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CSIRO's Smart Health Checks is Bringing Conversations Back to CareHealthcare interoperability is seen as a back-office challenge and it is rarely spoken about as a benefit to clinicians. But what if it was? Could it help accelerate initiatives? An initiative in Australia is doing just that - improving data exchange to reduce screen time so that clinicians can focus more on conversations with patients. Healthcare IT Today sat down with Kirsty Maunder, Senior Business Analyst at CSIRO's Australian e-Health Research Centre. She explains how their Smart Health Checks initiative uses Smart on FHIR technology to pre-populate clinical forms and return providers to natural conversations with patients. You will discover how bidirectional data write-back stops transcription errors and why building from frontline clinical frustrations drives genuine technology adoption.
Standard networking events and leadership courses fail to keep women in digital health careers. Half of female tech talent exits the sector by age 35. The solution? Offering practical advice and operational mentorship from women who have actually been successful. At HIC2026 in Sydney, Australia, Healthcare IT Today sat down with Anita Ghose, CEO at InventiveX and Program Lead for Women in Digital Health Leadership at the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (AIDH). Ghose breaks down why leadership development must center on hard-won deployment lessons rather than abstract theory. She also shares where Australian health systems are targeting AI investments to reduce cognitive load on frontline clinicians.
The health information management (HIM) profession is undergoing a massive worldwide evolution. AI require strict data governance to function safely, putting a direct spotlight on clinical data quality…and right in the wheelhouse of HIM professionals.Healthcare IT Today sat down with Kathleen Rogers, Member & Profession Services Manager, and Danika Bakalich, Director of Workforce Advocacy & Development from the Healthcare Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA). They unpack the worsening shortage of clinical coders, practical strategies to bridge the graduate training gap, and why health information managers must demand a seat at the executive table. You will also discover why accurate clinical data management is fundamentally an issue of patient safety rather than just a billing exercise.
For the 201st episode of the Healthcare IT Today Podcast, sponsored by Rhapsody, we are talking about Epic UGM and Health IT Australia! We kick this episode off by comparing the general vibe of this year’s UGM to the previous one. Then we discuss the signs or portents of things to come that we noticed, as well as the areas where people were focusing their attention. Next, we share the announcements that stood out to us at Epic UGM. Then we dig into Australia being an EMR greenfield market. Finally, we wrap this episode up by discussing our biggest takeaways from Health IT in Australia. Thank you to this episode’s sponsor, Rhapsody. Interoperability is hard to say, and even harder to do. Rhapsody makes it easy. Built exclusively for healthcare, Rhapsody helps organizations connect systems, activate trusted data, and reduce the burden of integration so teams can move faster with confidence. Trusted by more than 1,900 healthcare organizations worldwide and ranked #1 in Best in KLAS for integration for 17 years running, Rhapsody is helping healthcare organizations build an AI-ready foundation for what’s next. See where you stand. Get the Rhapsody State of Interoperability report at interopreport.com. Here's a preview of the topics and questions we discuss in this episode: What was the general vibe at this year's UGM compared to previous ones? Any signs or portents of things to come or areas where people were focusing their attention? What announcements stood out to you at Epic UGM? What's this I hear about Australia being an EMR greenfield market? What were some of your big takeaways from Health IT in Australia? Now, without further ado, we’re excited to share with you the next episode of the Healthcare IT Today podcast. We publish a new Healthcare IT Today podcast every ~2 weeks. Thanks to our friends at Healthcare Now Radio, you’ll be able to listen to the latest episodes of Healthcare IT Today on their radio station for the first two weeks. Then, we’ll be publishing each episode as a podcast and YouTube video here after it finishes on the radio. You can also subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today podcast on any of the following platforms: Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Stitcher Podcast Radio TuneIn Spotify iHeartRadio Pandora Thanks for listening to Healthcare IT Today and if you enjoy the content we’re sharing, please rate the podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. Along with the popular podcasting platforms above, you can Subscribe to Healthcare IT Today on YouTube. Plus, all of the audio and video versions will be made available to stream on HealthcareITToday.com. If you work in Healthcare IT, we’d love to hear where you agree and/or disagree with the perspectives we shared. Feel free to share your thoughts and perspectives in the comments of this post, in the YouTube comments, with @Colin_Hung or @techguy on Twitter, or privately on our Contact Us page. Let us know what you think of the podcast and if you have any ideas for future episodes. Thanks so much for listening! Rhapsody is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene. Listen to Our Latest Episodes:
Why is American healthcare so expensive, and why doesn't spending more necessarily translate into better outcomes?In this episode of Straight Out of Health IT, Christopher Kunney sits down with Malgorzata Guyot, PhD, an Independent Board & C-Suite Advisor with extensive experience across pharma, manufacturing, finance & audit, and international business.Having worked across the United States and Europe, Malgorzata brings a unique perspective to one of healthcare's most complicated questions: why do different healthcare systems produce such different economic and clinical realities?This conversation goes beyond EHRs, AI, and technology to examine the underlying financial, governance, regulatory, and incentive structures that shape healthcare.
On this episode of The Dish on Health IT, Tony Schueth, CEO of Point-of-Care Partners (POCP), welcomes Angel Ballew, Head of Pharmacy Clinical Programs & Services at Centene Corporation, along with Seth Joseph, Managing Director of Summit Health Advisors, and Jason Reed, Senior Consultant at Point-of-Care Partners, for a discussion about what it will take to scale pharmacist-delivered clinical services. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen
[SPONSORED] Custom APIs Are Failing Interoperability: How Agentic AI Replaces Manual Data Entry Healthcare systems spend billions attempting to force disparate software to connect through complex data standards. What if agentic AI could solve the problem without complex integration or the need for universal agreement on data standards?In this interview, Rishi Nayyar, CEO of PocketHealth, explains how their platform, Conductor, automates longitudinal workflows across legacy systems. Discover why electronic health records are engineered for data storage rather than process orchestration, and learn how applying automated AI agents directly to user interfaces solves cross-system bottlenecks without massive IT overhauls.
Send us Fan MailA 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
In this episode of The Dish on Health IT, Tony Schueth, CEO of Point-of-Care Partners (POCP), welcomes Angel Ballew, Head of Pharmacy Clinical Programs & Services at Centene Corporation, along with Seth Joseph, Managing Director of Summit Health Advisors, and Jason Reed, Senior Consultant at Point-of-Care Partners, for a discussion about what it will take to scale pharmacist-delivered clinical services. The conversation builds on findings from the NCPDP Foundation-funded white paper, A Business Model Framework to Scale Pharmacy-Delivered Clinical Services, developed with contributions from Point-of-Care Partners and Summit Health Advisors. The research starts from an important premise: there is already significant evidence that pharmacist-delivered clinical services can improve patient outcomes. The harder question is how to make those services operationally and financially sustainable at scale. Tony begins by asking Angel about the role pharmacists can play in closing care gaps, particularly for vulnerable and rural populations. Angel notes that Centene serves approximately 3.5 million people living in rural communities, but emphasizes that access challenges extend beyond geography to transportation, housing, food insecurity, and other social determinants of health. Against that backdrop, pharmacists can be among the most accessible healthcare professionals in a community and may interact with patients more frequently than physicians or other providers. Angel describes opportunities for pharmacists to reinforce medication adherence, identify medication-related concerns, provide immunizations, support test-and-treat services, conduct screenings, and perform other clinical services. As states continue expanding pharmacists' scope of practice and provider recognition, she sees opportunities to further integrate pharmacists into the healthcare team, particularly in communities with limited provider access. Seth and Jason broaden the discussion by sharing what emerged from the stakeholder interviews and industry research behind the white paper. Pharmacist-delivered services are already being piloted or implemented across areas including gaps-in-care counseling, test-and-treat programs, medication counseling and medication therapy management, immunizations and preventive screenings, and chronic disease management. Jason notes that pharmacists can play an important role between physician visits for patients managing conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. The conversation then turns to one of the biggest obstacles to scale: reimbursement and credentialing. Angel describes the tension between generating enough patient volume to make participation worthwhile for pharmacies and demonstrating enough outcomes and value to justify health plan investment. She discusses Centene's work to make credentialing requirements clearer for pharmacy partners, including the internal education required to bring pharmacy into processes traditionally designed around other healthcare providers. Tony asks Seth what the research suggests needs to change. Seth explains that the findings pointed strongly toward health plans and pharmacies working together to lead the development of sustainable models. Pharmacy benefit managers remain important participants with established relationships, networks, technology, and processes, but Seth describes the difficulty an innovative program champion within a PBM can face when they must first secure a client and then assemble participating pharmacies. Health plans may have greater ability to initiate programs and bring the necessary parties together, although their different lines of business and geographic markets add their own complexity. Angel shares how some of this has played out at Centene. The organization has worked directly with pharmacy communities and industry partners, often state by state because of differences in pharmacist scope-of-practice requirements. At the same time, Centene has developed a national program with consistent quality measures and an infrastructure that can support additional pharmacy service opportunities. That experience provides a real-world look at what scaling can require. Angel describes participation approaching 73 percent nationally and nearly 30,000 pharmacies contracted to participate in the program, including growth of more than 10,000 pharmacies over the past several years. She points to consistency as an important part of building participation. Rather than continually replacing programs with something new, Centene has gathered feedback and iterated, helping pharmacy partners gain confidence that the opportunity is stable enough to warrant their investment. The discussion then returns to a central finding of the white paper: the “cold start,” or chicken-and-egg, problem. Pharmacies may hesitate to invest in technology, staffing, workflow redesign, and clinical capabilities until sufficient patient volume exists, while health plans want sufficient pharmacy participation before investing in programs and measuring outcomes. Meanwhile, differences in credentialing, enrollment, reimbursement, contracting, and reporting continue to create practical barriers. Tony introduces the concept of regional Pharmacy Health Alliances for Reimbursable Medical Services, or PHARMS, as one potential approach to addressing the cold-start problem by bringing health plans and pharmacies together within a geographic market. Angel agrees that the concept begins with the right problem. The industry does not lack evidence that pharmacists can improve outcomes or help address gaps created by provider shortages. What remains less aligned is the business model. She cautions, however, that health plan operations vary considerably across lines of business, patient populations, benefit designs, quality priorities, and state Medicaid requirements. A regional model therefore needs enough flexibility to account for those differences. Seth explains that this variation is precisely why the research pointed toward regional collaboration rather than attempting to solve every issue nationally at once. The goal is not necessarily complete standardization, but identifying enough