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Upcoming Presentations/Panels: 

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Protege Summit – March 20th, 2025

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Protege, in collaboration with Shaper Capital, is hosting our first Healthcare AI summit. I will be moderating a panel titled "Training AI Models for Healthcare: From Pre-training to Patient Impact."  Panelists include: 

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• John Wilbanks, Head of Data, Astera Institute

• Nick Joseph, Head of Pre-training, Anthropic

• Erik Duhaime, CEO, Centaur Labs

• Othman Laraki, CEO & Co-founder, Color Health

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About Me

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I'm  a Co-Founder and Principal Scientist at Protege, and an Assistant Professor of Economics at Tulane University. My interests lie at the intersection of healthcare innovation, economic policy, and data-driven research, particularly my research focuses on aging populations and the effects of policy and technology on medical spending and health. 

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​I teach health policy, economics of pandemics, Intermediate microeconomic theory and quantitative research methods. 
 

Protege

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Protege aims to be the data layer for AI training, partnering with over 20 data providers to enable secure and compliant access to diverse datasets critical for healthcare AI development. Our vision is to create the largest linked multimodal database, integrating clinical notes, claims, genomics, and imaging data for advanced AI model training.

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To date, we've raised $10 million in seed funding and continue to expand our partner network.

• Read more about Protege's vision here.

• Academics interested in using this data can explore our platform here. 

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Academic Research

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My academic research examines healthcare spending and the economic and policy factors influencing health outcomes, focusing especially on aging populations. With healthcare accounting for nearly 20% of GDP, and roughly half of spending concentrated on 5% of the population -the elderly and end of life patients- understanding the economics of elderly care is critical.

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My work employs quasi-experimental methods and extensive real-world datasets, including:

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• Electronic Health Records (EHR) linked to mortality data

• Claims data linked to EMRs

• Multimodal imaging (DICOM) linked with EHR notes

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Key research themes include:

• Effects of Medicare reimbursement policies on healthcare innovation

• Evaluating marginal benefits and optimal reimbursement strategies for medical technologies

• Public health crises, notably the opioid epidemic and COVID-19, and their impact on healthcare utilization and disparities in care for elderly and vulnerable populations 

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If you’re interested in discussing healthcare innovation, data linkages, aging, or research collaboration, please reach out at eziedan@tulane.edu or engy@withprotege.ai  

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