KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn

KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn

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KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn episodes

  • Building the AI Hospital
    Walk into the emergency room at Israel’s largest hospital and the first clinician to take your history may be an AI avatar — with a physician signing off on every recommendation. Israel’s Sheba Medical Center is building what could become the first fully AI-based hospital by 2030. Dr. Eyal Zimlichman, Sheba's Chief Transformation Officer, Chief Innovation Officer and Chief AI officer, talks with Chip about what that means for patients. During their conversation, Dr. Zimlichman argues that in the future, doctors will "be much more humane than the doctors of the present...because if we're not able to achieve that, then there's really no difference between the AI and the physician...we will be able to compete with the AI in terms of humanity."

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    48 min
  • AI in Health Care: Who Gets Left Behind?
    Health care's AI future is being built right now. The open question is “for whom?” Dr. Uché Blackstock — emergency physician, former associate professor at NYU School of Medicine, founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, and author of The New York Times bestseller “Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine” — joins host Chip Kahn to argue that AI governance should be shaped not only by regulators and review boards, but by the communities the tools are meant to serve. Dr. Blackstock explains why she is skeptical of technology that presents itself as neutral, how average performance can conceal unequal harm, and what equitable AI design would require. She also makes the business case for equity and describes trust as infrastructure that can be designed into the system. Will the AI revolution reach the patients American health care has historically failed — or pass them by?

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    42 min
  • AI: Does Europe Have the Answer?
    When health systems are stressed, Martin McKee has been there taking notes. He's spent four decades studying collapse and recovery — the post-Soviet transition, the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, as professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and research director of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, he's turned that lens on AI. He arrives at a charged moment: America is locked in a debate over whether AI development should slow down or even pause. Europe made a different choice — binding AI with some of the world's strictest rules. After a run of episodes examining AI through a U.S. lens, Chip and McKee cross the Atlantic: What does the American debate look like from Europe — and does regulation offer an answer that a pause cannot?

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    54 min
  • What Should Health Care Do About AI’s Lack of Guardrails?
    In another concerning example of AI agents going rogue recently, an OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government website containing health care data. While some industry CEOs are calling for a slowdown and demands for regulation grow, host Chip Kahn focuses on the implications for health care when these same kinds of AI systems are already at work in hospitals — in billing, in scheduling, and increasingly in decisions about patients. To consider how health care should respond, Chip talks with Stephen Klasko, a physician, former health system CEO, and now an industry leader who sits on both sides of the issues, working with the labs building the technology and focusing on patient care initiatives through his work at General Catalyst and as CEO of the Health Assurance Foundation. Klasko says there's time to act and the answer isn’t a “pause.” Among his recommendations are creating a 9/11-style commission for AI in health, adding AI safety to health system board agendas, a 30-minute rule for tackling rogue agents, and giving frontline staff the authority to pull the plug.

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    1 hr 6 min
  • AI: To Regulate, or Not to Regulate?
    Across the tech industry, many of AI's own leaders are calling for oversight — self-imposed or from government. That debate is on, but where it will land is anyone's guess. Joe Grogan takes a different tack: the biggest threat in health care AI may not be too little regulation, but the wrong kind. And he has seen regulation from the seats where it gets made: the White House Domestic Policy Council, the federal health care budget at OMB, and before Washington, the industry side of bringing a cure for Hepatitis C to patients. Chip and Grogan discuss the federal government's proper role in regulating generative AI, the growing patchwork of state AI laws, why CMS reimbursement structures need to change, and how Europe's cautious approach is impeding the technology's growth. Grogan closes with his two biggest worries: fear-driven policy that bans innovation outright, and the risk to patients' most sensitive data as AI's appetite for it grows.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    54 min
  • FDA Regulation and the Dynamic Nature of AI

    Dr. Brian Miller has seen medical technology regulation from every side — as a hospitalist, a former FDA official, and now an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he leads a research group on market-driven approaches to FDA regulation and Medicare payment policy. In this episode, Chip talks with Miller about what happens when the FDA applies its 1976 medical device framework to AI — a technology that learns and changes.


    Miller's argument may surprise you: the manual system of medicine we have today is already less safe and less consistent than most people assume. What keeps him up at night isn't the speed of AI — it's the risk that fear-driven regulation will cost us the opportunities AI offers. The conversation was recorded shortly before the FDA released a discussion paper outlining possible regulatory approaches and inviting stakeholder feedback. Chip weighs in on the paper at the end of the episode. 

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    57 min
  • AI's Role in Health Care: What Keeps You Up at Night?
    At the close of every episode, Chip asks his guests the same question: ‘What keeps you up at night?’ In this highlights episode, we share intriguing responses on AI’s role in health care. From deepfakes and misinformation to bias and the risk of losing the human connection at the heart of care, these highlights capture some of the top issues today.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    16 min
  • Guardrails for AI in Health Care — How High?

    ***KFF's The Business of Health podcast is on a summer break and will return in September.***


    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?

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    43 min
  • The AI Arms Race in Administrative Health Care
    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 or just speeds up the fight over the dollar. Pearson brings a rare vantage: PHTI runs rigorous, independent evaluations of health technology — from a now-famous assessment that found digital diabetes tools didn't lower the total cost of care, to its own examination of the administrative AI arms race in prior authorization and medical billing. She and Chip dig into whether AI can deliver better care and real savings, or simply more activity — and how incentives and policy decide which way it breaks.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    50 min
  • AI: Rewiring the Machine
    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.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    38 min

About KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn

From the publisher's feed

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…