commonality among health plans and lines of business to prioritize a smaller number of services and begin building the infrastructure needed to support them. Angel views those complexities as design considerations rather than reasons not to pursue regional collaboration. She also sees the potential for lessons and common approaches developed regionally to eventually contribute to greater standardization nationally, particularly within individual product lines. Jason brings the discussion back to the pharmacy perspective. Pharmacies need confidence that services will be reimbursed before they can reasonably invest in technology, redesign workflows, train staff, and begin documenting clinical care differently. Regional collaboration among multiple payers could give pharmacies greater confidence that those investments will support sufficient patient volume while creating value for patients, pharmacies, and payers. From there, the conversation moves to another critical requirement for advanced pharmacy practice: data interoperability. Tony points out that pharmacists cannot effectively close care gaps if relevant clinical information remains siloed. Angel agrees that pharmacists need timely, actionable clinical information and enough context beyond the dispensing system to intervene effectively. At the same time, she cautions against overwhelming pharmacists with more information than they can realistically use within their workflows. She also challenges the idea that interoperability must be an all-or-nothing proposition. While the industry continues working toward a more ideal interoperability environment, imperfect data exchange should not prevent health plans and pharmacies from making progress today. Jason expands on the interoperability challenge by discussing the emerging concept of a pharmacy EHR. Pharmacy management systems are highly effective at supporting medication dispensing and claims transactions, but advanced clinical services require additional information. He argues that the answer is not simply to deliver the entire EHR to the pharmacist. Instead, the industry needs to identify the minimum actionable clinical information pharmacists need to make better decisions and perform specific services. Just as importantly, Jason emphasizes that pharmacy interoperability must be bidirectional. Pharmacists increasingly generate clinically valuable information through patient interactions, and that information also needs to reach providers and other members of the care team. Angel notes that Centene already receives some information back from pharmacies, including through programs involving social determinants of health, although the more seamless bidirectional infrastructure envisioned by the group is still developing. Looking ahead five years, Seth describes himself as a “data-driven optimist.” He points to momentum across private-sector organizations, national and independent pharmacies, state governments, and policy initiatives. While significant reimbursement, policy, and infrastructure challenges remain, he believes many of the pieces needed to overcome the cold-start problem are beginning to come together. Angel shares that optimism. Her hope is that pharmacists become a much more integrated and visible part of frontline healthcare delivery. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how accessible and valuable pharmacists can be when the healthcare system needs them, and she sees an opportunity to continue moving the profession beyond its traditional dispensing role. Jason adds that demographic pressures, including an aging population and primary care capacity challenges, will continue creating demand for pharmacists to practice at the top of their licenses. He expects states to continue expanding pharmacist prescribing authority and clinical roles while technology, interoperability, and potentially AI help pharmacies operate more efficiently and support broader clinical services. Tony closes with the question asked of every guest on The Dish on Health IT: what is one habit or perception healthcare stakeholders should change or revisit starting tomorrow? Angel challenges listeners to think about pharmacists as more than medication experts. They are also access experts. In a healthcare system facing provider shortages, increasing complexity, barriers to care, and pressure to improve quality, she encourages healthcare leaders to ask how they can better leverage one of the most accessible healthcare professionals available in nearly every community. Rather than focusing only on what pharmacists dispense, Angel leaves listeners with a broader question: What can pharmacists prevent or help solve? The episode closes, as always, with the reminder that Health IT is a dish best served hot. Prefer video? Catch episodes on the POCP YouTube channel
Treating healthcare AI like a standard software rollout creates a dangerous false sense of security for health system executives. Slapping human oversight onto agentic AI does not eliminate operational risk, it simply shifts massive legal and operational liability onto overburdened clinicians.In this interview from eHealth26, Julia Zarb, founder of Blue x Blue, breaks down why traditional IT playbooks fail when applied to agentic AI. She explains how small, logical micro fissures in AI outputs bypass manual checks and multiply when autonomous agents interact across an organization. Viewers will gain a practical framework for identifying governance blindspots and protecting clinical teams from hidden operational traps.
Send us Fan MailA 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.
Healthcare organizations are rushing to implement artificial intelligence tools without establishing basic operational safeguards. Moving too fast exposes your health system to severe compliance failures and massive security risks. In this interview, Patrick Lo, CEO of Privacy Horizon, maps out the critical framework needed to govern clinical AI before signing vendor contracts. Discover how to move past basic compliance checklists, apply clear lines of team accountability, and handle automated errors before they impact patient care.
Health information management conferences expose a massive continental divide: US teams fight endless billing complexity while Canadian facilities struggle to capture basic clinical facts. Structural differences in healthcare funding alter the daily operational reality for professionals on each side of the border.Healthcare IT Today sits down with Jodi McMullin, CEO of ScoJo Consulting, at the eHealth26 conference to unpack how distinct funding models dictate the daily reality of clinical coding. You will discover how portfolio funding versus multi-payer commercial models impacts code volume, and why both systems face severe data accuracy challenges. Learn how clinical documentation improvement programs protect patient safety, reduce claims friction, and secure stable resources.
Digital Health Talks - Changemakers Focused on Fixing Healthcare
When the EHR goes down, care doesn't stop, but the chart, the meds, and the allergies do. Chao Cheng Shorland explains why EHR downtime is a patient safety problem, not just an IT one, and how her team is working to end pen-and-paper charting during outages. In this conversation: Why EHR downtime belongs under patient safety, and how mortality risk climbs when systems go dark The difference between continuity during failure and disaster recovery after failure How ransomware turned downtime from a two-hour event into a 24-day average What a lightweight downtime system needs to do: charting, orders, medications, ADT, and ED tracking with no user training How a passive, read-only system flips to active over HL7 and syncs back when the primary EHR returns Chao Cheng-Shorland, CEO and Co-Founder, ShelterZoom Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Learn more about HealthIMPACT Live events, virtual forums, and healthcare leader conversations at healthimpactlive.com.Interested in being a guest, sponsoring, or joining the HealthIMPACT community? Visit healthimpactlive.com/digital-health-talks.
Rural Health News is a weekly segment of Rural Health Today, a podcast by Hillsdale Hospital. News sources for this episode: U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Et al., “#StopRansomware: Gunra Ransomware,” August 10, 2026, https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2026-08/aa26-222a-stopransomware-gunra-ransomware_508c.pdf. Giles Bruce, “Gunra ransomware targets hospitals: CISA, FBI issue new warning,” August 12, 2026, https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/cybersecurity/gunra-ransomware-targets-hospitals-cisa-fbi-issue-new-warning/, Becker's Health IT. Department of Health and Human Services, “Medicare Program; Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment Systems for Acute Care Hospitals (IPPS) and the Long-Term Care Hospital Prospective Payment System and Policy Changes and Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 Rates; Requirements for Quality Programs; Other Policy Changes; and Adoption of Updated Versions of Certain Health Information Technology Standards,” https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-08-04/pdf/2026-15833.pdf. Miranda A. Franco & Jennifer F. Hananoki, “CMS Releases Fiscal Year 2027 IPPS and LTCH Final Rule,” August 10, 2026, https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/08/cms-releases-fiscal-year-2027-ipps-and-ltch-final-rule, Holland & Knight. Meghan Basler, “CMS Proposes 2.4% IPPS Update for FY 2027 with Targeted Payment Adjustments, DSH Reductions, and Expanded Oversight Across Hospital Policies,” https://www.appliedpolicy.com/cms-proposes-2-4-ipps-update-for-fy-2027-with-targeted-payment-adjustments-dsh-reductions-and-expanded-oversight-across-hospital-policies/, Applied Policy. Mitch Carr, “Target 7: Southwest Virginia medical school tackles rural healthcare crisis,” August 10, 2026, https://www.wdbj7.com/2026/08/10/target-7bridging-gap-southwest-virginia-medical-school-tackles-rural-healthcare-crisis/, WDBJ7. Rural Health Today is a production of Hillsdale Hospital in Hillsdale, Michigan and a member of the Health Podcast Network. Our host is JJ Hodshire, our producer is Kyrsten Newlon, and our audio engineer is Kenji Ulmer. Special thanks to our special guests for sharing their expertise on the show, and also to the Hillsdale Hospital marketing team. If you want to submit a question for us to answer on the podcast or learn more about Rural Health Today, visit ruralhealthtoday.com.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing healthcare, but successful AI adoption requires much more than choosing the right technology. In this episode of The Beat's AI at ViVE series, Sandy Vance speaks with Dr. Melinda S. Kidder, DHA, MSN, RN, CENP, Chief Nursing Officer, Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Bill Slovin, Chief Technology Officer at Brandon Systems, about what healthcare organizations need to get right before AI can truly deliver value. Their conversation explores some of the biggest challenges facing healthcare AI adoption, including fragmented data, interoperability, data quality, alert fatigue, clinician buy-in, patient safety, and the importance of understanding the problem before selecting an AI solution. Dr. Kidder and Slovin also dive into how healthcare leaders can evaluate AI and analytics vendors, why frontline clinicians need to be part of technology decisions, and how interoperability can help unlock more effective AI-powered care. In this episode, they talk about: Why healthcare still has a long way to go on interoperability How fragmented data limits the effectiveness of AI in healthcare Why AI is only as good as the data behind it The importance of getting clinical, financial, HR, and operational data to work together Why healthcare organizations should solve the problem before choosing an AI solution How AI could help reduce alert fatigue for nurses and clinicians Why technology adoption is often a cultural and workflow challenge, not just a technology challenge How to get clinicians involved in AI implementation and earn their trust Why frontline staff can make or break a technology implementation How government policy can support responsible AI innovation while protecting patient safety What interoperability means for the future of AI in healthcare How TEFCA is helping expand health information exchange What healthcare leaders should ask when evaluating an AI or analytics vendor Why continuous monitoring after an AI implementation is critical Why healthcare organizations should focus on business value instead of adopting AI simply because it is the latest technology A Little About Melinda and Bill: Dr. Melinda S. Kidder, DHA, MSN, RN, CENP is a healthcare leader and nurse informatics expert focused on advancing technology, interoperability, and AI in healthcare. A former bedside nurse, Dr. Kidder transitioned into informatics after working with her organization's IT department to implement and evaluate technology in the clinical setting. In her current role as Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, she helps advance healthcare technology and interoperability while bringing a clinician's perspective to policy, education, and innovation. Bill Slovin is Chief Technology Officer at Brandon Systems, where he leads technology initiatives focused on healthcare, analytics, software development, and AI. With more than 25 years of experience in IT and software development, Bill began his career as a developer at Brandon Systems and has built deep expertise in healthcare systems and data-driven technologies. His work focuses on using technology to improve efficiency, support better patient outcomes, and advance digital transformation in healthcare.
