KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn

By KFF

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 ... more

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FAQs about KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn:

How many episodes does KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn have?

The podcast currently has 19 episodes available.

KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn episodes:

September 29, 2026 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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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1h 6min
September 22, 2026 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.
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54min
September 15, 2026 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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57min
September 08, 2026 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.
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16min
July 21, 2026 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.
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43min
July 14, 2026 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.
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50min
July 07, 2026 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.
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38min
June 30, 2026 AI: Show Me the Outcomes
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 concentrate AI there, she warns, it will drive up cost without improving outcomes. She says there is a better way — AI built for care can lower costs by improving care for those hardest to reach. She and Chip discuss what that looks like and how Cityblock is using AI now to improve care and the patient experience for its members.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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36min
June 23, 2026 Is AI (Still) Biased?
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. The discussion emphasizes that while AI can analyze data with remarkable precision, it is the context surrounding that data that ultimately determines its efficacy, usefulness, and fairness. Dr. Obermeyer is an emergency department physician, researcher, co-founder of Nightingale Open Science and Dandelion, and associate professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society.
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56min
June 16, 2026 Bench to Bedside at AI Speed
How can AI determine who gets matched to new therapies, who is identified for clinical trials, and how patient tracking is scaled across large populations? Chip is joined by Dr. A.J. Blood, a practicing cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of AIwithCare, a startup company that delivers AI-enabled solutions for research, clinical operations, and patient care. They discuss the role of AI in identifying patients for clinical trials and new therapies—which is typically a critical bottleneck in drug development—as well as how to ensure clinical trials are representative. Also, Dr. Blood shares insights from his extensive research background and the tool, RECTIFIER (RAG-Enabled Clinical Trial Infrastructure for Inclusion Exclusion Review), designed to enhance patient recruitment for clinical trials by efficiently sifting through complex medical data.
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49min

FAQs about KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn:

How many episodes does KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn have?

The podcast currently has 19 episodes available.