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In this episode, Omkar Kulkarni, VP, Chief Transformation & Innovation Officer at Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), outlines the stark funding gap in pediatric innovation, which receives less than 1% of digital health investments despite children making up 20% of the population. To combat this, the CHLA-led KidsX consortium unites children's hospitals nationwide to scale early-stage digital solutions through collaboration over competition.

Omkar suggests that pediatrics requires entirely separate technological blueprints, hence digital tools must be designed for adult caregivers, accommodate strict adolescent privacy laws at age 12, and scale across diverse physiological sizes. He highlights vital innovation pipelines, including AI tools targeting the youth mental health crisis, longitudinal chronic care management, and 24/7 validated conversational interfaces for parents.

For healthcare startups entering this space, Omkar emphasizes that the key to building institutional trust relies on presenting deep, heterogeneous clinical evidence, establishing commercially viable billing frameworks, and practicing deep humility when approaching complex clinical partnerships. He believes that generative AI will not replace clinicians but will instead automate administrative tasks, empowering them to focus on top-of-license, human-to-human care. Take a listen.

Omkar Kulkarni is the Vice President and Chief Transformation & Innovation Officer at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA). In his role, Omkar is responsible for fostering innovation across CHLA's clinical and research enterprises – including finding successful new methods of care, incubating new medical tools and software, and rallying communities in and out of the hospital to solve problems in the field of pediatrics – all with the goal of enhancing the experience and outcomes for the children and families CHLA serves.

Prior to joining CHLA, Omkar served as Executive Director of the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator powered by Techstars, where he helped build and launch the accelerator program. In that role, he evaluated over 3,000 healthcare start-ups and provided extensive mentoring, serving as the main liaison between the start-up community and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Omkar also led the performance improvement department at Cedars-Sinai for many years and has experience in financial process redesign at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Omkar has a master’s degree in public health and health care management from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from George Washington University.