Hospital leaders who view health information management strictly as a back-office coding function are making a massive operational mistake. Modern healthcare depends on accurate data to survive. Protecting that data requires active stewardship.Healthcare IT Today sat down with Mahmoud Suleiman, CEO and Registrar at CHIMA. We discussed the accelerating evolution of the HIM profession. Watch to learn why health systems must transition their teams from transactional encoders into strategic leaders who protect data quality and prevent clinical errors.
AI in Healthcare: A Practical Discussion for Executives On this episode of The Dish on Health IT, Brian Dwyer, Business Strategist at Point-of-Care Partners, is joined by Sam Schifman, Principal Engineer for AI at Red Hat and Consultant at Point-of-Care Partners, and Kendra Obrist, Senior Consultant and Payer Interoperability Subject Matter Expert at Point-of-Care Partners, for a practical discussion about how healthcare leaders can evaluate AI opportunities without needing to become technical experts. Together, they explore where AI is delivering measurable value today, why many initiatives struggle to achieve expected outcomes, how to evaluate vendors and risk, what emerging policy and governance trends mean for healthcare organizations, and why strong data quality and interoperability remain essential to AI success.
The healthcare industry is finally moving past the hype of artificial intelligence and the hope of data standards. Inserting immature tech or standard into an established workflow easily backfires if the deployment fails to adapt to human behavior.Healthcare IT Today sat down with Aidan Lee and Matt Leduc, Executive Directors at OntarioMD, during the #eHealth26 conference. They share the practical steps required to deploy clinical AI safely and how to activate idle healthcare data standards. Viewers will learn why cross-functional governance and a strict focus on the clinician's daily workload dictate the success of any new tech rollout.
Switching your electronic health record system is a multi-year journey that derails clinical workflows. Instead of taking on a massive migration, health systems are freezing their budgets and betting on short-term AI pilots instead. Healthcare IT Today sat down with Paul Warburton, Senior Market Research Analyst at KLAS Research, to dissect the latest US Acute Care EHR Market Share Report. We break down why large health systems logged zero major migration decisions last year and where IT budgets are actually moving. You will get a clear look at how the market share of Epic, Oracle, and MEDITECH has shifted this past year.
Most people assume the Canadian healthcare system is highly coordinated because of single-payer funding. The truth is that data exchange across provinces is just as fragmented as it is in the US. Healthcare IT Today sat down with Karen Gauthier, VP of International, and Gurpreet (GP) Singh, SVP for Interoperability Strategy & Solutions at ELLKAY, to discuss their deep roots in Canada. We cover how they help hospitals handle massive EHR transitions and why treating data as infrastructure solves major archiving headaches. You will learn the strategies for cleaning up historical records while giving clinicians easy access directly from their new systems.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of nearly every conversation in healthcare, but many executives are still asking the same question: What do I actually need to understand to make good business decisions? On this episode of The Dish on Health IT, Brian Dwyer, Business Strategist at Point-of-Care Partners, is joined by Sam Schifman, Principal Engineer for AI at Red Hat and Consultant at Point-of-Care Partners, and Kendra Obrist, Senior Consultant and Payer Interoperability Subject Matter Expert at Point-of-Care Partners, for a practical discussion about how healthcare leaders can evaluate AI opportunities without needing to become technical experts. Together, they explore where AI is delivering measurable value today, why many initiatives struggle to achieve expected outcomes, how to evaluate vendors and risk, what emerging policy and governance trends mean for healthcare organizations, and why strong data quality and interoperability remain essential to AI success. The conversation begins by unpacking what people actually mean when they say they're "using AI." Sam explains the differences between predictive AI, generative AI, conversational AI, and the rapidly emerging world of agentic AI, while Kendra encourages listeners not to get caught up in the terminology. Instead, she emphasizes starting with the business problem that needs to be solved and then determining whether AI is the right tool for the job. Brian then asks where AI is creating meaningful value today. Kendra highlights opportunities across administrative workflows, including documentation, member and provider engagement, claims, prior authorization, and other operational processes where reducing friction can improve efficiency and the user experience. Sam builds on that discussion by encouraging organizations to evaluate AI initiatives based on business outcomes and measurable success metrics rather than technical benchmarks, while recognizing that every AI implementation introduces its own set of risks and tradeoffs. The discussion shifts to why technically impressive AI projects often fail to produce meaningful business results. Kendra explains that organizations can become captivated by polished demonstrations without fully considering governance, data quality, workflow redesign, adoption, and organizational change management. Sam reinforces the importance of understanding AI's inherent uncertainty, establishing appropriate human oversight, and preparing employees for new ways of working as AI becomes integrated into everyday operations. Brian next explores how much AI healthcare executives actually need to understand. Rather than suggesting leaders become AI specialists, Sam encourages executives to develop enough knowledge to ask informed questions and avoid treating AI as an incomprehensible "black box." Kendra complements that advice by encouraging leaders to personally experiment with AI tools so they can better understand both their strengths and limitations before making strategic decisions. As organizations increasingly evaluate AI-enabled products, the panel discusses the questions healthcare leaders should ask prospective vendors. Beyond understanding how an AI solution works, they explore governance, transparency, auditability, accountability, data requirements, quality assurance, and vendor responsibility when AI produces unexpected results. Sam also introduces the concept of AI sovereignty, encouraging organizations to think carefully about long-term dependence on foundational AI models and the flexibility they'll need as technology and regulations continue to evolve. The conversation also examines the rapidly changing policy landscape surrounding AI. Kendra explains how federal agencies are currently taking a sector-specific approach to oversight while states continue introducing their own transparency, bias, and human review requirements. Together, they discuss the operational challenges this evolving patchwork of regulations creates for healthcare organizations operating across multiple states and why adaptability will become increasingly important. Looking ahead, Brian asks what developments deserve executives' attention and which trends may be receiving more attention than they warrant. Sam discusses why organizations should avoid assuming generative AI is always the right answer, highlighting continued opportunities for predictive AI, machine learning, and even traditional software approaches when they better fit the problem. Kendra shares why agentic AI and coordinated teams of AI agents may fundamentally reshape how work is performed across healthcare organizations. The episode concludes with each guest sharing one final takeaway for healthcare leaders. Sam encourages organizations to begin thinking strategically about AI sovereignty, security, and organizational flexibility as AI becomes increasingly embedded in core business operations. Kendra leaves listeners with a broader perspective, comparing AI's impact on knowledge work to the Industrial Revolution's impact on physical labor, and encourages leaders to embrace the technology thoughtfully rather than waiting until they feel they have all the answers. This episode offers practical guidance for healthcare executives who want to make informed AI decisions, ask better questions of vendors and internal teams, and develop an AI strategy grounded in business value rather than technology for technology's sake. Would you be interested in joining a future AI 101 webinar designed for healthcare executives? Sign up to be invited and tell us what you want to learn. We may not be able to pack everything into one webinar but we can do our best to make it as informative as possible.
Fragmented Legacy Data Causes Burnout. Smart Archiving Restores Patient Safety.Keeping a dozen old EHRs alive is a massive technical debt. It is also a major patient safety risk.Healthcare IT Today sat down with Justin Campbell from RLDatix to uncover the reality of legacy data management. Campbell explains how modernizing your data archives directly reduces clinician burden. He details how applying artificial intelligence to old records and incident reports uncovers workflow breakdowns that humans naturally miss. You will learn how to turn dead data silos into active risk mitigation tools.Are your clinicians still hunting through multiple legacy systems for patient history? Tell us how you are solving this in the comments below.
