Clinical AI at enterprise scale
Director of Data Science Engineering at HCA Healthcare, leading engineering, data science, and analytics across critical care, care team optimization, operations, revenue cycle, supply chain, and orthopedics.
Nashville, TN | Applied AI & Machine Learning
Kurtis Pritchard
Clinical AI leadership for products that have to work in the real world.
Data and AI executive with a decade building production machine learning systems in enterprise healthcare, from hands-on architecture to VP-level team and platform strategy.
Open to VP Applied AI roles where models, platforms, and team building are core to product differentiation.
10AI product teams led
25+engineers, data scientists, analysts
180+hospitals in enterprise context
2025NTC Data Professional of the Year
Current Work
Applied AI across clinical products, platform, and teams.
The throughline is pragmatic AI delivery: clinical partnership, measurable outcomes, real MLOps, and organizations that can keep improving after the first model ships.
SPOTv2 patient deterioration
Leading next-generation early-deterioration detection for critical care, with four classification model families designed for risk-stratified alerts more than six hours ahead of deterioration events.
iCORE orthopedic analytics
Built and scaled the orthopedic clinical analytics platform from a single-hospital research system into an enterprise platform supporting evidence-based medicine and published research.
Shared MLOps platform
Owns platform patterns for real-time clinical feature engineering, model training, registry, evaluation, retrospective analytics, production serving, and model monitoring.
Measured Outcomes
Evidence-based medicine with operational impact.
iCORE began as a hands-on build inside an orthopedic research department and grew into a platform supporting clinical meetings, published research, and enterprise analytics.
iCORE-supported evidence-based protocol improvement across the orthopedic program.
Operational and clinical improvement tied to analytics-driven care path refinement.
More patients walking over 50 feet on the day of surgery across the program.
Systems Depth
Builder credibility, executive operating range.
The work spans model science, production infrastructure, clinical governance, executive communication, and the recruiting loops that make applied AI sustainable.
Modeling
Classification, forecasting, NLP/LLM, computer vision, risk stratification, evaluation frameworks, and LLM-as-judge patterns.
ML engineering
MLflow, feature stores, model registries, streaming and batch inference, Databricks, Spark, Python, PyTorch, XGBoost, and SQL.
Governance
HIPAA and PHI handling, explainability, audit logging, lineage, model risk management, responsible AI frameworks, and clinical advisory review.
Organization
Recruiting, technical mentorship, executive communication, product leadership, clinical partnerships, and team formation from zero.
Career Arc
From self-directed builder to multi-team AI leader.
Early iOS products, startup mobile work, clinical software engineering, data science, analytics leadership, and enterprise AI product ownership all show up in the current operating model.
Nashville Technology Council Data Professional of the Year, 2025 winner and 2026 finalist.
MS Data Science, University of Colorado Boulder. BS Mathematics, Middle Tennessee State University.
Director of Data Science Engineering
HCA Healthcare
Leads AI-driven product teams across multiple healthcare domains and operates two flagship clinical AI products on shared MLOps infrastructure.
Manager, Engineering & Analytics
HCA Healthcare
Built a high-performing team of engineers and analysts, expanded beyond orthopedics into neuro and spine, and supported clinical data registry initiatives.
Consulting Software Engineer & Technical Lead
HCA Healthcare
Scaled iCORE across the enterprise and founded the Orthopedic Surgeon Leaders Group with top-performing surgeons.
Full-stack Engineer & Data Scientist
Southern Joint Replacement Institute
Built the first iCORE application, predictive modeling, analytics platform, dashboards, ETL, infrastructure, and clinical meeting process end to end.
Technical Blog
Field notes on clinical AI, MLOps, and agentic systems.
A writing home for production lessons from patient-safety models, analytics platforms, and AI products that need governance, adoption, and measurable value.
AI agents need the same discipline as clinical ML
Why evaluation loops, governance, human review, and product accountability matter just as much for agentic systems as they do for regulated AI.
Read essayThe model registry is not the platform
A practical view of streaming features, retrospective evaluation, clinical event definitions, deployment gates, and operational monitoring.
Read essayClinical AI does not earn trust in a notebook
How model validation, advisory cadence, explainability, and workflow design decide whether a patient-safety model becomes real infrastructure.
Read essayPortfolio & Social
Connect with Kurtis.
Professional background, product work, code, and direct contact channels for applied AI leadership conversations.
CodeSplash AI
AI software portfolio and product work, including the broader CodeSplash ecosystem for developer and builder workflows.