Karandeep Singh

Karandeep Singh is chief health AI officer at UC San Diego Health and the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Endowed Chair in Digital Health Innovation. A nephrologist who learned to code early, he became widely cited in 2021 when his team showed that a sepsis model used in hundreds of U.S. hospitals performed far worse than its vendor claimed.

Training as a Nephrologist

He earned his medical degree at the University of Michigan and a master's degree in biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, and he completed an internal medicine residency at UCLA. He practices as a nephrologist.

Testing Epic's Sepsis Model

As a faculty member at the University of Michigan, he led a team that checked Epic's sepsis prediction model against close to 40,000 hospitalizations at Michigan Medicine. Published in JAMA Internal Medicine in June 2021, the study found the model's accuracy (an area under the curve of 0.63) fell well short of the 0.76 to 0.83 Epic reported, and that it alerted on nearly one in five patients. "In essence, they developed the model to predict sepsis that was recognized by clinicians at the time it was recognized by clinicians. However, we know that clinicians miss sepsis," he said.

The work shaped policy. His research has been cited in the White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and in documents from HHS and the Government Accountability Office, and he was associate chief medical information officer for artificial intelligence at Michigan Medicine.

Governing AI at UC San Diego Health

He started at UC San Diego Health on December 29, 2023, responsible for putting AI into clinical workflows, cutting documentation time, and running the governance around what gets deployed. The health system has used emergency-department models to flag sepsis risk and piloted drafted replies to patient messages from Epic and Microsoft.

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