Hosts Colin Hung and John Lynn discuss World Cup of Health IT. To stream our Station live 24/7 visit www.HealthcareNOWRadio.com or ask your Smart Device to “….Play Healthcare NOW Radio”. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen
Mike McSherry is the CEO of Xealth, the digital health orchestration company now operating inside Samsung Electronics. Xealth gives clinicians a way to prescribe and recommend far more than medication—including digital health apps, connected devices, remote-monitoring programs, transportation, meal delivery, and other services that increasingly shape a patient's care journey.The Samsung acquisition puts Xealth inside a company with a healthcare footprint far larger than most Americans realize. Samsung operates major hospitals, manufactures biologic medicines and medical equipment, develops healthcare robotics, and already has televisions, appliances, phones, watches, and other connected devices inside millions of American homes. Mike's bet is that this existing footprint can become the infrastructure for aging in place, chronic-care management, fall detection, medication support, and earlier intervention—without making patients feel constantly watched or turning the home into a hospital.That opportunity is becoming more immediate through the CMS ACCESS Model, a ten-year effort to bring technology-enabled, outcomes-based care to Medicare patients with chronic conditions. The model could allow companies offering services such as weight management, diabetes support, mental healthcare, wearable monitoring, and AI coaching to participate more directly in Medicare care delivery. Xealth can serve as the connective layer between health systems, clinicians, patients, and these new programs, while Samsung's devices and consumer reach could support both monitoring and distribution.Mike's larger argument is that healthcare is approaching a data reset. Consumer technology companies and AI platforms are beginning to combine medical records, laboratory results, wearable signals, and patient-reported information into a more complete picture than many hospitals currently possess. Health systems and EHR companies that cannot absorb wearable data may lose relevance—but simply dumping more information on clinicians will make the problem worse. The real breakthrough will come from AI systems that filter continuous data, identify what actually matters, and surface only the moments that require human attention.We discuss:Why Samsung may have a better chance in home-based healthcare than Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, and other major companies that struggled to turn consumer reach into sustained healthcare adoptionHow Samsung's hospitals, medical equipment, biologics manufacturing, robotics, wearables, smartphones, televisions, and connected appliances could become infrastructure for aging in place and chronic-care managementWhy big technology companies repeatedly bounce off healthcare—and why the industry rewards trust, patience, integration, and long-term investment rather than quick wins and software-like marginsWhat the ten-year CMS ACCESS Model could change for Medicare patients with chronic conditions—and why companies such as Noom, WHOOP, Headspace, Lark, and Welldoc could begin operating more like technology-enabled care providersHow Xealth could connect clinicians and health systems with covered digital-health programs, while Samsung's devices and consumer reach support patient monitoring, engagement, and distributionWhy EHRs that cannot absorb wearable data risk falling behind AI platforms and consumer-health companies that already combine medical records, laboratory results, and continuous biometric informationHow AI could prevent physicians from drowning in streams of heart rate, temperature, oxygen, sleep, stress, and activity data by identifying the signals that actually require human interventionWhere wearables and connected care go next—from patches, earbuds, glasses, and implantables to household devices and robots that help patients remain independent without making their homes feel like hospitals—Brought to you by: Sage Growth Partners — Value-focused strategy and marketing for growth-driven healthcare organizations. — Where to find Jared: • X: https://x.com/jaredstaylor • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredstaylor/
Healthcare AI is moving faster than many health systems can govern it.In this episode of Straight Out of Health IT, David Hilderbrand, Chief Commercial Officer at Ferrum Health, joins Christopher Kunney to discuss the rapid rise of clinical AI, medical imaging AI consolidation, and the growing need for enterprise-level governance. He explains why health systems are no longer just asking which AI tools to buy, but how to monitor, manage, and understand the tools already running across their organizations. As AI enters through devices, platforms, service lines, and vendor relationships, CIOs and clinical leaders are facing a new kind of operational complexity. The conversation explores why effective AI oversight has become essential as adoption accelerates across healthcare.David breaks down the difference between AI committees, analytics, telemetry, and true governance. He explains that governance is not simply about knowing whether an algorithm is turned on, but about understanding how it behaves in clinical care and how it performs across different patient populations. Without that level of visibility, health systems risk overlooking issues such as bias, model drift, inconsistent performance, and patient impact. He argues that meaningful governance is critical to ensuring AI delivers safe, reliable, and measurable clinical value.David also shares how Ferrum Health approaches clinical AI through platforming, observability, and neutral model monitoring. Rather than recommending which AI tools organizations should adopt, Ferrum helps health systems gain visibility into their entire AI portfolio so they can make informed decisions about expanding, replacing, or retiring algorithms. The discussion also covers measuring ROI, recognizing the costs of underperforming AI models, and the importance of early disease detection. Hilderbrand concludes by explaining why AI governance should remain independent from vendor bias to support better long-term clinical and operational outcomes.Tune in to hear why clinical AI governance is becoming essential infrastructure for health systems, and why the future of healthcare AI depends on visibility, accountability, and trust.Key TakeawaysClinical AI is expanding quickly, but many health systems lack the tools to understand what is actually running across their environments. Vendor sprawl is creating new operational, financial, and clinical risks as AI tools enter through devices, platforms, and service lines. True AI governance goes beyond telemetry and analytics; it requires visibility into how algorithms interact with patients and clinical workflows. Health systems need unbiased observability to determine whether clinical AI tools are performing as promised. AI governance can help organizations reduce the cost of failed algorithms and improve the value of their AI investments. Early detection through clinical AI can improve patient outcomes while also reducing downstream care costs. Governance must remain separate from vendor bias so health systems can make clear decisions about which tools to keep, expand, replace, or remove. The next phase of clinical AI will require stronger infrastructure, especially as agentic AI and cloud-based workflow solutions grow.ResourcesConnect with David Hilderbrand on LinkedIn.Follow Ferrum Health on LinkedIn and visit their website.
Hospitals are sitting on hundreds of hours of unwatched surgical video. Residents and attendings simply do not have the time to review it together. The footage sits on thumb drives and gathers dust.Dr. Chloe Nobuhara is a general surgery resident at Stanford. She sat down with Healthcare IT Today to discuss a new AI application built specifically for laparoscopic surgery. This tool watches the footage and analyzes surgeon performance. It automatically chunks the operation into distinct steps. Viewers will learn why generic large language models fail in the operating room. You will discover how a highly specific model gives educators their time back and helps surgeons master complex skills.
As a nurse with MS, I’m interviewed about AI’s real role in care: pattern recognition, human-in-the-loop skepticism, and the Three T’s and Two C’s framework. Click here to view the printable newsletter. More readable than a transcript. Click here for a verbatim transcript Summary I sit in the guest chair on Practical AI in Healthcare with Steve Labkoff. I walk through my experience feeding my own symptom logs, lab results, and ten years of clinician notes into an AI LLM: a physical therapy referral I needed and hadn’t scheduled, a medication side effect my neurologist later confirmed, and a rating scale buried in my chart that no one had surfaced. I describe the less impressive side: the four-pound box of unsorted paper my primary care practice mailed me and the 296 pages of unsearchable PDFs I got back from another system in fifteen minutes. Along the way, I lay out my framework for judging any digital health tool, the Three T’s and Two C’s: time, trust, talk, control, and connection, and explain why I insist on keeping humans in the loop even though the research on that is more complicated than people assume. This isn’t a pitch for AI in healthcare. It’s a working nurse and patient’s honest field report. What’s your experience been feeding your own health data into an AI LLM? Tell us in the comments. Episode Transcript Proem I usually ask the questions. This time I'm the guest. I met Drs. Steve Labkoff and Leon Rozenblit a couple of years ago at a DCI Network conference. They host Practical AI in Healthcare, a show I've listened to steadily, though it creates more tension for me than any other podcast I keep coming back to. Usually, I jettison podcasts that do that. I stay with this one because I approach AI in healthcare the way I approach best health; I'm an N of one and resist generalizing, while most guests do a fair amount of it. I bristle at most of them, wanting the shades of gray that reflect deep understanding. In four of 33 episodes, the guest has had lived experience: ePatient Dave DeBronkart, Amy Price, Hugo Campos, and me. I invited Steve and Leon to join my virtual Reckoning group, which I've hosted since 2019. We give podcasters warm critiques of selected episodes: the kind of feedback you give when you've made a hundred mistakes yourself, can spot them quickly in someone else's cut, and have endless thoughts about production, audience, dissemination, and life. They took the critique well. When Steve later asked me to come on his show to talk about how I use AI, not the theory but the daily grind, I readily agreed. They let me publish it here unchanged, apart from this Proem and Reflection. I struggled to prepare for this conversation. I wanted to wear all my hats, but had to narrow my focus to two. I chose my lived experience and nurse hats. Underneath it all was the question I keep circling back to. Not a cure. Best health, the most function, and Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of Practical AI in Healthcare. My name is Dr. Steven Lapcoff, and this week I’m actually on my own because my partner, Dr. Leon Rosenblatt, is actually on spring break with his kids, so I am covering for him and he’ll be back in the next week. This week we have a guest who we met at a conference in Boston a few months ago at the Beth Israel at the DCI network. Steven Labkoff: We have Danny van Leeuwen. Danny is a nurse. He has background in giving actual physical care to patients. He actually runs his own podcast called Health Hats, the Podcast, and he’s been using AI in both his personal life and in his professional life very extensively. Also, Danny has a significant medical condition, and I’ll let him explain that in the course of the discussion because it’s with that lens that we got introduced at our patient-centric AI conference, and that’s why we thought it’d be a good idea to have Danny come and have a chat with us. So welcome to the podcast, Danny. How are you today? Health Hats: I’m good. