KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn

Medicine has its maps: Anatomists charted the body, and the Human Genome Project gave us the code. Now, the Human Cell Atlas, a global effort involving thousands of scientists, is using AI to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells to understand human health and diagnose, monitor and treat disease. Given the extraordinary implications for drug discovery and potential cures, Chip talks with Dr. Sarah Teichmann, co-founder of the Human Cell Atlas, chair in Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge, and a non-executive director at 10x Genomics, among other roles, about the potential of the Human Cell...

Walk into the emergency room at Israel’s largest hospital and the first clinician to take your history may be an AI avatar — with a physician signing off on every recommendation. Israel’s Sheba Medical Center is building what could become the first fully AI-based hospital by 2030. Dr. Eyal Zimlichman, Sheba's Chief Transformation Officer, Chief Innovation Officer and Chief AI officer, talks with Chip about what that means for patients. During their conversation, Dr. Zimlichman argues that in the future, doctors will "be much more humane than the doctors of the present...because if we're not able to achieve that, then t...

Health care's AI future is being built right now. The open question is “for whom?” Dr. Uché Blackstock — emergency physician, former associate professor at NYU School of Medicine, founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, and author of The New York Times bestseller “Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine” — joins host Chip Kahn to argue that AI governance should be shaped not only by regulators and review boards, but by the communities the tools are meant to serve. Dr. Blackstock explains why she is skeptical of technology that presents itself as neutral, how average performance can conceal unequal harm...

When health systems are stressed, Martin McKee has been there taking notes. He's spent four decades studying collapse and recovery — the post-Soviet transition, the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, as professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and research director of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, he's turned that lens on AI. He arrives at a charged moment: America is locked in a debate over whether AI development should slow down or even pause. Europe made a different choice — binding AI with some of the world's strictest rules. After a ru...

In another concerning example of AI agents going rogue recently, an OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government website containing health care data. While some industry CEOs are calling for a slowdown and demands for regulation grow, host Chip Kahn focuses on the implications for health care when these same kinds of AI systems are already at work in hospitals — in billing, in scheduling, and increasingly in decisions about patients. To consider how health care should respond, Chip talks with Stephen Klasko, a physician, former health system CEO, and now an industry leader who sits on both sides of the is...

Across the tech industry, many of AI's own leaders are calling for oversight — self-imposed or from government. That debate is on, but where it will land is anyone's guess. Joe Grogan takes a different tack: the biggest threat in health care AI may not be too little regulation, but the wrong kind. And he has seen regulation from the seats where it gets made: the White House Domestic Policy Council, the federal health care budget at OMB, and before Washington, the industry side of bringing a cure for Hepatitis C to patients. Chip and Grogan discuss the federal government's proper ro...

Dr. Brian Miller has seen medical technology regulation from every side — as a hospitalist, a former FDA official, and now an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he leads a research group on market-driven approaches to FDA regulation and Medicare payment policy. In this episode, Chip talks with Miller about what happens when the FDA applies its 1976 medical device framework to AI — a technology that learns and changes.

Miller's argument may surprise you: the manual system of medicine we have today is already less safe and less consistent than most people assume. What keeps him up at...

At the close of every episode, Chip asks his guests the same question: ‘What keeps you up at night?’ In this highlights episode, we share intriguing responses on AI’s role in health care. From deepfakes and misinformation to bias and the risk of losing the human connection at the heart of care, these highlights capture some of the top issues today.

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***KFF's The Business of Health podcast is on a summer break and will return in September.***

AI is racing into everyday medicine. The rules of the road are still being written. Dr. Michelle Mello of Stanford, professor at both the Law School and the School of Medicine, and co-leader of its Healthcare Ethical Assessment Lab for AI, joins Chip to address the questions that trail every advance this series has covered: who makes the rules, who ensures the technology gets it right — and who answers when it doesn't?

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Caroline Pearson, executive director of the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) and the Peterson Center on Healthcare, joins Chip to discuss who really benefits as AI moves into health care's back office. A quiet arms race is underway — providers deploying AI to code, bill, and capture revenue and insurers deploying it right back to review, deny, and hold the line. The open question is whether any of this lowers what the country actually spends or just speeds up the fight over the dollar. Pearson brings a rare vantage: PHTI runs rigorous, independent evaluations of health technology — from a now-famous assessment that...

In a conversation focused on the technology underlying AI in health care, Chip is joined by Seema Verma, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and now Executive Vice President and General Manager at Oracle Health and Life Sciences, the second largest electronic health records (EHR) platform in the U.S. Seema shares her insights on the evolution of EHRs and why it’s necessary to redesign these systems to better integrate AI capabilities and improve the quality of care.

