The Business of Health with Chip Kahn
Building AI In-House at Europe’s Largest Hospital
November 3, 2026
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About this Episode
Episode 22, AI Series: Most hospitals buy their AI. Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Europe’s largest academic medical center and ranked eighth in the world by Newsweek, is developing its own. Charité has consolidated its scattered AI projects into a single Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and switched on Clé, an in-house platform that runs across research, teaching, patient care, and administration. Its success, says Chief Executive Officer Prof. Dr. Heyo Kroemer, will depend on whether it improves care, supports staff, and makes innovation usable in everyday work. In this episode, Chip and Kroemer talk about what Charité stands to gain or lose by taking this path, and what it means to own an AI platform rather than license one.
The Host
Charles N. Kahn III is a senior visiting fellow at KFF. He is also a visiting senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a nonresident senior scholar at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics. He serves as co-chair of the international Future of Health collaborative.
Guest
Prof. Dr. Heyo K. Kroemer is Chief Executive Officer of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, a position he has held since September 2019.
A pharmacist and pharmacologist by training, he previously served as Chief Executive Officer of University Medical Center Göttingen and Dean of its Faculty of Medicine from 2012 to 2019. Before that, he held the Chair of General Pharmacology at the University of Greifswald, where he also served as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Chief Scientific Officer of University Medicine Greifswald.
Kroemer chaired the German Federal Government’s COVID-19 Expert Council from 2021 to 2023 and its Expert Council on Health and Resilience from 2024 to 2025. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He co-authored the Leopoldina’s 2026 policy brief on agentic artificial intelligence in health care, addressing its opportunities and the conditions required for its responsible implementation.
SERIES
This weekly podcast features 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.
The podcast’s first series on AI in health care illuminates how AI is changing health care, and features guests who are deploying this technology, managing its consequences, and designing policy around it.