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Steven Labkoff: So Danny, as you probably have heard because you’ve helped us with our podcast, and for that I want to say thank you. For those who are listening in, Danny runs actually a group that actually helps folks running podcasts improve their podcasts, and he’s had Leon and I on many times to listen to critiques and feedback, and it’s been very, very helpful. Danny, we often start our podcast with asking for folks’ origin stories, like how did they get their cape and their superhero tights. What did you do to get you to this point in your life? And just tell us the background of what brought you here. Health Hats: Oh, thanks. So I’m a child of Holocaust survivors, and my parents– when I was young, my parents were active in the civil rights and fair housing movement in the ’60s. And when I was 16 and I was thinking about the war in Vietnam and worried about getting drafted, I wanted to learn what I could learn about the draft and how I could protect myself and manage. And I went to a church in downtown Detroit, and I went for a session of draft counseling as, you know, a little precocious at 16, and I found it fascinating, and they found me fascinating, and they encouraged me to become a draft counselor. And so I, uh, I actually took their course and became a draft counselor, and what I learned is that you change systems from the inside, not the outside. And I learned how the sausage was made, and that, uh, really pointed me in a direction. The way I got into nursing is really because I didn’t want to cut my hair I had an opportunity for a job at one point, and I could have read water meters or become an aide at the Detroit Psychiatric Institute. And reading water meters paid more, but I didn’t wanna cut my hair, so I got the job as, as nurse’s aide. And while I was there, they introduced me to the idea of going to nursing school, which was amazing. Steven Labkoff: It was more– You got paid more to read meters, water meters, than you did- Health Hats: Yes. Steven Labkoff: That’s unbelievable. Life gives you some real interesting turns and twists, doesn’t it? Health Hats: It does. And I was really fortunate because my first jobs in nursing were in physical rehabilitation and home care. I just happened to be in a place where the Holyoke Visiting Nurses was dying to hire a guy, and I was a brand-new nurse, and they ended up hiring me. And so my first introduction to nursing was not in acute care. It was in home care, and actually, I was the first male public health nurse in Western Massachusetts in 1976. And really, what I learned there was that most healthcare does not occur in the medical system. It occurs outside the medical system. And so when I ended up getting into medical care, it was always so interesting to me that everybody there thought this is where, you know, health happened, which it doesn’t. So over the 20 years of working as a nurse, I’ve worked in, other than the rehab and home care, I’ve worked in the emergency department, I’ve worked in ICU, I worked in pediatrics, behavioral health. And after about 15, 20 years, I shifted from becoming a student of individual health to a student o- of organizational health. And what I mean by that is I got into performance improvement. I led a couple of electronic health record implementations. I had a couple of gigs in the C-suite. I did some consulting. Now, in 2009, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and when I was diagnosed, I learned that I had had it for 25 years. And since my father died young, he died at 45 when I was 19 of his second heart attack, and so every time I would have some kind of episode, I would get a cardiac workup. And by the time the cardiac workup was done, you know, the episode was over, and this went on two, three, four times a year for a long time. And there was a pattern there, and nobody was connecting the dots for 25 years. That’s very important to me because the pattern of what was going on was in my records for 25 years, but nobody had synthesized it. Steven Labkoff: Yeah, they may have been biased, right? Because of your family history and having these episodes, you know, as a clinician, you get very biased by family history, and that can actually lead you down roads which may not be correct, and it sounds like that’s precisely what happened with you. Health Hats: So I’ve– I wanna bring in the caregiver role because I have been a caregiver for my grandmother, my mother, and a son in their end-of-life journeys. So I’ve been on many sides of very difficult decisions. As you said, that my shtick is health hats, and I’m health hats because I’m a patient, I’m a caregiver, I’m a nurse, I’m an advocate, I’m an informaticist, I’m a podcast host. I wear a lot of hats. And wearing many hats has gotten me a seat at many tables because they can check off boxes. When it was really different to be bringing patients o-on board, I was an easy choice. Uh, I was at the table for technical expert panels at CMS, at National Academy of Medicine, at AHRQ, National Quality Forum, PCORI, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. But really, I wasn’t really there in it for the seat itself. My goal was always to open seats for people who weren’t there yet Now let’s build the bridge, since this is a podcast about AI, let’s build that little bit of that bridge. So my first, like, serious experience with– Well, I don’t know about my first. I was involved in something that you probably are familiar with, which was the Blue Button Plus program, and my goal in that, I was there both as a patient and as somebody who was working with people with disabilities. I, I was VP of quality for an organization that supported about 40,000 people with disabilities. And my goal for that couple of years of weekly or every other week, I can’t remember, calls was, uh, to add a f- a caregiver field to the data set, and to also introduce the idea that what people needed was information that would be able to say what works for me when I’m in pain and what works for me when I’m afraid, which was an issue for me, and it was an issue for the organization that I was working with at the time. Now, I have to say that the caregiver field got added, so I felt some success in that. But as a nurse leader in the informatics group I was part of, really they were only interested in putting a name in the field, not doing anything with that information, which I- Just collecting, so just collecting the data. Steven Labkoff: They didn’t care what the data was used for? Is that what you’re saying? Health Hats: Correct. Yeah. And I couldn’t– got no traction on the pain and fear, which now that I’m older, I understand why, how difficult that is. Nevertheless, it’s something that’s important to patients and caregivers. So I think I would close this section with that I am both an early adopter of technology and a rapid skeptic, that I’m kinda making this number up, but I’ve probably tried over 100 health apps, and I would say that I’ve used five more than three times. And so I think there’s a gap between what’s promised with digital technology and what’s useful for people. So that’s really why I’m here and what’s guiding for me in this. Steven Labkoff: So let’s take it to the next step. In our prequel, I didn’t even know about your personal background to that degree. Mm-hmm. We can take that one offline later about the Holocaust survivor issues. We, we have family, I have family in that same situation, frankly. Let’s change gears and talk about the challenges that you’ve seen. You opened the door a little bit on that a few minutes ago- Yeah … in terms of people wanting to collect data but not necessarily doing much with the data, not being able to understand the true value of the data to some degree. And you said it yourself, people weren’t connecting the dots. Medical records have always been complicated. They’ve always been bulky. They’ve always been full of information, some of which is really relevant, a lot of which is not so relevant, and connecting the dots to making that a, uh, an important information source is not always an obvious task. So what, what was the particular angle on that challenge that you were trying to gun at? Health Hats: Well, I think we have to take a step back- and think about what is– Well, I’m just gonna speak for myself, okay? I know that I often, you know, as I said, I get asked to sit at the table because people can, you know, check boxes, like is that I’m a patient. I wanna be clear that I’m a privileged white old man with MS living in Boston, but I’m an N of one, and I don’t represent other patients. I’m representing myself here and my perspectives. My goal in terms of my health is best health, and what I mean by best health is optimal health and function, physical, mental, spiritual. Not a cure, but best health for where I am, what I have right now. And to get there, I need my own health data, not just what’s in my clinician’s chart, but what I know about myself, my circumstances, my environment, my history, my habits. Not just my medical history, my life history, my treatment responses. And so that’s like patient-reported data, and that’s stuff that’s only exists because I observe it and sometimes I record it And that’s where it falls apart right away. You were just alluding to some of it, that there’s all this medical data and what’s useful about that. I think Dave DeBronkart was a guest on your show. And when he launched his Gimme My Damn Data campaign, I responded to him with, “Watch what you wish for. You’ll be trying to drink dirty water from a fire hose.” And, and that was years ago, and it’s still true. So six months ago, I, I’d been on a mission to gather my medical data, and my– I’d been with my, uh, primary care practice since 2011, and I wanted all that data from 2011 to 2025. This was, like, in December I started on this crusade of trying to get my data. And actually, two months later, I got a box, a four-pound box of paper, and it was paper that was not in chronological order. And it’s just sitting right here. I’ve scanned it in. It’s not, um- Was it in– Steven Labkoff: Was it a printout of Epic or something, or was it actual- Health Hats: It’s a computer printout. It seems like it’s a vendor that they use to- Steven Labkoff: It wasn’t digital. They sent you, literally sent you a box of paper. Health Hats: Yeah, it was a box of paper. Oh. And then I use a lot the, the Beth Israel Lahey Mount Auburn system, and I asked for the last three months of my records, and I got 296 pages of redundant, non-searchable PDFs, and I got that in 15 minutes. Uh, I see a lot of doctors, so maybe I had seen Hmm. I think I had maybe eight or nine visits, and it just happened to be a three-month period that was busy for me, but I got s- 296 pages. And so that really adds to your comment, which is that access to data and access to usable data are really different. Steven Labkoff: Oh, absolutely. And yeah, I’ll tell you, in my world, I think you know that I’ve worked in the life sciences for many, many years, and we are consumers of healthcare data on many levels. We consume medical claims, we consume electronic medical records, and one of the hardest things about using medical records for research or for outcome studies and things like that is the very fact you’re describing, which is the data tends to be sparse, it tends to be poorly organized. It doesn’t always come in an encoded fashion. Thank God most of what we get these days is at least digital. No boxes of paper for us these days, but it wasn’t so long ago that when it was all paper, we couldn’t get that data in the first place. It just wasn’t even gettable. So at least you’ve made some progress. And- Yeah … yeah, I know that you sit on some national level boards, uh, around outcomes, and you can talk about that in a moment. But those are, you know, those boards are trying very hard to come up with outcome studies and ways of– Let me back that up. They’re coming up with ways of using data to perform outcome studies by harmonizing and, and distilling down to usable forms of this EHR data, which is so challenging. Health Hats: I think what’s key, I– like I, I think I w- I’d like to focus on my data. And so what I wanna do is I wanna see patterns. I wanna see patterns that takes my circumstances, my environment, my habits, my treatment over time, and because I think that these patterns are how I formulate the right questions, so the right questions before I go into a clinical encounter. They’re how I track when something is actually working, and it helps me to coordinate across care teams that don’t talk to each other and make decisions that I can live with that help me attain this goal of best health. So that’s the job, formulate better questions, g- seek better answers, make better decisions. And AI is the tool that I try to use to do it. Now, whether it’s up to the task or not is different. I wanna stick in the nursing angle, if you don’t mind- You know, one of the things that I learned the way I got started in nursing is that my goal as a nurse was to put myself out of a job. Steven Labkoff: So that sounds counterintuitive, but what I mean is from minute one with a patient and family, I’m planning my exit. Like, and to do that, I need maximum face time. I need real present, real conversation, real relationships, not less charting. I was gonna say not charting, not documentation, so that’s just ridiculous. Health Hats: But less, you know. The way you do that, I think, is, you know, less charting, less documentation, you know, not hunting through information you can’t find. And that’s where nursing, that’s a genuine