Keeping Pace with AI
ASN Podcast
Published May 19, 2026 * 00:17:36
Karandeep Singh, MD, speaks with Karin Bergling, MD, and Wisit Cheungpasitporn, MD, about the AI-Powered Kidney Care Network, an ASN Community for those with medical and technical backgrounds interested in AI and its applications in kidney care.
Please note that this transcript was automatically generated and may contain inaccuracies. It is intended for informational purposes only. Refer to the audio for full context.
----Speaker 1: Welcome to Rewired, Navigating AI's Role in Kidney Health. This series will dive into challenges and triumphs as artificial intelligence continues to evolve in kidney care. Each episode will feature leaders in this new intersecting space.
Speaker 2: I'm Dr. Navdeep Tangri. I lead the Partnership for Responsible AI and Kidney Health Steering Committee, and I'm an attending physician and professor in the Division of Nephrology Department of Medicine at the University of Manitoba. So you have two great guests and friends joining me. Karen Bergling is a physician-scientist at the Reno Research Institute, where her work begins on translating AI into clinically practical tools for kidney care and dialysis. Dr. Bergling is a co-moderator of the ASN Community AI-powered Kidney Care Network. Welcome, Karen.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Dr. Tangri. I'm really happy to be here.
Speaker 2: Oh, we can stay on first names. And joining us is Visit Chingpasetporn, a professor of medicine in the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he also serves as the content lead and course director for the Mayo Clinic Alex School of Medicine in the field of AI. Dr. Bergling is a co-moderator of the ASN Community AI Kidney Care Network, along with Visit. Visit, welcome.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much. Thank you. So I will call Nav and thank you so much for having us today.
Speaker 2: So you're both here and you've both been part of this group for some time, but really you've led the creation of the AI-powered Kidney Care Network. So tell me, what inspired the creation of this network and what motivates you to be a part and essentially the driving force behind this ASN community?
Speaker 1: Yes, I will start by just defining what the AI-powered Kidney Care Network is. So for those who are not aware, it is an online discussion forum which is open to ASN's member. It's open to anyone who is interested in artificial intelligence and its applications and research within kidney care. Our active members include clinicians and AI-focused researchers and developers. And our members come with very different backgrounds. Some have medical, clinical backgrounds, while other come with more technical backgrounds, like data science or computational science.
Speaker 3: Yes, and to me, and my motivation is that like AI is everywhere in our daily life now and moving so fast, like AI algorithms, prediction models, application in electronic health record, and last language model in healthcare. So everything moving so fast and it's so hard to keep up alone. So we need everyone to get together and learn together. And that's why we came up with the idea that we should have a space where everyone can share ideas and not feeling intimidated about asking questions, can throw the ideas out, discuss pros and cons, so we can learn together and move forward together.
Speaker 2: What's your motivation, Corinne? Yeah.
Speaker 1: First and foremost, I share visits motivation for putting time and effort into this forum, but also a motivation that I see that many of our members seems to have. It comes up in so many of the discussion threads. And it really cooks down to if kidney care experts and patient advocates are not part of the very important AI conversations, how AI tools are being developed and implemented in clinics, if we are not part of this conversation, someone else will. And the risk is that we end up with AI tools that are suboptimally serving our patients or doesn't really fit into our workflows. I also want to add one more motivation. It is that I am learning so much by being part of this community. I am seeing how colleagues are describing strengths and pitfalls of AI technology. And most of all, learning how to ask the right questions when a new tool comes up.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's pretty incredible. I think your, when you were talking there, it reminded me of one of my favorite sayings, you know, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu, right? So, so this is part of this is about being on the table.
Speaker 1: True, absolutely true.
Speaker 2: And you know, these kind of communities, they organically take time to grow, right? You don't have a membership, you don't have dialogue on day one. So tell me a little bit about, with it, about how the community has grown over time.
