CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

Send us Fan Mail

Only 6% of high-risk lung cancer patients get their annual screening. Nearly half of positive colon cancer tests never receive clinical follow-up. The cancer care system isn’t just expensive, it’s leaving patients behind at every step.

Othman Laraki, Co-Founder and CEO, Color joins host John Driscoll to discuss how a virtual-first cancer clinic model is closing the massive gap between cancer risk and actual care, and why the biggest lever in cancer outcomes isn’t a new drug, it’s fixing the broken infrastructure between screening, diagnosis, and follow-up.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT OTHMAN LARAKI
Othman Laraki is a technology entrepreneur, an investor, and the co-founder and CEO of Color Health. Othman was an early Product leader at Google, where he worked on performance infrastructure and client-side software, including the Google Chrome browser. After leaving Google, he co-founded MixerLabs, which was one of Twitter’s first acquisitions. At Twitter, Othman was the Vice President of Product, helping create the company’s first revenue products and grow the user base from 50 to 200 million users. After leaving Twitter, Othman co-founded Color Health, which he has been leading for the past ten years.

Othman holds degrees in computer science and management from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a long-time investor and advisor to leading companies such as Pinterest, AngelList, Slack, Instacart, Gitlab, and others.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

🩺 THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY:
Assured is the agentic platform that gets healthcare providers credentialed and in-network with payers faster, so you're not stuck waiting months to start billing. They released their Payer Enrollment Benchmark Report, which pulls 458 real enrollment cases from 160 healthcare organizations to show you how long getting in-network with each major payer actually takes, where applications stall, and how much revenue those delays quietly cost. Find it here 👈 

GET IN TOUCH
Visit us on the web
Follow CareTalk on LinkedIn
Become a CareTalk sponsor
Guest appearance requests

Support the show

⚙️CareTalk:  Healthcare. Unfiltered. is produced by Grippi Media Digital Marketing Consulting.

Send us Fan Mail

Healthcare debates endlessly about cost, reimbursement, and spending as a share of GDP. But according to one Harvard physician and economist, none of that is actually the binding constraint.

In this clip from our episode “How AI Is Changing The Way Doctors Think”, host John Driscoll sits down with Dr. Bapu Jena to discuss why time is the scarcest resource in medicine, and what it means when a doctor’s only goal walking into a patient’s room is to make sure they feel better when he leaves.

Listen to the full episode here

🎙️⚕️ABOUT DR. BAPU JENA
Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, is the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and a physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As an economist and physician, Dr. Jena’s research involves several areas of health economics and policy including the use of natural experiments in health care, the economics of physician behavior and the physician workforce, medical malpractice, the economics of health care productivity, and the economics of medical innovation. Dr. Jena graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his MD and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago and completed his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the host of the Freakonomics, MD podcast, which explores the “hidden side of health care.”

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

GET IN TOUCH
Visit us on the web
Follow CareTalk on LinkedIn
Become a CareTalk sponsor
Guest appearance requests

Support the show

⚙️CareTalk:  Healthcare. Unfiltered. is produced by Grippi Media Digital Marketing Consulting.

Send us Fan Mail

More than 80% of internists are already using AI tools in clinical practice, and adoption is accelerating faster than any healthcare technology in recent times. The question is no longer whether doctors will use AI, but whether it will actually give them more time to do what drew them to medicine in the first place.

Dr. Bapu Jena, physician and health economist at Harvard Medical School, joins host John Driscoll to discuss how AI is reshaping clinical decision-making, and why the scarcest resource in healthcare has never been money or technology, but time at the bedside.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT DR. BAPU JENA
Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, is the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and a physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As an economist and physician, Dr. Jena’s research involves several areas of health economics and policy including the use of natural experiments in health care, the economics of physician behavior and the physician workforce, medical malpractice, the economics of health care productivity, and the economics of medical innovation. Dr. Jena graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his MD and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago and completed his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the host of the Freakonomics, MD podcast, which explores the “hidden side of health care.”

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

🩺 THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY:
Assured is the agentic platform that gets healthcare providers credentialed and in-network with payers faster, so you're not stuck waiting months to start billing. They released their Payer Enrollment Benchmark Report, which pulls 458 real enrollment cases from 160 healthcare organizations to show you how long getting in-network with each major payer actually takes, where applications stall, and how much revenue those delays quietly cost. Find it here 👈 

GET IN TOUCH
Visit us on the web
Follow CareTalk on LinkedIn
Become a CareTalk sponsor
Guest appearance requests

Support the show

⚙️CareTalk:  Healthcare. Unfiltered. is produced by Grippi Media Digital Marketing Consulting.

Send us Fan Mail

There are half as many hospitals delivering babies in the U.S. today as there were in 1982. And the reason is simple: most hospitals lose money every time they do it.