promise. So pattern recognition across specific cohorts of patients. So as a nurse, even though I worked a lot of different places, in each place I worked, there was commonalities. In– When I lived in West Virginia and I was an ER nurse in a super rural hospital, if I had had more information about my patients, their families, I could get– an AI could help me surface those patterns that exist for the people that I’m taking care of, I think I could get time back as a nurse. And if the nurse gets time back, then the patient and family gets the presence of the clinician. So that’s the trade that I’m interested in I wanna go back to that thing about pain and fear. I wanna add what I’ve learned working on the blue button, plus I wanna add cognition. So when you think about it, the data almost never captures the variability of pain, fear, and cognition, and those things are really important because pain changes what you can do and what you can decide. Fear closes your heart. It closes your mind. And so when you’re scared in a clinical encounter, you’re not making good decisions. You’re just saying yes to end it. And cognition is, you know, it varies. Like I can absorb better at 10 in the morning on a good day compared to 3:00 in the afternoon when I’m spent. You know, you could extrapolate this to other people. They have their own particular patterns and circumstances. But I think What I’m trying to get at in all of this is it isn’t first about the data, it’s first about what about life and what about the things that are important to people, uh, patients, caregivers, and the clinicians that they partner with, and how can AI help them? Steven Labkoff: So you’ve explained to me in the pre-call that you’re doing some of this work, so maybe you can unpack a little bit about what it is you’re actually doing with it and how it’s helping or, in some cases, not helping those efforts. Health Hats: Well, what have I done? I, I’ve done different things. One of the things that, that I’ve done is to try to build my toolkit. You know? So when I say build my toolkit, I’m a, I’m a, a conglomeration of symptoms. I mean, you know, I’m, I’m not MS, I’m not my symptoms, but they’re big and they’re there, and I feel like I’m trying to, I’m trying to figure out for anything that I have to deal with, whether it’s any of the different kinds of pains I have, my, my anxiety, my bladder, you know, my mobility, I have challenges, and I, I need a toolbox. I need a toolbox, and the way I think is I need at least three things that will work so that when they happen, I got something I can go do, and pretty much the most common thing is drink water. Drink water is by far the most successful intervention across all of my symptoms. It’s kind of amazing. It’s so cheap, so easy. It isn’t the drugs. Okay, but so how do I do that? Well, for me, I’ve done that partially just in my head. Partially I’ve done that by keeping lists. Like, I keep track of the steps I take. I keep track of the amount of time I play music. I keep track of my falls. I keep track of my weight. And so I use digital tools to do that when I can. Steven Labkoff: I also record my clinician visits because- When you say record, do you mean like audio record or dig- Health Hats: Yeah. Yeah, audio record, right. And, uh, until recently I used Abridge, which is a company that, um- Steven Labkoff: How did you get to use Abridge? You– I thought Abridge was only selling basically into doctor’s offices, uh, from the clinician side. Do you- Health Hats: So I was before that. Ah. And they started as a patient-facing product, and actually they sponsored my podcast for three years. So I was pre that. So putting all that together, so I play with, you know, trying to put into Claude There’s nothing magic or special. You know, it’s me playing, just trying stuff. You know, some of it, you know, my wife will say, “Hey,” she sees a pattern. My kids will see a pattern, or I’ll- Steven Labkoff: Give, give, give us an example of what, of what this looks like. I mean, you’re saying you’re giving Claude or another LLM- Yeah … a series of symptoms, or you’re giving it a series of, plus your data. Like, unpack it and let us know. Yeah. What have you did- Okay, so what- … with the system, and how is it working for you? Health Hats: I’ve done a couple of different things. One is, you know, I have a spreadsheet, and I just put the spreadsheet in, you know, as a document or whatever you call it when you have a project and, you know, you load. I load my spreadsheet. I keep a annual summary, and I keep the year that I’m working on. And I will have fits of journaling. You know, I, this is not something that I am, like, super consistent on, but I’ll, especially when I’m struggling with something, if I’m struggling with my blood pressure or I’m struggling with my mood. I have a progressive mobility thing going on, and I’ll put that in and I’ll prompt. I’ll say, “Can you– do you see a pattern in this?” You know, and I’ve gotten, you know, that there’s- Steven Labkoff: Has it given you some insights? Is it… Like, give me an example of some of the insights it’s actually given you that you didn’t see yourself. Health Hats: Well, I’ve gotten, like, uh, it’s kind of humorous. But, but I’ve gotten, like, you know, “Have you thought about seeing a physical therapist?” And I, I have. You know, I have a physical therapist, uh, that I don’t go to very often. You know, my relationship with her is I go for a tune-up. But they’ll– I, I want– It’ll show, like, I’ll do my sort of things are clearly, you know, I’m not walking as far, I’ve fell on a few times, you know, and I’ll get this suggestion, you know. I also– What else have I done? Oh, oh, uh, once I had a medication that I was taking for neuropathy, and I was– my mood had, like, changed considerably and, you know, I got a thing on that might be a side effect. You know, “Have you talked to your doctor about this?” Steven Labkoff: And I- And you got that out of the LLM? You fed that to the LLM? Health Hats: I did. Yeah. Steven Labkoff: And it suggested it was a side effect, which you didn’t figure out. Health Hats: I didn’t. A neurologist said that he thought– He said, “It sounds like you have an allergy to it.” And, you know, he wanted it to be listed as an allergy because he thought it was very possible that he’s had people that have had a problem. Steven Labkoff: When you tell me that you’ve loaded your data, you give the LLM your signs, your symptoms, you give it your labs, you give it what’s in, in the system, and it comes up with a recommendation that you hadn’t thought– Now, you’re a clinician. You’re a nurse. Yeah. You’ve been a nurse for many, many decades. Health Hats: 50 years. Steven Labkoff: 50 years. And does it surprise you that it comes up with stuff that you didn’t see? Health Hats: No. Steven Labkoff: Cause I, to be honest with you- I- … if I, if I did what you just said and it came up with something completely radical that I’d never thought of and it was right- I would be scratching my head and thinking, “Okay, that’s in- that’s beyond interesting. I better pay more attention to this, and maybe I wanna use it differently.” Because not, it’s not just yous using it. Like, people around everywhere are starting to use it for the same, in the same sim- in the same exact way. So that’s the simplification of the medical system, right? Health Hats: It does. I mean, like when I tell my neurologist, he laughs, and he’s like a whatever works kinda guy, you know? That he feels like he doesn’t have all the answers, and that he likes- those stories. I feel like I’ve learned, I think you know Amy Price, right? Steven Labkoff: Yeah, very well. Health Hats: Yeah. We’re buddies. And so one of the things that I’ve learned from her is how to query and how to be skeptical and how to ask questions from different angles, from different perspectives so that you– And that’s why I think that’s where the unexpected comes up. Steven Labkoff: Well, you’re describing something that we did at the conference. I don’t know if you were in the room in the working group that we did this on, but you’re describing, and actually we’re submitting a paper on it very shortly, on AI literacy. Yeah. And you, you didn’t label it as such, but you’re describing yourself as being AI literate and understanding how to use the tools, most importantly, how to be skeptical of the answers, how to interpret the information that’s being presented to you. Health Hats: A- and that, those are all components of literacy, of AI literacy specifically. One of the things I’m finding in my world is that painfully few people are indeed AI literate. Even the folks in IT departments in large life science companies or hospitals who even work in the space and think that they’re good at it and are literate sometimes are not. That has other implications, which are if people are taking on these really impressively powerful tools and they don’t quite know how to use them as well as they should, and if they query them incorrectly, to your point earlier about making good queries, the responses that come out may or may not be the point. And if patients use that information inappropriately because they didn’t know how to ask the right questions to start with, that could have deep implications to the healthcare system. You could say that same thing about doctors. Steven Labkoff: I will say it about doctors. I mean, not about AI, about the advice that doctors give. Health Hats: There’s a, a tremendous variation, and it is very different. When I am feeling good enough to be organized and to be directive in the conversation with a clinician, I get a very different output than when I’m not. And I still have to be skeptical of what doctors tell me, and until I build some trust. And, and then I, you know, then there’s just too many decisions to make when you’re a person with chronic illness. It’s like putting in a kitchen. There’s so many decisions to make, and I’m happy for the doctors that I trust to make the decisions for me. But there are certain decisions I don’t want to give to the doctor or to AI, like I don’t wanna mess with my pathological optimism. I wanna progress as slowly as possible, and I wanna keep playing my horn. These are really important things to me, and I don’t give those decisions that affect that, I don’t give up. But all the rest of it I do, and, and I’ve worked really hard to build the team that I have that appreciates me and my strangeness and my assertiveness, and, you know, they’re not threatened by it. Steven Labkoff: Is your team AI literate? Do they also use the, these same tools in your care? Health Hats: Uh, like I don’t know. I mean, AI literate is like, is huge. You know? I mean, that’s just such a big thing. Do they use AI? Yes. Do I know how they use AI? Well, you know, they use what’s attached to Epic. I know that. Uh, I mean, look, my neurologist, who I just love, he thinks like he uses, he uses the portal well because he takes– he just keeps adding things to the end of the, a note. Yeah. And so he feels like… Well, I don’t find his notes at all useful, and I tell him that. I tell him, “What I really wanna know is, how am I doing? Am I getting better? Am I getting worse? Am I stable? What should I be paying attention to in the next six months till I see you again?” And I can’t find that in his note. That’s true. Yeah. Now, on the other hand, I’ve taken his note and asked Claude and say, “Here’s the note. How am I doing? You know, have I progressed? H-how is he measuring it?” Oh, well, then I find he’s using this scale, right? And it’ll come up with looking through this note, which is like 10 years running, and it’ll find, I can’t remember the name of it, but there’s a scale that he uses. And then we go back and I’ll say to him, “Oh, you’re using this scale.” And he goes, “Yeah.” And I say, “Well, why don’t you like put that at the top of your note?” You know, so that I can find it. You know, so we have that kind of conversation- Yeah … that AI has helped. Steven Labkoff: Well, that’s actually an interesting perspective that AI is helping to reorganize things, ’cause one of the use cases that has been discussed at, at length actually, and it was discussed at our conference, is using AI to digest medical records. Health Hats: And when I say digest, it’s not about like ingesting them, which is slightly different, but digesting, which means find all the different pieces, put them together, come up with a narrative that summarizes perhaps 300 pages of information which may be sparse and may be poorly organized, and bring it all together. And that’s actually a task that AI is actually turning out to be pretty darn good at. And that again changes the nature of the healthcare system and the healthcare journey. You know- And it does a fair job. You say it’s really good at it. So- It’s better than I could do. It’s better than I could do. Well, yes. Well, you’re not– First of all, that’s not your training, and you don’t have the time for it. And