Suggestions
Dale Sanders
Senior Data Strategist | Investor | Board Director | Former Air Force Officer
Dale Sanders is a seasoned healthcare technology expert and data strategist with over 40 years of experience across defense, space, and healthcare sectors.12 He currently serves as a Board Member/Chair at Dendritic Health AI, a startup that uses AI to train medical students.4
Sanders' career highlights include:
- Senior Data Strategist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) since July 2022.2
- Executive Partner at Ardan Equity, a healthcare software private equity firm.2
- Former Chief Strategy Officer at Intelligent Medical Objects (May 2021 - May 2023).2
- Former Chief Product and Technology Officer at Health Catalyst, where he led the company to a $1B IPO in 2019.2
- Previous roles as CIO/CAO at Northwestern Medicine and Regional Director of Medical Informatics at Intermountain Healthcare.2
Sanders' background also includes:
- Former Air Force officer and NSA threat analyst, specializing in nuclear warfare and counterintelligence.1
- Experience in developing clinical analytics capacity and data warehouses in healthcare.2
- Advisory roles for organizations such as the Drug Enforcement Administration and Alberta Innovates.2
In May 2023, Sanders announced a one-year professional break to focus on family, friends, and personal time.3 However, he has since become involved with Dendritic Health AI, demonstrating his continued influence in the healthcare technology sector.
Highlights
The Second Winter of Artificial Intelligence Is Today’s Harvest
This week, I’ll close on an investment and Board role in an AI company in healthcare which I truly believe in; that is, the company has a genuine opportunity to apply AI for the betterment of healthcare and humanity, absent the overhype. I’ll post more about that company after the ink is signed.
Coincidentally this week, while searching my files for “cognitive”, I found this document from 1993. AI Effectiveness = Data x Programming Languages x Compute. In 1993, essentially the end of the Second AI Winter, we didn’t have much of anything to maximize that equation, but we did have ideas and concepts.
#AI today is much more creative, and of course the computing horsepower is no comparison, to what we were doing in the early 1990s. But, the patterns and concepts are not that different, thankfully, because my 64-year old brain can still make sense of today’s AI world. Besides better computing, more data, and today’s more creative brains, like Barret Zoph, today’s programming languages and libraries are off-the-charts better and easier; and the web and open source enables collaboration and improvement at the speed of light. We were on UseNet and ARPANET, using proprietary hardware and operating systems, while programming in LISP, SmallTalk, ProLog, FORTRAN, CLIPS, Scheme, C, and then C++. Comparing the programming languages of today to those in 1993, is like comparing NVIDIA chips to the CPUs of 1993.
While at TRW (now part of Northrup Grumman), I funded AI research at the University of Utah, including this one-day symposium of ~12 speakers. Among several roles at TRW, I led the “Knowledge Based Systems” team. At that time, I was also supporting the National Security Agency, which was one of the few organizations in the world that had the skills, computational power, and data content to reasonably apply AI. Our team’s mission involved applying expert systems, fuzzy logic, symbolic reasoning, and the emergence of neural networks and genetic algorithms to primarily solve problems in space and defense, but I also wanted to apply them to healthcare. It’s been a long time coming.
I am eternally grateful for the odd path of my life. I’ve never really had a plan. I just keep following the tug that pulls me along.

The problem is…
90+% of the MBAs in companies like Walmart, CVS, and venture capital and private equity, view US healthcare economics, and the behaviors which drive that economy, with equal parts greed and naïveté. They see flashing neon greenbacks in a $4T (18% of GDP) healthcare economy, and want a piece of that.
But that money doesn’t move around and that economy doesn’t behave in a traditional consumer-based economy with discretionary spending. This is not Adam Smith characteristics of efficient economics going on here. Maybe better said, Adam Smith economics can explain the US healthcare economy, but most MBA programs don’t teach how to apply it. I see it in pitch decks, business ideas, and examples like this… all… the… time.
Even Warren Buffett didn’t see it… until he saw it.
