There’s plenty of hype around AI and robots in healthcare, but the problem that’s actually costing hospitals money right now is operating room coordination. Two to four hours of OR time is lost every single day, not because of the surgeries themselves, but because of everything in between from manual scheduling and coordination chaos to guesswork about room turnover. <\/p>\n
TechCrunch\u2019s Equity podcast caught up with Conor McGinn, co-founder and CEO of Akara, the startup that recently landed a spot on Time’s Best Inventions of 2025 and is building what\u2019s essentially air traffic control for hospitals using thermal sensors and AI. <\/p>\n
Chapters: <\/p>\n
00:00 – Introduction <\/p>\n
00:54 – Air traffic control for ORs <\/p>\n
02:35 – Where hospitals lose hours daily <\/p>\n
03:54 – Selling into risk-averse hospitals <\/p>\n
06:21 – Thermal sensors and edge AI <\/p>\n
09:11 – NHS as proof of concept <\/p>\n
13:16 – The AI under the hood <\/p>\n
18:12 – Privacy benefits of thermal <\/p>\n
21:22 – Infrastructure before robots<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s plenty of hype around AI and robots in healthcare, but the problem that’s actually costing hospitals money right now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":85011,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheblog.top\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheblog.top\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheblog.top\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheblog.top\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheblog.top\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nicheblog.top\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheblog.top\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheblog.top\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheblog.top\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheblog.top\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}