you still have to review it. Yeah, of course. Because I have never used AI that gave me a, “Oh, this is great.” I mean, the first time I read it pretty much every time I think it’s amazing. And then, you know, my rule is sleep on it and check it again. And then it’s like, oh my God, this, first of all, it either just said nothing very fancy or it got some very basic things wrong. And then I’ll say, “Oh, you know, you missed this and you missed that.” And it’ll go, “Oh, you’re right, I did.” You know? Steven Labkoff: Well, that also speaks to the concept of keeping a human in the loop- Yeah which is something that you espouse and many folks in the healthcare aisle- I do … espouse. Ironically, you know Adam Rodman, I think. He was at our conference, he spoke. Yeah. Uh, he’s done a study which shows actually having a human in the loop in some cases actually makes the conclusions worse, believe it or not. Ah. Which is w- a non-intuitive finding. You would think that the two together would be better than either one alone, but so that’s, that’s now relatively n- well, it’s not even that new anymore. That information came out about a year ago. So I, we gotta start wrapping up in a few minutes here. Yeah. You know, we didn’t cover the concept around outcomes around your three T’s and two C’s. Maybe we can cover that in the last bit here, and then we can get to closing. Health Hats: Okay. So I feel like one of the questions that you’ve asked is how AI helped, right? And so what I need to tell you is the framework that I’ve developed over the years, which I’ve actually shared in my AI Claude project that’s Danny’s Health, what I call the three T’s and the two C’s, and this is like the framework I use to evaluate any digital health technology. And so they are time, trust, talk, control, and connection. What I mean by that is time is, you know, you need time to learn, to plan, to talk, to build trust. So I say the clock isn’t the enemy, it’s the, the wrong things filling the time, so the, the time. The second is trust. You know, trust can take a really long time. It can happen really quickly. Sometimes you never have it, and you know in your gut when you don’t have it. And most digital health tools, AI, have a trust deficit, I think, not because they’re untru- untrustworthy, which maybe they are, but it’s really because the people who use them, use the tools, don’t, don’t trust them, and I think it’s really important. You c- you can’t shortcut trust in the use of any tool. I think talk is really important. It’s woven through all of it, real conversation. There is nothing like actual conversation that is making decisions together, which is a lot of what healthcare is about, is making decisions. AI can help you prepare for it, and it can help process it. And then control. I trust more when I have power in a situation. So if I’m feeling like an ant ready to be crushed, I’m not making good decisions. And finally, I would say connection is, it’s the human lifeline. You know, when somebody greets you when you cross a threshold, that’s a connection. When someone’s been where you’re going and they can say, “Oh, that helped me.” AI can extend that connection. They can help people find communities that are available at 3:00 in the morning, but you can’t manufacture it. I, I think that connection is really important, so that’s where I g- you know, time, talk, trust, control, and connection, and I use that framework when I’m evaluating. Steven Labkoff: And that framework gives you a better, you know, a how do I say this right? It gives you a, like a rubric, if you will, to go- Yes … through, uh, the information that’s coming out of it. Danny- Yeah … we’re gonna have to wrap up here in a second. Sure. Are there any last comments you wanna make that, that will, you know, help other patients in the, in the space in terms of how they might wanna think about adopting- an AI tool in their world? Health Hats: I think that I would say use it, use AI, keep using it, experiment with it. That, that i- i- just like anything else, it takes time to learn. It takes time to be comfortable with it. Use it. I would say advocate for humans in the loop. I don’t care what the study says. It’s about humans. We are human. Keep it humans in the loop. I would say find a buddy, you know. Do this with somebody else. Find a buddy- That’s good advice … and experiment. I would say, yeah, talk to your clinician about it. It’s a good barometer of a physician. If they don’t wanna talk or blow you off, that tells you something. Absolutely right. And I would say if you’re comfortable with it, mentor. You know- That’s a good idea … be the buddy. And for clinicians and for systems and developers, I would say you need to have patients, caregivers, and practicing partner clinicians in the design. They need to be there from the beginning. And, you know, so i- it solves the problems people have, not the problems that the developers think are there or the venture capitalists thinks are gonna make money. You know, y- and if you have an opportunity, join, you know, participate. Steven Labkoff: All good advice. Well, Danny, I wanna thank you very much for your participation in, in today’s discussion. Hopefully that there are other patients out there who listen to the podcast, they’ll take something away. For the clinicians out there who are listening, you know, you’ve heard it straight out from a patient who happens to be a healthcare provider himself, and he’s got very strong perspectives on how this can be used in a positive and productive way, and I think the framework that he’s put together is very useful. Danny, I wanna just say thank you for all the help that you’ve provided helping this podcast get off the ground. That’s been really incredibly generous of you and your friends who have helped us a lot, and a lot of the things that have happened on our podcast, uh, for improvement’s sake, have come directly from those conversations, so thank you for that. I wanna thank you for being a guest and sharing your journey and sharing your experiences here. And for the rest of us, I’m gonna say thank you for joining us, and we will see you again next time on another episode of Practical AI in Healthcare. Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining us this week on Practical AI in Healthcare. If you’re ready to go beyond buzzwords and hype and explore how AI is truly transforming healthcare, stay tuned for more conversations that get us to what works. Until next time, stay practical Reflection When Steve interviewed me, he didn't know that everything I told him is the origin story of TrustMyOwn.Health. The box of paper. The 296 pages that were technically my data and practically useless. Twenty-five years of a pattern that sat in my chart the whole time, that it took a person, my PCP, a year to put together. Could AI have done it in an afternoon? I got tired of that being the normal experience instead of the exception. [Add: what specifically prompted starting TMOH, and when.] TMOH starts from a premise I didn't have language for until I said it out loud to Steve: trust isn't a feature you bolt onto a health platform after the engineering is done. It's the whole structure, or the whole thing fails. The three T's and two C's I use to size up any digital health tool turn out to be close to a design spec. Time, because a vault of your whole health history takes patience to build, not a single import. Trust, built into governance rather than promised in marketing; TMOH's Data Sovereignty Covenant binds the board and investors to the same terms as everyone else, which is the only version of trust I believe in. Talk, because the point was never to replace the conversation with my clinician, it was to walk in more prepared for it. Control, because I decide what goes in the vault and who sees it, the same way I decide which of my own decisions I hand to a doctor or an AI and which ones I keep for myself. Connection, which no vault can manufacture, but a good one can make room for. I told Steve that AI found a pattern in my chart that twenty-five years of clinicians missed. That's not really a story about AI being smart. It's a story about who owned the data long enough to ask the question. That's the whole bet behind TMOH: put the owner at the center, and let the rest of the ecosystem, the networks, the vendors, the AI, earn its place around that. See you around the block. Practical AI in Healthcare Episodes https://open.spotify.com/episode/4wA4ltjmZfIZ5VpmTeTTOF?si=KbEvc2_ERNWakJ3JeP2Ddg https://open.spotify.com/episode/0LDetUFJJrSV1cy6LtpGFx?si=qAqoqKBBSNm9PiwPjSIXYA https://open.spotify.com/episode/0wXEm1KnnGorOvTt9GTh7o?si=K_DKXzGyThusBPA6KoVkCg https://open.spotify.com/episode/6krV94ob6Lcv7VNo0qahZ5?si=B6lZDkvsQ9y2Z2FhkXzQGQ Referenced in episode Patient data access history: “Introducing Blue Button Plus: The Next Generation in PHRs” — HealthIT.gov (Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT) — https://www.healthit.gov/blog/consumer/introducing-blue-button/ The “Gimme My Damn Data” campaign Danny references: “Gimme My Damn Data (and Let Patients Help!): The #GimmeMyDamnData Manifesto” — Dave deBronkart, Journal of Medical Internet Research — https://www.jmir.org/2019/11/e17045/ Amy Price, mentioned as a mentor in questioning and skepticism: “Welcoming Dr. Amy Price as Editor-in-Chief” — Society for Participatory Medicine — https://participatorymedicine.org/2024/welcoming-dr-amy-price-dphil-as-the-editor-in-chief-for-the-journal-of-participatory-medicine/ AI literacy for patients, the concept Steve names in the episode: “Critical AI Health Literacy as Liberation Technology: A New Skill for Patient Empowerment” — National Academy of Medicine — https://nam.edu/perspectives/critical-ai-health-literacy-as-liberation-technology-a-new-skill-for-patient-empowerment/ Human-in-the-loop research Danny and Steve discuss (Adam Rodman): “AI and the Evolution of Medical Thought with Dr. Adam Rodman” — NEJM AI Grand Rounds (podcast) — https://ai-podcast.nejm.org/e/ai-and-the-evolution-of-medical-thought-with-dr-adam-rodman/ Abridge, the ambient AI scribe tool Danny mentions using: “Pioneers in Generative AI for Healthcare” — Abridge — https://www.abridge.com/about The DCI Network conference where Danny met the hosts: “About DCI Network” — DCI Network, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center — https://www.dcinetwork.org/about-us Please comment and ask questions: at the comment section at the bottom of the show notes on LinkedIn via email YouTube channel DM on Instagram, TikTok to @healthhats Substack Patreon Production Team Kayla Nelson: Web and Social Media Coach, Dissemination, Help Desk Leon van Leeuwen: editing and site management Oscar van Leeuwen: video editing Julia Higgins: Digital marketing therapy Steve Heatherington: Help Desk and podcast production counseling Joey van Leeuwen, Drummer, Composer, and Arranger, provided the music for the intro, outro, proem, and reflection Claude, Perplexity, Auphonic, Descript, Grammarly, DaVinci Resolve, DaVinci AI Art Generator, OpenArt AI Creator Studio Inspired by and Grateful to: Steve Labkoff, Leon Rosenbilt, Amy Price, Leon and Oscar van Leeuwen, Laura Marcial Artificial Intelligence in Podcast Production Health Hats, the Podcast, utilizes AI tools for production tasks such as editing, transcription, and content suggestions. While AI assists with various aspects, including image creation, most AI suggestions are modified. All creative decisions remain my own, with AI sources referenced as usual. Questions are welcome. Creative Commons Licensing CC BY-NC-SA This license enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. CC BY-NC-SA includes the following elements: BY: credit must be given to the creator. NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted. SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms. Please let me know. dannyhealthhats@gmail.com Material on this site created by others is theirs, and use follows their guidelines. Disclaimer The views and opinions presented in this podcast and publication are solely my responsibility and do not necessarily represent the views of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute® (PCORI®), its Board of Governors, or Methodology Committee. Danny van Leeuwen (Health Hats)
The Financial Math of Value-Based Care Fails + How TPMG Cracked the CodeValue-based care is the goal for everyone. Achieving it in a financially sustainable way is a completely different story. Most independent groups struggle to align their technology and processes with risk contracts without drowning in overhead.Healthcare IT Today sat down with Jeff Morrison, Vice President and CMIO at TPMG. We discussed how his independent medical group maximizes the eClinicalWorks platform to make value-based care actually work. You will learn how they made smart decisions and made organizational changes to capture new revenue streams, automate patient outreach, and eliminate the quality reporting slog.