In this clip from our episode “The Maternal Health Crisis America Can’t Ignore”, host John Driscoll sits down with Dr. Neel Shah to discuss why the economics of childbirth are pushing delivery hospitals to close, and what that means for the millions of families left without access.

Listen to the full episode here

🎙️⚕️ABOUT DR. NEEL SHAH
Dr. Neel Shah, MD, MPP, FACOG is Chief Medical Officer and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board at Maven Clinic, the largest virtual clinic for women’s and family health, and a visiting scientist at Harvard Medical School where he previously served as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology. He has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and contributed to four books, including as senior author of Understanding Value-Based Healthcare (McGraw-Hill). He founded Costs of Care, an NGO helping delivery systems provide better care, and co-founded the March for Moms Association, a coalition of 20+ organizations dedicated to improving maternal health outcomes. His work on health equity is featured in the Emmy-nominated documentary Aftershock and The Color of Care, executive produced by Oprah Winfrey. He serves on the NIH Office of Women’s Health Research advisory board and is listed among Becker’s “40 Smartest People in Healthcare.”

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

GET IN TOUCH
Visit us on the web
Follow CareTalk on LinkedIn
Become a CareTalk sponsor
Guest appearance requests

Support the show

⚙️CareTalk:  Healthcare. Unfiltered. is produced by Grippi Media Digital Marketing Consulting.

Send us Fan Mail

A mother today is 50% more likely to die in childbirth than her own mother was (per @CDC) . The U.S. has half the hospitals delivering babies it had in 1982, and in some parts of the country, families drive farther to reach a delivery hospital than the average person in Kenya.

Dr. Neel Shah, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board at Maven Clinic, joins host John Driscoll to discuss the generational collapse in U.S. maternal outcomes and the newly launched $100 million bipartisan campaign, Healthy Moms Healthy Babies America, aiming to cut maternal mortality in half within five years.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT DR. NEEL SHAH
Dr. Neel Shah, MD, MPP, FACOG is Chief Medical Officer and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board at Maven Clinic, the largest virtual clinic for women’s and family health, and a visiting scientist at Harvard Medical School where he previously served as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology. He has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and contributed to four books, including as senior author of Understanding Value-Based Healthcare (McGraw-Hill). He founded Costs of Care, an NGO helping delivery systems provide better care, and co-founded the March for Moms Association, a coalition of 20+ organizations dedicated to improving maternal health outcomes. His work on health equity is featured in the Emmy-nominated documentary Aftershock and The Color of Care, executive produced by Oprah Winfrey. He serves on the NIH Office of Women’s Health Research advisory board and is listed among Becker’s “40 Smartest People in Healthcare.”

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

🩺 THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY:
Assured is the agentic platform that gets healthcare providers credentialed and in-network with payers faster, so you're not stuck waiting months to start billing. They released their Payer Enrollment Benchmark Report, which pulls 458 real enrollment cases from 160 healthcare organizations to show you how long getting in-network with each major payer actually takes, where applications stall, and how much revenue those delays quietly cost. Find it here 👈 

GET IN TOUCH
Visit us on the web
Follow CareTalk on LinkedIn
Become a CareTalk sponsor
Guest appearance requests

Support the show

⚙️CareTalk:  Healthcare. Unfiltered. is produced by Grippi Media Digital Marketing Consulting.

Send us Fan Mail

Before a provider sees their first patient, they face a months-long gauntlet of credentialing, payer enrollment, and network approvals, all still driven by spreadsheets, faxes, and manual labor. Every day of delay is revenue left on the table.

Rahul Shivkumar, Co-Founder & President, Assured joins host David E. Williams to discuss how AI agents are replacing the manual work behind provider credentialing and payer enrollment, and what it actually takes to build compliant, scalable automation in one of healthcare's most fragmented administrative systems.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT RAHUL SHIVKUMAR
Rahul Shivkumar is co-founder and president of Assured, a provider network management platform that uses AI agents to run credentialing and payer enrollment workflows. Before Assured, Rahul co-founded Dawn Health, a multi-state virtual care company, where he experienced firsthand how difficult it was to get providers licensed, credentialed, in-network, and ready to bill as the business scaled. That experience led him to build Assured, which today supports tens of thousands of active payer enrollments across all 50 states for health systems, digital health companies, and provider groups.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT ASSURED
Assured automates provider credentialing, payer enrollment, and network monitoring with AI agents. We manage 30,000+ active payer enrollments across all 50 states for digital health companies, health systems, and provider groups. Series A backed by Insight Partners and First Round Capital.

