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Healthcare administrative costs consume an estimated 15 to 20 percent of every dollar spent in the American healthcare system. A quarter of that is medical coding alone, a process that has remained largely manual, subjective, and error-prone for decades.

Hamid Tabatabaie, Founder and CEO of CodaMetrix, joins host John Driscoll to discuss how autonomous coding AI is making the shift from subjective to objective coding a reality across 35 of the largest health systems in the country, and why getting the codes right is not just a billing issue but a clinical one that directly affects patient care and outcomes.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT HAMID TABATABAIE
Hamid Tabatabaie is President and CEO of CodaMetrix, an AI-powered SaaS company that automates medical coding and revenue cycle management for health systems using machine learning, deep learning, and NLP. CodaMetrix works with leading health systems including Mass General Brigham, Yale Medicine, Henry Ford Health, and University of Colorado Medicine. Tabatabaie has a 30-year career in health information technology and has served as CEO of four successful startups. He founded lifeIMAGE, the most widely used cloud-based platform for diagnostic imaging exchange, which facilitated the sharing of 9 million records containing 2 billion images across hundreds of hospitals and academic medical centers. Prior to lifeIMAGE, he led AMICAS, a pioneer in web-based diagnostic imaging automation. He was named a 2025 Top Leader in Digital 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. 

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His father was a cardiologist who retired because he could not type fast enough. That moment became the reason Abridge exists.

In this clip from our episode “The Ambient AI Inside 300 Health Systems”, host John Driscoll and Dr. Shiv Rao, CEO of Abridge, break down the personal story behind why he left a comfortable venture role to build technology that takes the clerical burden off of clinicians.

Listen to the full episode here 

🎙️⚕️ABOUT DR. SHIV RAO
Shiv Rao, MD, is the Founder and CEO of Abridge. Shiv is a practicing cardiologist at UPMC. He previously led the provider-facing investment portfolio for UPMC where he invested in startups, and also helped fund a Machine Learning in Health program at Carnegie Mellon University. Shiv completed his medical education and training at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He received his BA from Carnegie Mellon, where he also programmed virtual synthesizers, and skateboarded in IMAX movies.

🎙️⚕️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.

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Doctors now need an estimated 30 hours a day to complete every clerical task asked of them. They are compensated not for the care they deliver but for the care they document. That gap is where physician burnout lives, and where AI has the most to offer.

Dr. Shiv Rao, Co-Founder and CEO of Abridge, joins host John Driscoll to discuss how an ambient AI platform now deployed across more than 300 health systems is giving clinicians back the time and presence to actually practice medicine, and why the next frontier for this technology goes beyond documentation into real-time clinical decision support at the point of care.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT DR. SHIV RAO
Shiv Rao, MD, is the Founder and CEO of Abridge. Shiv is a practicing cardiologist at UPMC. He previously led the provider-facing investment portfolio for UPMC where he invested in startups, and also helped fund a Machine Learning in Health program at Carnegie Mellon University. Shiv completed his medical education and training at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He received his BA from Carnegie Mellon, where he also programmed virtual synthesizers, and skateboarded in IMAX movies.

🎙️⚕️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. 

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

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American healthcare still runs on fax machines, paper forms, and reimbursement models built for reactive sick care. Meanwhile, patients are connecting wearables to AI chatbots, ordering their own labs, and triaging themselves without ever seeing a physician.

Dr. Daniel Kraft, Founder of Digital.Health and NextMed Health, joins host John Driscoll to discuss why the consumer is pulling healthcare into the future faster than institutions can follow, and what continuous, AI-powered, multimodal health monitoring could mean for the 500 million people who cannot get timely access to a primary care doctor today.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT DANIEL KRAFT, M.D.
Daniel Kraft is a Stanford- and Harvard-trained physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator. With over 25 years of experience in clinical practice, biomedical research, and healthcare innovation, Kraft has served as faculty chair for Medicine at Singularity University since its inception in 2008, and in 2011 founded NextMed Health (previously called Exponential Medicine), a program and community that explores convergent, rapidly developing technologies and their potential in biomedicine and healthcare. He serves as Chair of the XPRIZE Pandemic & Health Alliance. Daniel is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.