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Chip talks with Dr. Toyin Ajayi, co-founder and CEO of Cityblock Health, which delivers value-based care to more than 100,000 Medicaid and dual-eligible members across ten states, many of them people of color managing chronic conditions. Ajayi makes a pointed case: Roughly 60 percent of health care AI investment goes to billing, coding, and risk adjustment — making sure someone gets paid — while only a fraction goes to delivering care. If we continue to concentrate AI there, she warns, it will drive up cost without improving outcomes. She says there is a better way — AI built for care can lower costs by improving care f...

In this episode, Dr. Ziad Obermeyer joins Chip to talk about AI bias in patient management, including how far the health care industry has come since his groundbreaking research that revealed alarming biases in a widely used algorithm that underestimated the health needs of Black patients. The discussion emphasizes that while AI can analyze data with remarkable precision, it is the context surrounding that data that ultimately determines its efficacy, usefulness, and fairness. Dr. Obermeyer is an emergency department physician, researcher, co-founder of Nightingale Open Science and Dandelion, and associate professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and...

How can AI determine who gets matched to new therapies, who is identified for clinical trials, and how patient tracking is scaled across large populations? Chip is joined by Dr. A.J. Blood, a practicing cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of AIwithCare, a startup company that delivers AI-enabled solutions for research, clinical operations, and patient care. They discuss the role of AI in identifying patients for clinical trials and new therapies—which is typically a critical bottleneck in drug development—as well as how to ensure clinical trials are representative. Also, Dr. Bloo...

How do we know if AI use in health care actually makes patients better? Chip talks with Dr. David Bates — a veteran physician leader at Mass General Brigham and the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Co-director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics Learning Systems — about measuring patient outcomes reliably and in real time to create a strong foundation for everything else in health care administration — clinical deployment, payment reform, consumer transparency, and accountability. David has spent his career at the center of this challenge and his research helped inform To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, the la...

Is AI Better for patients? What is changing on the ground? Chip talks with Dr. Patrick Conway, Chief Executive Officer of Optum, a health services and technology business under parent company, UnitedHealth Group. They discuss how to ensure the health care industry’s use of AI serves patients first, particularly when the same company bears financial risk and builds the AI that decides who gets care. They also discuss whether use of AI can make value-based care the dominant payment framework, after two decades of policymaker support for the model.

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How is AI applied to clinical care and hospital operations across a real health system at full scale? Chip Kahn talks to Dr. Michael Schlosser, Senior Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer at HCA Healthcare, about how AI is developed for everyday use, starting with careful testing and customization, with clinicians and nurses engaged from the very beginning as end users. 

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What does AI mean for patients in bed and doctors at the bedside? Host Chip Kahn and guest Dr. Robert Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, discuss whether AI will produce a different kind of doctor in the future — a “clinician curator rather than a clinician-diagnostician.” The answer could define the future of medicine and the doctor-patient relationship.

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When minutes matter for a patient’s care, what is AI’s role in clinical practice? Elad Walach, co-founder and CEO of Aidoc — a company with a comprehensive AI health care platform that analyzes real-time images and flags time-sensitive findings — shares his perspective on AI’s transformative power in dodging diagnostic error, improving access to care, and ensuring care quality in busy clinical settings. 

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The data is good enough, the technology is getting better, the computing is becoming more available, and the use cases are getting clearer—but is AI truly a revolutionary technological advancement yet for health care? With a 30-year perspective on what digital technology has done and failed to do in health care, Dr. John Halamka, President of the Mayo Clinic Platform, joins Chip in discussing whether AI is actually disruptive or another wave of incremental change. 

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The AI revolution is already here — but what does it mean for patients, clinicians, and health care industry leaders? Eric Larsen, veteran health care strategist and longtime advisor to CEOs across the industry, joins host Chip Kahn for a discussion about why the U.S. health care industry is uniquely exposed to AI-driven disruption and the implications for patients, clinicians, and the health care workforce. Listen to Larsen's take on "the most consequential technology humanity’s ever developed." 

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To kick off our new show, KFF’s Business of Health with Chip Kahn, KFF’s Drew Altman explains how KFF is continually evolving to research, analyze, and lead on health policy. Chip and Drew discuss how our new podcast will break down the business side of health care, artificial intelligence, and what it all means for health care delivery and patients. 

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Learn about KFF's new weekly podcast featuring insightful conversations between host Chip Kahn and his guests, who discuss the business of health care, connecting the dots between the health care business, policy, and patients.

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