If you want to dig into the data we discussed today, read Assured’s 2026 Payer Enrollment Benchmark. It covers 458 real enrollment cases and breaks down how long providers actually take to get in-network.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

GET IN TOUCH
Visit us on the web
Follow CareTalk on LinkedIn
Become a CareTalk sponsor
Guest appearance requests

Support the show

⚙️CareTalk:  Healthcare. Unfiltered. is produced by Grippi Media Digital Marketing Consulting.

Send us Fan Mail

What happens when AI adoption in healthcare moves faster than regulation?

In this clip from our episode “Is AI Helping or Hurting Healthcare Right Now?”, hosts David E. Williams and John Driscoll discuss the rapid adoption of AI tools by physicians and why healthcare may need stronger oversight to ensure they’re being used safely and effectively.

Listen to the full episode here

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

GET IN TOUCH
Visit us on the web
Follow CareTalk on LinkedIn
Become a CareTalk sponsor
Guest appearance requests

Support the show

⚙️CareTalk:  Healthcare. Unfiltered. is produced by Grippi Media Digital Marketing Consulting.

Send us Fan Mail

We’re being flooded with headlines about what AI will and won’t do to healthcare: threatening jobs, creating new ways to manipulate reimbursement, and introducing new risks into an industry that already has plenty of them.

So, what’s AI ACTUALLY doing to healthcare right now, and where is it leading?

David Williams, President, Health Business Group and John Driscoll, Chairman, UConn Health debate AI's real impact across clinical care, including whether AI-driven upcoding is leveling the playing field between hospitals and insurers, and whether physicians are at risk of losing the diagnostic skills they no longer practice.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

GET IN TOUCH
Visit us on the web
Follow CareTalk on LinkedIn
Become a CareTalk sponsor
Guest appearance requests

Support the show

⚙️CareTalk:  Healthcare. Unfiltered. is produced by Grippi Media Digital Marketing Consulting.

Send us Fan Mail

In clinical AI, saving money means nothing if the system is not safe enough to trust with a patient's life. So how do you actually prove it is?

In this clip from our episode “Voice AI Is Expanding Access to Healthcare”, host John Driscoll and Munjal Shah, Co-Founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, break down the safety testing standard Hippocratic built before shipping a single clinical AI interaction, and why they do not go live until the AI outperforms the human.

Listen to the full episode here

🎙️⚕️ABOUT MUNJAL SHAH
Munjal Shah is co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, a generative AI startup building safety-focused large language models for healthcare to improve patient outcomes, lower costs, and address the growing clinician shortage. Hippocratic AI has raised $278M from General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins, and its LLM outperformed GPT-4 on 105 of 114 healthcare exams and certifications. Shah is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded Like.com, an AI-powered visual search engine acquired by Google in 2010, and Health IQ, an AI platform helping seniors identify optimal Medicare Advantage plans. He has also been a seed investor in over 42 companies and 23 venture funds, with notable exits including Scopely ($4.9B), Reify Health ($4B+), and Kabam ($1B+). He holds a BS in Computer Science from UC San Diego and an MS in Computer Science with a focus on AI from Stanford.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

GET IN TOUCH
Visit us on the web
Follow CareTalk on LinkedIn
Become a CareTalk sponsor
Guest appearance requests

Support the show

⚙️CareTalk:  Healthcare. Unfiltered. is produced by Grippi Media Digital Marketing Consulting.

Send us Fan Mail

There are not enough nurses, doctors, and hours in the day to reach every patient who needs attention. The healthcare system was designed around scarcity, and that assumption has shaped everything from how care is prioritized to which patients get left behind.

Munjal Shah, Co-Founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, joins host John Driscoll to discuss how an AI care management platform now logging nearly 280 million patient interactions is proving that the most powerful applications of clinical AI are the ones doing things health systems never thought to do in the first place, and why voice is the channel that actually changes patient behavior in a way text and apps never could.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT MUNJAL SHAH
Munjal Shah is co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, a generative AI startup building safety-focused large language models for healthcare to improve patient outcomes, lower costs, and address the growing clinician shortage. Hippocratic AI has raised $278M from General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins, and its LLM outperformed GPT-4 on 105 of 114 healthcare exams and certifications. Shah is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded Like.com, an AI-powered visual search engine acquired by Google in 2010, and Health IQ, an AI platform helping seniors identify optimal Medicare Advantage plans. He has also been a seed investor in over 42 companies and 23 venture funds, with notable exits including Scopely ($4.9B), Reify Health ($4B+), and Kabam ($1B+). He holds a BS in Computer Science from UC San Diego and an MS in Computer Science with a focus on AI from Stanford.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

GET IN TOUCH
Visit us on the web
Follow CareTalk on LinkedIn
Become a CareTalk sponsor
Guest appearance requests

Support the show

⚙️CareTalk:  Healthcare. Unfiltered. is produced by Grippi Media Digital Marketing Consulting.