Brendan / CV

Brendan Smith-Elion

I build production AI for regulated healthcare.

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brendansmithelion.com · linkedin.com/in/brendansmithelion

Experience and selected accomplishments

Career results below are reported in my public LinkedIn experience. They describe product and operational work; they are not clinical outcome measurements.

  1. Jan 2026–present

    VP, AI & Automation

    Arcadia

    • Build production agentic assistants, LLM evaluation and observability, and document-workflow orchestration for regulated healthcare data.

  2. Jun 2021–Jan 2026

    VP, Product Management

    Arcadia

    • Led a team of more than 15 product managers, designers and domain experts delivering healthcare SaaS products.
    • Led launches across care management, patient engagement and provider workflows, aligning product strategy with providers and ACOs.
    • Reported a 25% reduction in administrative tasks through AI/ML integrations and a 30% improvement in query performance through platform modernization.

  3. Jun–Dec 2024

    Strategic advisor (contract)

    Bravemind

    • Advised an early-stage effort exploring AI avatars and support for combat veterans. The startup has since ended.

  4. Oct 2018–May 2021

    Product Lead, Healthcare Data Platform

    Verily Life Sciences (Alphabet)

    • Led healthcare data product management and governance across chronic disease management, provider analytics, patient applications and stop-loss insurance.
    • Developed the go-to-market strategy for a healthcare analytics product launched at major academic hospitals in 2020.
    • Advanced FHIR and domain standards on a claims and EHR data platform; reported a 40% reduction in implementation costs.

  5. May 2015–Sep 2018

    Director, Product Management, Clinical Workflows & Microservices

    athenahealth

    • Led product work on clinical workflows, ordering and a universal chart service, including surgery and emergency medicine workflows.
    • Led adaptation of the ambulatory EHR for critical access hospitals, reaching more than 100 hospitals within two years.
    • Created a meaningful-use certification program and helped develop product hiring and education programs.

  6. May 2010–May 2015

    Product Manager

    Chartwise Medical Systems

    • Managed clinical documentation improvement software, customer reporting and third-party integrations for hospitals and health systems.

  7. 2006–2010

    Product Manager, Cardiology PACS

    Agfa HealthCare

    • Led major and minor releases of regulated cardiology imaging software, vendor relationships and planning for a virtualized deployment platform.
    • Worked on FDA compliance activities and corrective and preventive actions.

Education

  • Bowdoin College

    BA (self-designed), cum laude, 2002

  • CPO Accelerator

    Executive Product Leadership Program (2021)

Certifications

AI/ML
  • AWS Machine Learning Specialty
  • Stanford AI/ML Specialization
  • Google Cloud AI Certification
Healthcare
  • HL7 FHIR Proficiency
  • HIPAA Compliance Certification
Product Management
  • Pragmatic Institute Certified
  • Scrum Product Owner
  • Agile at Scale

Skills

AI & LLM
  • Agent orchestration
  • LLM evaluation and observability
  • Tool use and structured outputs
  • RAG and context engineering
  • Document AI pipelines
Languages & frameworks
  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • SQL
  • React and Astro
  • Playwright and pytest
Cloud & infrastructure
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • PostgreSQL
  • CI/CD
  • Observability and workflow orchestration
Healthcare data
  • FHIR and HL7
  • Claims and EHR data
  • Clinical code sets
  • Population health analytics
  • PHI handling
Product & delivery
  • Product strategy
  • Specs and acceptance criteria
  • Code review
  • Release management
  • Technical writing

Public writing

Talks and conversations about building AI for healthcare.

Invite me to speak