KFF's The Business of Health with Chip Kahn

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.

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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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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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How do we know if AI use in health care actually makes patients better? Chip talks with Dr. David Bates — a veteran physician leader at Mass General Brigham and the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Co-director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics Learning Systems — about measuring patient outcomes reliably and in real time to create a strong foundation for everything else in health care administration — clinical deployment, payment reform, consumer transparency, and accountability. David has spent his career at the center of this challenge and his research helped inform To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, the landmark 1999 report by the U.S. Institute of Medicine that revealed the high frequency of preventable medical errors in health care.

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Is AI Better for patients? What is changing on the ground? Chip talks with Dr. Patrick Conway, Chief Executive Officer of Optum, a health services and technology business under parent company, UnitedHealth Group. They discuss how to ensure the health care industry’s use of AI serves patients first, particularly when the same company bears financial risk and builds the AI that decides who gets care. They also discuss whether use of AI can make value-based care the dominant payment framework, after two decades of policymaker support for the model.

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How is AI applied to clinical care and hospital operations across a real health system at full scale? Chip Kahn talks to Dr. Michael Schlosser, Senior Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer at HCA Healthcare, about how AI is developed for everyday use, starting with careful testing and customization, with clinicians and nurses engaged from the very beginning as end users. 

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What does AI mean for patients in bed and doctors at the bedside? Host Chip Kahn and guest Dr. Robert Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, discuss whether AI will produce a different kind of doctor in the future — a “clinician curator rather than a clinician-diagnostician.” The answer could define the future of medicine and the doctor-patient relationship.

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When minutes matter for a patient’s care, what is AI’s role in clinical practice? Elad Walach, co-founder and CEO of Aidoc — a company with a comprehensive AI health care platform that analyzes real-time images and flags time-sensitive findings — shares his perspective on AI’s transformative power in dodging diagnostic error, improving access to care, and ensuring care quality in busy clinical settings. 

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The data is good enough, the technology is getting better, the computing is becoming more available, and the use cases are getting clearer—but is AI truly a revolutionary technological advancement yet for health care? With a 30-year perspective on what digital technology has done and failed to do in health care, Dr. John Halamka, President of the Mayo Clinic Platform, joins Chip in discussing whether AI is actually disruptive or another wave of incremental change. 

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The AI revolution is already here — but what does it mean for patients, clinicians, and health care industry leaders? Eric Larsen, veteran health care strategist and longtime advisor to CEOs across the industry, joins host Chip Kahn for a discussion about why the U.S. health care industry is uniquely exposed to AI-driven disruption and the implications for patients, clinicians, and the health care workforce. Listen to Larsen's take on "the most consequential technology humanity’s ever developed." 

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