Speaker 3: Yes, the NAV and we just, started in the summer of this year and now we have more than 500 active discussions and more than 450 active members. That's amazing. This means that we're going very fast and we are very happy about this. definitely meaning that like everyone like the would love to learn more about AI and we're looking to get more engagement in the community and we so welcome everyone to join.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: What's your strategy, Karin? What's your, like, how do you find the right members and how do you get the membership to grow and stay relevant and constant?
Speaker 1: Right. So when we launched the forum, Visit and I figured out a way to invite members that we figured would be extra interested in this forum. So we actually went to PubMed and we pulled all abstracts on the topic of nephrology and AI over the last 10 years. And then we had an LLM to just search through this abstract to see that they were really on AI and nephrology. And then we extracted the authors of these, I think it was like 25,000 abstracts or something like that. And then we particularly started to invite these people who we know were publishing in the field of AI and nephrology. And it really turned out to be quite a successful strategy. And it helped us to grow the forum really fast. in the beginning.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, that's really inventive. And I think as, and perhaps even a lesson broadly about how new forums and new channels, even in the broader community can grow, right? I mean, you've used really a data-driven strategy. Now, I've sometimes posted on the forums and you can kind of get a sense that some of the posts only attract one or two comments and others really go down a long chain where many are contributing and people seem energized by an idea and really interested in it. So, Karin, for you, what have you found to be like, give me an example of the most engaging discussion for the listeners today. Give me an example of something that was really engaging and caught the community.
Speaker 1: Right. So one engaging theme, hot topic, has been discussions on ethics and accountability when AI is actually implemented in clinic. And this is very timely because we're now in a phase where AI is moving from theory and research and actually starting to crawl into clinical implementation. So one quite recent threat that sparked a lot of discussion described A fictive case of an individual that had chronic kidney disease stage 4, where an AI tool recommended a full dose of Varlaciclovir, and this patient along the line developed severe toxicity. And this thread quickly turned into a pretty wild discussion on liability in this case. Who is actually liable when AI goes wrong? Is it the AI tool developer? Is it the hospital system that has implemented the tool? Or is it the clinician who is consulting the tool and trusting the output of it? And what this discussion really cooked down to is that harm, even if it's with AI or with humans, often usually happens when multiple safeguards fail at once. And I think Visit and I, we have discussed this. is the exact, it's a great example of what we want this forum to be. Not only of space where people share advancements, also a space where people with both clinical and technical backgrounds can identify and work together through the technical limitations. of AI tools and what is needed to implement AI safely.
Speaker 2: I really like your example. I think it does highlight something that can go wrong. And this very important question about who is accountable, right? First of all, I think it's really important to not compare these systems, these clinical decision support systems to perfection, because we know medical errors occur completely in the absence of AI as well. So in a way, maybe randomization is the answer, right? As in many things, that if you randomize to a clinical decision support system or an AI-based recommendation system versus not being randomized to one, then at least you can figure out what is the true error rate in the population. Otherwise, comparing to perfection just doesn't seem to make sense. Vise, what about for you? What's been exciting for you and what's the post that caught your attention?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, Nav. I would love to highlight the discussion on AI in education. I have seen a very active discussion on those. There have been many, like the discussion on like new AI tools for the education. And it's so exciting to see educators actively discuss on how AI tools can enhance the Quality Fellowship training. We are seeing great discussion on like how AIs can summarize the new research studies for the fellows and generate discussion questions for the journal clubs or the new tools like notebook LM that can create interactive learning experiences. So those engagements have been fantastic because everyone that's sharing practical applications, because they really been using it and try it in their programs now.
Speaker 2: And I think that's wonderful. And I think for me personally, like as a user perspective, I'm always happy when it's a tool that I've, that I'm using already becomes enhanced with an AI component. Like if you think about Google Scholar, right? And enhancing that with an AI component or taking one up to date and now that has an AI component, right? So I find that you're like, hey, I already trust this resource. I already use it and now it's better as a result. Anything additional you want to talk about from the posts?
