s. It also signals something bigger. Pharma is starting to feel real pressure to create affordable paths outside the traditional insurance channel.

And there’s another angle here. The market is flooded with compounded versions and knockoffs. Novo Nordisk is drawing a line by making FDA approved semaglutide more accessible at the point where most patients enter treatment.

But affordability is only the first step. The harder part is follow through. What happens to long term adherence when patients are self pay ? Who manages dose escalation ?Who tracks side effects? Who handles discontinuation or rebounds? 

I see this every week in practice. Lowering the barrier to start is good. But it creates new questions around continuity, counseling, and long term safety.

If you work in obesity medicine, primary care, GI, endocrinology, digital health, or employer benefits, this is worth paying attention to.

Open article: Novo Nordisk cuts direct-to-consumer prices for Wegovy, Ozempic to $349 a month by www-cnbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org

Novo Nordisk cuts direct-to-consumer prices for Wegovy, Ozempic to $349 a month

The next $9B healthcare revolution isn’t coming from a new drug. It’s coming from your gut.

I spent the week going through Scope Forward's new report on the microbiome market and the signal is unmistakable. This isn’t a fringe niche anymore. It’s becoming one of the fastest-growing categories in healthcare.

A $1.6B market in 2025 growing to almost $9B by 2034. That’s biotech-scale expansion hiding inside an organ most of us barely learned about in training.  

What’s driving the surge:

• FDA-approved therapeutics from Rebiotix Inc (a Ferring Company) (Ferring and Seres Therapeutics (  Vowst and Reybota ) 
• AI platforms like Jona, Iom Bioworks, and Microba building “digital twins” of the gut
• CRISPR-driven engineering from groups like SNIPR Biome - A CRISPR Company 
• Personalized nutrition and wellness platforms like Zoe, Supergut, Pendulum Therapeutics, and Viome - which also has FDA Breakthrough Device designation for early cancer detection, plus partnerships with GSK, Scripps Health, and Mayo Clinic
• Early-life gut health innovation from Tiny Health
• Multi-omic testing platforms from Clinical Microbiomics, CosmosID, Inc., and Microbiome Insights Inc.
• Diagnostics companies pushing the field forward, like PreciseDx and 32 Biosciences "Three Squared"

The common theme is scale. These aren’t small labs anymore. They’re mature platforms with investors, clinical pipelines, regulatory pathways, and rapidly expanding real-world use cases. 

And the clinical implications are massive.The report calls the microbiome a “healthcare operating system” After reading it, that no longer feels like an exaggeration.  

A few patterns stand out:

• GLP-1 response is increasingly predictable by baseline gut signatures
• Post-GLP-1 weight regain tracks with microbial diversity loss
• IBS, IBD, NAFLD, and metabolic disease all show microbiome-linked phenotypes
• Infant and maternal gut health is becoming its own specialty
• Smart sensors, at-home sequencing, and AI interpretation are pulling this into routine care fast

For clinicians ,a new field is forming, and GI is at the center of it. For startups, regulatory clarity plus market pull is rare ,and it’s happening now. For patients, we’re moving toward more personal, precise, preventive care.

Full report is linked in the comments, its a must read for anyone building in the space.

Influencers made millions selling the fantasy of “wild birth.” Now babies are dying.

The Guardian’s investigation into the Free Birth Society is devastating. But it’s also predictable if you understand how the modern health information ecosystem works.

A handful of creators built a movement that rejects prenatal care, midwives, and obstetricians. They wrapped it in spiritual empowerment. They monetized it through expensive courses. And when tragedies happened the blame quietly shifted to the mothers. It looks extreme only until you zoom out.

The same playbook is all over gut health. I see it every week. People come to me after following online influencers that promise transformation. Anti-antibiotic extremism, Herbal detoxes, Colon cleanses, Twenty ingredient supplements, Zero fiber diets,
I hear about another extreme protocol every week.

Influencers operate in an economy where clarity beats accuracy, confidence beats nuance, and fear is the strongest conversion tool on earth. If you can turn a health belief into an identity you’ve built the most profitable funnel in modern wellness.

Real Healthcare operates in a completely different economy. Slow, Regulated, and Data driven. Designed to avoid harm.
And when the public can’t access it quickly or affordably they migrate toward whoever speaks first, loudest, and simplest.

Once someone feels dismissed by a clinician the internet becomes their new medical home. And in that world the Free Birth Society isn’t an outlier. It’s the logical endpoint of a system where emotional resonance outperforms evidence.

There’s a psychological piece too. Humans crave stories that restore agency.Traditional medicine can feel complex and disempowering, especially in todays current system. Influencers sell narratives where you’re the hero who “listens to your body” and rejects the institutions that failed you. Once you’re in that frame even risk looks virtuous.

The Free Birth Society exposed the cost of that system in its purest form. Clinicians need to step into these conversations before the next ideology scales. We can’t counter harmful health narratives by staying silent or speaking only in data. 

Clinicians need to learn how to communicate with the same emotional clarity and human resonance that online influencers use so effectively. If we don’t meet patients at that level of connection someone else will.

No alternative text description for this image

People are starting to confess to  AI chatbots. Not just quick questions, but sensitive information regarding the most intimate parts of their lives, including health.

The New York Times  featured an opinion piece by Nils Gilman that pointed out laws don’t protect these conversations , even when they look and feel like therapy, medical advice, or pastoral care.

Yet at the same time, they’re the ones demanding OpenAI turn over 20 million private ChatGPT chats to see if people bypassed their paywall. Seems a bit hipocritical…

We’ve built systems that can listen better than people, remember everything, and never judge.  But AI chat platforms aren’t bound by medical privacy laws. They don’t owe you confidentiality. They can use your words to train their models, sell insights, or deny responsibility if you’re harmed. If a chatbot gives bad medical advice, there’s no malpractice.
 If your private chats are exposed, there’s no privilege. We need the legal framework to catch up to technology.

Anyone else see a problem with the New York Times’ position?

NYC hospitals quietly rolled out new AI tools without notifying nurses. There was no training, no safety protocol, and no disclosure about what the technology would actually do. They didn’t launch a pilot. they just turned it on and hoped no one asked questions.

Now nurses are speaking out, and the details are alarming. One ICU nurse reported vendors attaching devices directly to patients’ skulls without supervision. 

When executives move faster than the clinical reality can absorb, patients become the beta testers. AI isn’t dangerous on its own, but unchecked AI deployment absolutely is. 

When systems introduce technology without the people who actually run care, risk climbs faster than benefit. And no algorithm can compensate for a rollout designed in a boardroom instead of a hospital floor.

We have to stop pretending clinicians are “resistant to innovation.” They are resistant to being handed black-box tools with no transparency and no evidence they make care safer. 

Executives don’t run workflows, and vendors don’t run codes, but nurses do. They see the gap between how the tech is pitched and how it actually behaves in real time. And they’re the ones who carry the consequences when that gap becomes a safety event.

If the frontline didn’t help build it, it’s not ready for the bedside. AI should make care more reliable, more human,and less chaotic.

We don’t need to slow innovation down; we need to anchor it in the people who do the work. Clinician-informed design isn’t optional. And if healthcare gets this wrong, patients will pay for mistakes they never agreed to take on.

taplio

The Battle

Igor Korolev, DO, PhD 🧠

Michael Bass, M.D.

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreMichael Bass, M.D.'s LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Igor Korolev, DO, PhD 🧠

Michael Bass, M.D.

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Michael Bass, M.D.'s LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreMichael Bass, M.D.'s LinkedIn Performance