He is often called upon to speak to the future of health, medicine, and technology and has given four TED and two TEDMED Talks and has delivered keynotes to a diverse array of organizations. He has multiple scientific publications (including in Nature and Science) and has done medical device, immunology, and stem cell-related work through NIH-funded faculty positions at Stanford University School of Medicine and as clinical faculty for the pediatric bone marrow transplantation service at UCSF. He is the founder of Digital.Health, is a Kaufman Fellow, and an Aspen Institute Health Innovation Fellow.

🎙️⚕️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. 

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

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Most health tech companies do not fail because their product does not work. They fail because they never defined what success looked like before the pilot ended and the budget conversation began.

Dan Galles, Partner at Allumia Ventures, joins host David E. Williams to discuss what 16 exits over a decade investing from inside Providence Health System revealed about what it actually takes to go from pilot to enterprise contract, and why the care model transformation AI is enabling may be the most important investment theme in healthcare right now.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT DAN GALLES
Dan joined Allumia Ventures in 2015. He focuses on investments in the healthcare information technology, healthcare services, and medical device sectors. For over 20 years, he has been investing in and partnering with management teams of early- and growth-stage companies in the healthcare industry.

Prior to joining Allumia, Dan was a partner at HLM Venture Partners, where he led or co-led investments in 14 companies. Before HLM, he was an associate at the venture capital firm J.H. Whitney and Co. and an analyst in the healthcare investment banking group at Alex. Brown & Sons. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and a BS in Economics from The Wharton School. Dan lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three kids, and is an avid sports fan including playing golf, pick-up basketball, and pickleball with his friends and family.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT HEALTH BIZ PODCAST
HealthBiz is a CareTalk podcast that delivers in-depth interviews on healthcare business, technology, and policy with entrepreneurs and CEOs. Host David E. Williams — president of the healthcare strategy consulting boutique Health Business Group — is also a board member, investor in private healthcare companies, and author of the Health Business Blog. Known for his strategic insights and sharp humor, David offers a refreshing break from the usual healthcare industry BS.

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A national standard for reproductive health data privacy is not coming. The political divide is too wide and the parties are too far apart.

In this clip from our episode “State Health Data Laws Are a Patient Safety Problem”, host David E. Williams and Leigh Burchell, Vice President of Policy and Public Affairs at Altera Digital Health, break down why a federal fix to the state health data patchwork is unlikely and what HIPAA was never built to handle in the first place.

Listen to the full episode here

🎙️⚕️ABOUT LEIGH BURCHELL
Winner of the Changemaker in Health (Policy) and Most Influential Women in Health IT awards and a long-time leader with the EHR Association, I am a passionate advocate about the opportunities that exist for health outcomes improvement and cost containment thanks to the country's widespread adoption of health information technology. I work to ensure policy makers are educated and aware of the implications of potential and current laws and regulations, maximizing long-term relationships with those in both government and other stakeholder groups across the industry. I undertake efforts working on behalf of Altera, as well as through both industry non-governmental organizations and our trade association.   Specialties:  Healthcare Information Technology / Electronic Health Records (EHR) Payment and Delivery System Reform in Healthcare Legislative Relationships Regulatory Analysis and Response Physician Perspective in EHR Projects, HIE Settings Health Information Exchange (HIE) Health Equity / Social Determinants of Health Best Practices for HIE Governance Community-wide EHR Adoption

🎙️⚕️ABOUT HEALTH BIZ PODCAST
HealthBiz is a CareTalk podcast that delivers in-depth interviews on healthcare business, technology, and policy with entrepreneurs and CEOs. Host David E. Williams — president of the healthcare strategy consulting boutique Health Business Group — is also a board member, investor in private healthcare companies, and author of the Health Business Blog. Known for his strategic insights and sharp humor, David offers a refreshing break from the usual healthcare industry BS.

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A patient's right to control their own health data now depends almost entirely on which state they live in or happen to seek care in. The patchwork is growing, and the clinical and compliance consequences are catching up fast.

