Edward Reiner
In modern medicine, “AI” appears on every slide deck, from hospital boardrooms to pharmaceutical strategy meetings. Few people, however, spend as much time exploring that buzzword as Edward Reiner — a Stony Brook ‘77 alumnus whose career has followed healthcare’s shift from paper charts to terabytes of data and now, to large language models.
Reiner, who studied at Stony Brook before earning an MBA and moving into industry, is now an Advisor at Data Leaders Network, helping life science and healthcare organizations actually use AI in their day-to-day work. His focus is on health economics, epidemiology, and outcomes research — fields that rely on massive datasets to answer practical questions: does this drug work in the real world, and is it worth the cost?
“People talk about AI as if it’s magic,” he said. “What matters is whether it helps you make better decisions about real patients, real treatments, real systems.”
Reiner said he recently asked a senior leader at a major pharmaceutical company how much AI their teams were actually using.
“He told me, ‘Ed, I can’t even get my staff to use Microsoft Copilot,’” Reiner said. “They’re afraid to touch it. They don’t know how leadership will react to the results. That’s where the industry really is: big plans, big investments, and a workforce that isn’t sure how to bring AI into their everyday work.”
That gap, between ambition and practice, is what Data Leaders Network attempts to close. Rather than sending people to generic “AI in healthcare” workshops, the organization embeds support in real projects.
Read the full story by Ankita Nagpal on the AI Innovation Institute website.