14892
Blog

Pride, Care, & Innovation: In conversation with Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld

C-Suite, Care Coordination, Patient Management
Table of Contents

In conversation with Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, Aidoc’s Global CMO and the AMA’s first openly gay President, on Pride, healthcare, family, and the future of AI.

What does celebrating Pride Month mean to you when it comes to advocating for health equity and family-centered care?

Pride for me has always been about visibility and visibility in medicine is a matter of life and death. For too long, LGBTQ+ patients learned to hide who they were from the very people meant to care for them and that silence costs lives. When I became the AMA’s first openly gay president, I felt the weight of every patient and colleague who’d never seen someone like themselves in that chair. Celebrating Pride means recommitting to the work that’s left: closing the health gaps our community still faces, and making sure every family, including mine, is seen, respected, and cared for. Family-centered care can’t only mean the families that fit a textbook. It has to mean all of us. 

As Aidoc’s Global CMO, how do you see AI helping physicians spend more time building real connections with patients?

I still practice medicine, so I feel this one personally. Physicians didn’t go into the field to fight with their inboxes, click through endless screens, or finish their notes at 10pm, but that’s where the time goes. Burnout isn’t a personal failing; it’s what happens when you bury skilled clinicians under administrative weight. At Aidoc, the work I care most about is using AI to carry that load: flagging the urgent scan, coordinating the next step, handling the cognitive overhead so the clinician doesn’t have to. The goal was never to put technology between doctors and patients. It’s to clear everything else out of the way, so that the most human part of medicine, being fully present with another person, is the part we protect. 

How can AI help healthcare providers better understand and meet the unique needs of LGBTQ+ patients?

Carefully, and only if we build it right. LGBTQ+ patients have specific, well-documented health needs, and many clinicians simply weren’t trained to ask the right questions. Thoughtfully designed AI can help: surfacing relevant clinical considerations, prompting more inclusive history-taking, helping a clinician catch what they might otherwise miss. But I’ll be honest as someone who builds these tools. AI is only as equitable as the data and the intent behind it. Train a system on a world that overlooked our community, and it will overlook us too. So the opportunity is real, but it comes with responsibility: we have to build with our communities, not just for them, and prove these tools actually work for the people who’ve been left out before. 

In the age of AI and high-tech medicine, why is human empathy and representation still the most important part of healthcare?

Because medicine has never really been about the technology. It’s about trust. A machine can read an image faster than I can. What it can’t do is sit with a frightened patient, understand the life behind the chart, or earn the trust that makes someone tell you what’s really wrong. That’s human work, and it always will be. Representation is part of that trust. When patients see someone who understands their life, their family, their identity, their fears, they open up, they come back, and they get better care. I’ve spent my career being “the first” in a lot of rooms, and I’ve learned that representation isn’t symbolic. It changes outcomes. The best thing AI can do is give us more time for exactly that. 

How can AI help bridge the gap in healthcare equity, making it easier for historically underserved communities to get the care they need?

Where you live, what you earn, the color of your skin, who you love: none of that should determine whether you get the right care in time. But today in many places, it does. AI’s real promise is democratizing expertise. A small rural hospital can have the same intelligent triage as a major academic center, so a stroke or a critical finding gets caught early no matter where a patient walks in. Earlier detection saves lives, and the gaps in who gets that early detection are exactly where inequity lives. Same caveat as always, though: equity has to be designed in from the start. That means diverse data, validation across populations, and a genuine commitment to closing gaps rather than quietly widening them. The technology is powerful. Pointing it at the right problems is the work. 

Pride is all about community and joy. What are some fun traditions or ways you and your family love to celebrate together?

Honestly? The joy is the whole point! Pride is the one time of year the celebration matches how I actually feel about my life. With young kids, everything is louder, messier and more fun and watching them take in Pride, the color, the music, the sheer number of people who are thrilled to be exactly who they are, is something I’ll never get tired of. And true to form, I’m usually the one off to the side with a camera trying to catch all of it. Judd has learned to expect that by now. After spending the last seven years in Milwaukee we’re putting down roots in DC, so this year we get a whole new city to celebrate in and are excited to find a new favorite spot to watch the parade. 

Explore the Latest AI Insights, Trends and Research

Follow a manual added link

Webinars

Aidoc experts, customers and industry leaders share the latest in AI benefits and adoption.

Follow a manual added link

eBooks

Explore how clinical AI can transform your health system with insights rooted in real-world experiences.

Follow a manual added link

AI Strategy

Learn how to go beyond the algorithm to develop a scalable AI strategy and implementation plan.

Follow a manual added link

Solutions

Explore how Aidoc can help increase hospital efficiency, improve outcomes and demonstrate ROI.

© Copyright 2026 Aidoc