Leigh Burchell, Vice President of Policy and Public Affairs at Altera Digital Health and Chair of the Electronic Health Record Association, joins host David E. Williams to discuss why states moving in opposite directions on sensitive health data are creating real patient safety risks, and what it costs EHR vendors in hundreds to thousands of engineering hours every time another state writes its own version of the rules.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT LEIGH BURCHELL
Winner of the Changemaker in Health (Policy) and Most Influential Women in Health IT awards and a long-time leader with the EHR Association, I am a passionate advocate about the opportunities that exist for health outcomes improvement and cost containment thanks to the country's widespread adoption of health information technology. I work to ensure policy makers are educated and aware of the implications of potential and current laws and regulations, maximizing long-term relationships with those in both government and other stakeholder groups across the industry. I undertake efforts working on behalf of Altera, as well as through both industry non-governmental organizations and our trade association.   Specialties:  Healthcare Information Technology / Electronic Health Records (EHR) Payment and Delivery System Reform in Healthcare Legislative Relationships Regulatory Analysis and Response Physician Perspective in EHR Projects, HIE Settings Health Information Exchange (HIE) Health Equity / Social Determinants of Health Best Practices for HIE Governance Community-wide EHR Adoption

🎙️⚕️ABOUT HEALTH BIZ PODCAST
HealthBiz is a CareTalk podcast that delivers in-depth interviews on healthcare business, technology, and policy with entrepreneurs and CEOs. Host David E. Williams — president of the healthcare strategy consulting boutique Health Business Group — is also a board member, investor in private healthcare companies, and author of the Health Business Blog. Known for his strategic insights and sharp humor, David offers a refreshing break from the usual healthcare industry BS.

🩺 THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

Vector Sciences:
Vector Sciences is a BIDMC/Harvard spin out, utilizing a novel, next-generation RheoVax platform for development of improved vaccines and therapeutics.

Learn how Vector Sciences is developing medicines for a healthier world, here

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

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A year ago, if you went to a healthcare security conference, AI was still on the horizon. Interesting, a little speculative, maybe useful for writing better phishing emails. But not anymore. There are documented cases where an attacker handed an AI agent stolen credentials and the agent ran the entire attack by itself. It can include hundreds of steps, from breaking in, harvesting credentials, mapping the network, encrypting everything, and leaving the ransom note.

David E. Williams, President of Health Business Group, and John Driscoll, Chairman of UConn Health, break it all down, examining what a documented 600-step autonomous AI attack means for health system security teams and why the most effective defense still comes down to fundamentals.

🎙️⚕️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:

Vector Sciences:
Vector Sciences is a BIDMC/Harvard spin out, utilizing a novel, next-generation RheoVax platform for development of improved vaccines and therapeutics.

Learn how Vector Sciences is developing medicines for a healthier world, here

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

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A cancer diagnosis used to be enough to qualify as medically frail and exempt from Medicaid work requirements. A new federal rule says it no longer is, and nobody has defined what will be enough instead.

In this clip from our episode “The Hidden Cost of Medicaid Work Requirements”, hosts David E. Williams and John Driscoll break down the last-minute rule change narrowing the definition of medical frailty and why 25 states say the federal government has gone beyond what Congress ever authorized.

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.

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

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Medicaid work requirements take effect in every expansion state by January 1, 2027. But half the states just sued to stop the rules that govern them. They’re challenging a new federal rule that narrows who counts as “medically frail” and adds paperwork for people trying to prove they’re exempt. We’ll discuss what the fight means for coverage, providers, and for the states preparing to implement.

In our latest episode, David E. Williams (President, Health Business Group) and John Driscoll (Chairman, UConn Health) dig into what these cuts will really cost. They break down the CBO's projections for coverage and dollars over the next decade, and why a last-minute federal rule narrowing the definition of "medical frailty" may be the most consequential, and least understood, piece of the whole debate.

🎙️⚕️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:

Vector Sciences:
Vector Sciences is a BIDMC/Harvard spin out, utilizing a novel, next-generation RheoVax platform for development of improved vaccines and therapeutics.

Learn how Vector Sciences is developing medicines for a healthier world, here

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

Support the show

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