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Data as of March 2026 show that demand for 988 continues to rise, with the volume of calls, texts, and chats 15% higher than a year earlier and nearly 50% higher than two years ago. States are also answering more calls in-state, where counselors are more likely to be familiar with local resources.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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.
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.
An overview of PEPFAR reporting requirements under current and past law.
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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