Speaker 1: So one pretty fascinating thing is that we have had members that have been looking for collaborators within our forum, which is great to see. And also, many of the members share AI advances that they are bumping into. For example, a week ago, I found a very fascinating paper from Clinical Kidney Journal. It was about real-time AI system that during the dialysis system, during the dialysis, predicted whether or not this patient is likely to have intradialtic hypotension. And what was special about this paper is that it was a four-year follow-up. So the system was implemented four years ago in Taiwan, covered, I think it was like 200,000 dialysis sessions. And the authors could hear report sustained reductions in hypotensive episodes. They had far less post-dialytics falls and also less CPR events during dialysis. And it was, I shared this article and I could see a lot of interest from the members where people are writing that they're happy to see this research. It's a good place to share AI advancements.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I could see that because those kind of posts identify the purpose of our community, right? It's to engage the very broader population of practicing nephrologists. And every nephrologist has dealt with cramps and hypotension. And so when you, again, when you pull a familiar clinical concept to them at AI, it really does seem to pull them. Guys, you've made a great case for this community. I hope everyone listens also feels this way. So tell the audience, starting with Vissit, like, Who should join? Who is this community for?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and I think everyone should join. We welcome everyone. As you know, we love to hear perspective from our multidisciplinary team, advanced practitioners, nurses, pharmacists. dietitians, as well as fellows and residents. Of course, we're looking forward to have like patient advocate voice as well in our community. So that would be super exciting and we're looking forward to the wonderful future.
Speaker 1: I agree with the visit. And I would say that one of the beauties about the forum is that you do not need to be an artificial intelligence expert to contribute. Rather, actually the best discussions come out of a clinician or anyone asking a simple question. For example, how do I know if this AI tool is actually going to help my patient? I promise members are so eager to help out and dissect tools and evidence available. And those are the best discussions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally agree. I think members should feel free to join and ask questions saying, hey, I think this would be a great case for AI. Is there, does a tool exist? Or I saw this tool being piloted in my practice or in my health system. What's the evidence behind tools like this? Because it's very important in this emerging fields to track and follow the evidence and discuss the evidence. Guys, very quickly, what do you see as the parallels between your community and other ASN communities? I mean, you two have become the Richard Glassick of this community, which is, it's quite the high order, but do you see other parallels? And tell me, what can our listeners expect in 2026?
Speaker 3: Yes, so we are really excited about 2026, and we are also hoping to engage and working with other communities, forums with ASN as well. That would be wonderful that we collaborate. And thinking about 2026, when the new fellows that they will join, they'll be more familiar with technology than many of us. This means that we need to keep pace with this AI and actually may need to learn from our new fellows too. It's going to be very exciting ship where the teaching dynamic might And this 2026 fellows might be teaching us on how to use the new AI tools for presentation, for education that we have not even known yet. So our community needs to evolve into more bi-directional learning space. we will still provide the clinical expertise and nephology knowledge, but we also will need to learn and open-minded to learn from our fellows and new generation as well on those like cutting-edge AI applications from the fellows. So I think we need to create more peer-to-peer discussion formats and maybe even create some spaces or sessions that fellows can lead the discussion on emerging technologies.
Speaker 2: I like how you always go towards medical education. It's very nice. And I think this is like a great community and a great forum for this. Corinne, you want to tell us what people can expect from you in 2026 on the community?
Speaker 1: So I hope during 2026, maybe not that many expectations from my end, but I'm very much looking forward to is that we are now starting to reach a critical mass of members in the forum. We're currently about 450 members, and as AI is now starting to slowly, slowly roll out into clinics, I am hoping that discussions are just going to flourish.
Speaker 2: That's awesome. I think I could see that happening already, and I think that there is this critical mass phenomena. So let me recap and thank you both, Vissit and Karan, for this amazing discussion. And to our listeners, you could find the ASN AI-powered kidney community through the ASN Community platform. Until next time on Rewired.
Speaker 1: This podcast should not be used in any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. If you have any questions about any medical condition or before taking any drug, changing your diet, or commencing or discontinuing any course of treatment, please consult your doctor or another qualified healthcare professional. Views expressed on this podcast are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of the American Society of Nephrology.
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Episode URL: https://www.asn-online.org/media/podcast.aspx?ID=656