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Considering the existing challenges to hospital-based maternity care in rural areas and the potential for it to worsen, this data note analyzes the availability of hospitals providing inpatient maternity care in rural areas for Medicaid enrollees and illustrates how access to these services could be affected if additional rural hospitals were to close or eliminate those services.
States and local governments, rather than the federal government, have authority over school vaccination requirements, and while all 50 states and DC require certain vaccines for school attendance, they vary substantially in how exemptions are granted and administered. As the Trump administration has moved away from longstanding federal childhood vaccine recommendations, an increasing number of states are delinking their vaccine policies from CDC/ACIP guidance, while recent state policy changes have generally made non-medical exemptions easier…
Examines the White House’s latest Executive Order seeking to reshape U.S. childhood vaccine recommendations, including a directive to separate MMR vaccines and use a new HHS task force for federal recommendations. It finds that the order is unlikely to have an immediate or sweeping effect on U.S. vaccine policy given courts blocked earlier, similar administration actions, and states are increasingly decoupling their policies from federal recommendations.
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?
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 the second of his “Untold KFF History” series, KFF’s Founding President and CEO Dr. Drew Altman discusses KFF’s first big foray into health news: Kaisernetwork.org, which was an online health policy resource and webcasting service called “HealthCast.”
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…
As KFF approaches a leadership transition next year, Founding President and CEO Dr. Drew Altman will share a series of occasional columns about key moments in the organization's 37-year history. The first in the series recalls KFF’s (then called the Kaiser Family Foundation) decades-long commitment to South Africa during and after apartheid. Dr. Altman will continue his regular columns about health policy. “The greatest privilege of my life was to be able to work with…
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.
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