Artificial intelligence in healthcare is moving beyond simply summarizing things that have already happened. In behavioral health, AI is beginning to help clinicians make better-informed decisions before care happens; things like bringing clinical protocols, payer requirements, documentation, and a patient's real-time condition together at the point of care.
In this episode, host Sandy Vance talks with Mehmet Kazgan, CEO and Founder of Cliexa, and Susan Jerlow, VP Enterprise Applications at ERC Pathlight, about their collaboration to use AI to reduce friction across behavioral health workflows. They discuss how AI can help clinicians evaluate medical necessity, improve documentation quality, support authorization processes, and make transitions between levels of care smoother for patients and their families.
The conversation also digs into one of the biggest questions facing healthcare organizations today: How do you actually measure the ROI of AI?
In this episode, they talk about:
How AI can bring clinical protocols, payer requirements, and real-time patient information together at the point of care
Using AI to reduce documentation burden and improve consistency in behavioral health
How ERC Pathlight uses AI to support admissions and level-of-care decisions
Why keeping clinicians in the loop is essential for quality, compliance, and trust
How ERC Pathlight reduced admission declines by 20% through its Enhanced Admission Review process
Why AI adoption and measurable outcomes are more meaningful than simply promising time savings
How healthcare organizations can build trust and successfully integrate AI into clinical workflows
A Little About Susan and Mehmet:
Susan Jerlow is a healthcare technology executive and AI strategist leading one of the most advanced real-world AI transformations in behavioral health today. As Vice President of Enterprise Applications, Analytics, and AI at Eating Recovery Center | Pathlight Mood & Anxiety Center, she architects and executes an end-to-end enterprise AI ecosystem across clinical, operational, and analytical domains.
Her work moves beyond pilots and proofs of concept - deploying AI directly into live care environments to reduce clinician burden, improve documentation quality, and enable more consistent, data-driven decisions across the patient journey. Her portfolio includes ambient AI documentation, automated clinical audits, AI-guided assessments, admissions intelligence, and a governed semantic data layer that powers enterprise-wide insights.
She is particularly focused on how AI can separate signal from noise in complex clinical environments - turning fragmented data into clear, actionable insight that improves both patient outcomes and operational performance.
Mehmet Kazgan is the Founder and CEO of cliexa, the Denver-based healthcare AI company he launched in 2016. His path to founding cliexa runs through some of the most influential names in technology and healthcare — Adobe, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Visa, and Aetna — where he learned to build at consumer scale while mastering the exacting standards of financial services and the realities of how care actually gets delivered.
It was his time in executive leadership at Aetna that proved formative. Working inside one of the nation's largest health insurers, Mehmet saw firsthand where healthcare breaks down: the gap between what clinicians know is right for a patient and what the system will recognize, approve, and pay for. That vantage point — sitting where medicine, coverage, and technology collide — became the founding insight behind cliexa. He built the company to close that gap, giving clinicians the clarity to know what's medically necessary and appropriate at the moment care happens, rather than after the fact.
Under his leadership, cliexa earned selection into the Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate program, forged a co-development partnership with the American College of Cardiology, and delivered its flagship enterprise deployment with ERC Pathlight. A frequent speaker, mentor, and advisor across digital health, Mehmet has built cliexa into a company whose partners include the American College of Cardiology, ERC Pathlight, Columbia University, Astellas, and more.
