Agentic Patient 8: Why an AI Founder Won't Trust Chatbots With Her Own Health

Episode Description

In this episode of The Agentic Patient, a Faces of Digital Health series on how patients are using AI to find answers the healthcare system didn't give them, Tjasa Zajc talks to Elena Ikonomovska, CEO and Co-Founder of Diadia Health. She stopped trusting chatbots with her own health data — after building an AI company on the problem they create.

Elena talks about her two-and-a-half-year journey that followed her mother's death and her own dismissed symptoms — and the causal-reasoning AI she built in response.

Guest: Elena Ikonomovska, CEO, Co-Founder & Chief AI Officer, Diadia Health

What the conversation covers:

- Why Ikonomovska calls generative AI's confident wrong answers "faithful hallucinations"

- Building a causal-reasoning engine instead of using large language models for clinical decisions

- Why lab "normal" ranges differ by genetics — and what that means for your bloodwork

- Her own dismissed thyroid and pre-diabetes symptoms, and what a two-and-a-half-year diagnosis journey actually looks like

- The risk of self-diagnosing from ChatGPT-style tools, and what to ask any AI health platform about your data

- Why she believes AI should strengthen, not replace, the doctor-patient relationship

- Early clinical results: agreement rates with physician judgment and reductions in diagnostic trial-and-error

- The equity risk in AI-driven healthcare — who gets access to validated tools, and who doesn't

Chapters:

00:00 Intro: why The Agentic Patient series exists