Yasir Tarabichi takes AI leadership role at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi
Yasir Tarabichi, MD, has moved from MetroHealth to Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, where he will serve as executive medical director of AI and digital. The appointment places a physician with deep experience in clinical informatics, predictive modeling, and digital care delivery into a role built around redesigning how technology supports bedside decision-making and system-wide operations.
The move follows a year in which MetroHealth elevated Dr. Tarabichi into its inaugural chief health AI officer role. From November 2024 through October, he led the safety-net system’s push to build an AI governance structure and to deploy predictive clinical decision support in live care settings. He also launched and co-chaired the organization’s interdisciplinary AI Advisory Committee, a move that signals how quickly AI programs now depend on formal oversight rather than isolated pilot projects.
Early operational gains at MetroHealth shaped the new post
Two of the tools associated with his MetroHealth tenure point to the kind of work he is likely to bring to Abu Dhabi. One was a sepsis early warning system in the emergency department. The other was an AI model designed to reduce missed appointments among patients at highest risk for no-shows. In his professional profile, the sepsis tool was tied to a significant reduction in a composite measure of death and length of stay, while the scheduling model cut no-shows by 15% in the highest-risk group.
A 15% reduction in no-shows may sound operational on the surface, but in clinical systems it reaches directly into access, continuity, and downstream disease control. Patients who miss visits often reappear later with more advanced illness, more expensive care needs, or preventable deterioration. In that setting, an AI model that identifies patients most likely to miss appointments can change clinic flow, improve resource use, and keep care plans intact before problems escalate.
The sepsis work carries even greater bedside weight. Sepsis remains one of the most time-sensitive syndromes in acute care, and predictive alerting attempts to catch physiologic decline before organ dysfunction hardens into a more dangerous trajectory. If a decision-support tool can help clinicians recognize the syndrome earlier, the likely mechanism is straightforward: earlier antibiotics, earlier fluid resuscitation, and faster escalation of care can all improve the odds of recovery. In an emergency department, minutes matter because the window for altering the path of shock can be narrow.
A physician-informaticist with broad systems experience
Dr. Tarabichi is a pulmonary and critical care physician, a background that fits naturally with work in sepsis, acuity triage, and ICU-adjacent decision support. He spent 11 years at MetroHealth, where his responsibilities extended beyond AI implementation. He also served as chief medical informatics officer of virtual care company Ovatient and as director of clinical research informatics at MetroHealth.
Those roles matter because AI in healthcare rarely succeeds as a standalone technical exercise. Clinical models need data pipelines, governance, physician buy-in, workflow integration, and ongoing monitoring for drift and unintended consequences. A physician leader with experience across virtual care, research informatics, and operational deployment is positioned to bridge the distance between algorithm design and daily use at the point of care. The Abu Dhabi appointment suggests Cleveland Clinic is looking for exactly that combination.
Dr. Tarabichi’s professional record also includes leadership in informatics communities outside his employing institutions. He previously chaired the American Medical Informatics Association’s Clinical Research Informatics Working Group and served on Epic’s Cosmos Governing Council. Both roles place him in circles where data standards, interoperability, and multi-site analytics are central concerns. Those are not abstract technical themes. They determine whether a model can be trained, validated, monitored, and expanded across real clinical environments.
Healthcare still runs on systems built for a different era, he said in his LinkedIn post announcing the move. His new position is intended to move care toward an AI-native model built from the ground up rather than layered onto legacy processes.
AI strategy is shifting from pilots to institutional architecture
The language around AI in healthcare has changed quickly. A few years ago, many systems treated AI as a set of point solutions. Now the conversation is shifting toward governance, safety, model performance, and whether digital tools can be integrated into the operating structure of hospitals rather than applied around its edges. An executive medical director of AI and digital sits at the center of that transition.
At a place like Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, the remit likely includes more than individual algorithms. It probably reaches into digital workflow design, clinical adoption, model oversight, and the broader question of how to make care more responsive without overburdening clinicians. AI can only improve care if it reduces friction instead of adding alerts, duplicative documentation, or unnecessary cognitive load. The success of any program will depend on whether the tools actually help clinicians make faster, safer decisions in the environments where pressure is highest.
Dr. Tarabichi’s move also reflects a broader competition for leadership talent in health AI. Hospitals and health systems are no longer only recruiting data scientists and engineers. They are also searching for physicians who understand the clinical consequences of model failures, the ethics of deployment, and the workflow damage that can follow from poorly designed automation. In that sense, his new role is not simply an executive appointment. It is a signal that AI strategy is becoming a core clinical function rather than a side project.
The practical question now is how quickly the new role can translate into measurable change across care delivery in Abu Dhabi, and whether the same early wins seen at MetroHealth can be reproduced in a different health system, with different patient populations, workflows, and digital infrastructure.