Welcome to Health-e Law, Sheppard's podcast exploring the fascinating health tech topics and trends of the day. In this episode, partner and host Sara Shanti sits down with Erik Pupo, Director of Commercial Health IT at Guidehouse, to discuss how healthcare's push toward greater connectivity and data sharing creates new cybersecurity risks, and what health systems need to do to stay ahead of emerging threats. What we discuss in this episode: The current cybersecurity landscape for hospitals and health systems What TEFCA is and why it matters for healthcare data sharing The core cybersecurity practices providers of all sizes should have in place Cautionary tales from the field that emphasize the importance of maintaining a strong cybersecurity program About Erik Pupo Erik Pupo has spent more than 25 years advising healthcare organizations on technology, cybersecurity and business transformation. As Director of Commercial Health IT Advisory at Guidehouse, he helps healthcare organizations modernize their IT infrastructure as a principal strategist in cloud, security, data and AI. Prior to joining Guidehouse, Erik served as Global Principal Practice Manager for Healthcare Cybersecurity at Amazon Web Services, helping health systems navigate the security challenges of moving critical infrastructure to the cloud. Before that, he served as Chief Information Officer at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, leading IT strategy and operations for one of the nation's most complex academic medical environments. Earlier in his career, Erik spent nearly a decade in global consulting, first as Senior Manager at Deloitte, where he led health IT initiatives for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. He later served as Managing Director at Accenture, where he led strategic and technological transformation initiatives for providers, payers, and life sciences companies across North America. About Sara Shanti A partner in the Corporate practice group in Sheppard's Chicago office, and co-lead of the firm's Digital Health team, Sara Shanti's practice sits at the forefront of healthcare technology by providing practical counsel on novel innovation and complex data privacy matters. Using her medical research background and HHS experience, Sara advises providers, payors, start-ups, technology companies, and their investors and stakeholders on digital healthcare and regulatory compliance matters, including artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), gamification, implantable and wearable devices, and telehealth. At the cutting edge of advising on "data as an asset" programming, Sara's practice also supports investment in innovation and access to care initiatives, including mergers and acquisitions involving crucial, high-stakes and sensitive data, medical and wellness devices, and web-based applications and care. Contact Information Erik Pupo Sara Shanti Thank you for listening! Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to the show to receive new episodes delivered straight to your podcast player every month. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us get the word out about this podcast. Rate and Review this show on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or Spotify. It helps other listeners find this show. This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as legal advice specific to your circumstances. If you need help with any legal matter, be sure to consult with an attorney regarding your specific needs.
The Small Business Administration is ramping up its relationship with Palantir, announcing a “new phase” in its anti-fraud work with the data analytics and software giant. In a press release Tuesday, the SBA said it's formalizing and expanding its work with Palantir after signing a $300,000 contract in January for a fraud prevention pilot and bootcamp. That deal had a projected end date of April 4, but the agency said in the release that the “collaboration” with Palantir will now continue through “ongoing efforts to identify, investigate, and help prosecute fraud in pandemic-era small business relief programs.” The agency pointed specifically to its Paycheck Protection Program and COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program as areas previously beset by fraud. SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler said in a statement that the Palantir partnership “will strengthen our ability to expose fraudulent actors, support criminal enforcement actions, and recover stolen funds with advanced technology and artificial intelligence.” “No amount of fraud is acceptable — whether it is $10,000 or $10 million — which is why the SBA is deploying these tools to accelerate our work to surface wrongdoing and ensure those who cheated taxpayer-funded programs face consequences,” she added. The National Institutes of Health selected Kristen Honey, a longtime government data and technology official, to head up its coordination of public-private research partnerships. In a social media post, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT announced Honey as the inaugural official in the NIH role. As part of her duties, Honey will help “to build robust partnership models, reduce duplication, improve transparency, and move promising ideas from concept to execution with greater speed and consistency in collaboration with” ONC and across the department, per the post. The chief partnerships officer role is housed in the Office of the Director's Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, per the post. “The ‘wicked problems' that I run toward—complex, interdisciplinary challenges no one wants to own and that require cross-sector solutions—just got bigger. Joining NIH as Chief Partnerships Officer,” Honey said in a LinkedIn post. Honey has served in various HHS and White House roles over the past decade — including as HHS's chief data officer. Honey was initially installed as CDO after President Joe Biden's administration reorganization of its IT, data and artificial intelligence portfolio. Her time as CDO, however, appears to have ended after the Trump administration undid that reorganization in March, per her LinkedIn. Since then, she has listed her role as senior executive service. Currently, Arman Sharma, HHS's deputy chief AI officer, is listed as the agency's top data official on the CDO Council webpage. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
The healing power of love, creativity, and faith Peter Breggin MD & Ginger Breggin Mon Jul 6 The Breggin Hour Cultural Wars, Faith, Family Life, Health It was one of those recording sessions that lingers in the heart long after the microphones are turned off. On a recent afternoon, Peter and I had the profound privilege of speaking with Dr. Francis Christian—a gifted surgeon, poet, professor, and thinker whose life embodies the integration of science, art, and deep faith. His latest book of poems, To a Nurse Friend Weeping, published by a small Canadian house, and his Substack (francischristian.substack.com) reflect a man who sees the full spectrum of human experience: suffering, joy, and the creative spark that connects us all to something greater. Dr. Christian joined us as we explored themes close to our own lives—especially in this season of recovery and reflection following Peter's stroke. The conversation flowed naturally from the personal to the cultural, touching on what it means to be fully human in a world that often fragments us. Reconnecting Medicine to the Human Story As a professor of surgery at the University of Saskatchewan, with expertise in trauma and oncology, and a former director of patient safety and quality improvement for the province, Dr. Christian could easily have focused solely on technical excellence. Instead, he founded the Surgical Humanities program and served as founding editor of the Journal of Surgical Humanities. He explained it beautifully: “Unless you're acquainted intimately and engaged with the human story, how can you actually treat the human being?” The humanities—literature, poetry, music, and visual arts—remind physicians, residents, and students of the narratives behind the patients they serve. He shared how he witnessed talented young people set aside their creativity under the pressures of training, only to become cynical. The program sought to reconnect them: through an annual musical evening with an orchestra of physicians, nurses, and students, and a journal that welcomed high-literary-quality pieces from medical voices or non-medical perspectives on medical themes. Creativity isn't a luxury; it is essential to wholeness. As Dr. Christian noted, we are created in the image of God, the Master Creator. To be fully alive is to create—to engage with joy, sorrow, suffering, and relief in ways that science alone cannot teach. For those of us who have faced illness or cared for the sick or wounded, a physician who is truly present—who hears you, respects your humanity—becomes part of the healing itself. Sexuality, Sublimation, and the Gifts of Commitment A recent essay on Dr. Christian's Substack moved me profoundly. In it, he explores the sublimation of sexual energy into creativity and the devastating cultural costs of the sexual revolution. He spoke with poetic respect about human desire—not as mere biology or casual encounter, but as a profound drive that, when channeled with reverence, fuels art, poetry, family, and civilization itself. He drew on John Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the lover's unfulfilled yearning becomes eternal beauty: “Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss… yet do not grieve… for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.” For centuries, Christian civilization elevated this longing toward the prize of marriage—a sacred house of fulfillment, commitment, and creative partnership in raising the next generation. The sexual revolution of the 1960s, he observed, lowered the “price” of sex, especially for men, through the pill, abortion, and cultural shifts influenced by feminist and Marxist ideas. What was promised as liberation has delivered falling birth rates, crashing below replacement levels, declining testosterone, less satisfying relationships, sky-high divorce rates, and energies diverted from family into ideologies. Birds, he noted wryly, often show more fidelity than this new mammalian norm. We spoke of the sadness for young people today—burdened by debt, indoctrinated to view children as encumbrances, and offered casual encounters via apps instead of the depth of lifelong trust. Yet there is hope. Some younger generations seem to be turning toward virtue, early commitment, and building families with community support. Peter and I shared from our own journey: the joy of treasuring one another, the self-sacrificial love that grows stronger through trials, and how God's grace sustains it. Peter reflected movingly on how, since his stroke, he has seen God's love through my care for him—and how it has drawn us both closer to the Divine. “Treasure other human beings,” he urged, especially the young. “Dare to love. You'll get hurt, but the more you love, the more you help others become loving.” Dr. Christian echoed this in referencing agape love—the selfless, giving love modeled on the cross. He reminded us of St. Paul and Jesus' mission: to heal the brokenhearted, set the bruised at liberty, and proclaim good news. His hope, like ours, is that people find new life at the foot of the cross and in the resurrection's promise of eternal meaning. A Call to Treasure What Matters This conversation left us refreshed and reminded of what civilization truly rests upon: deep respect, creative fullness, committed love, and faith. In a time when so many forces seek to cheapen human connection, we are called to nurture love like a garden, to greet “that of God” in one another (as the Quakers say), and to resist the fragmentation of modernity. Dr. Francis Christian's life and work stand as a witness: a surgeon who operates with skill and soul, a poet who finds beauty in the weeping and the joy. I encourage you to visit his Substack and explore his poetry. In a world hungry for authenticity, voices like his point us back to what is true, good, and life-giving. Peter and I continue to learn, day by day, about the miracles of recovery, partnership, and grace. We pray this hour of reflection blesses you as it blessed us—to love more boldly, create more freely, and trust in the God who made us for relationship. Thank you, Dr. Christian, for sharing your wisdom and your faith. Our audience—our wonderful community—is richer for it. ______ Learn more about Dr. Peter Breggin's work: https://breggin.com/ See more from Dr. Breggin's long history of being a reformer in psychiatry: https://breggin.com/Psychiatry-as-an-Instrument-of-Social-and-Political-Control Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, the how-to manual @ https://breggin.com/a-guide-for-prescribers-therapists-patients-and-their-families/ Get a copy of Dr. Breggin's latest book: WHO ARE THE “THEY” - THESE GLOBAL PREDATORS? WHAT ARE THEIR MOTIVES AND THEIR PLANS FOR US? HOW CAN WE DEFEND AGAINST THEM? Covid-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey Get a copy: https://www.wearetheprey.com/ “No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity, under cover of false public health policies.” ~ Robert F Kennedy, Jr President Trump's Director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the largest health agency in the world.
Kim Tzoumakas is the CEO of VytlOne, the nation's only independent, fully integrated total pharmacy solutions partner — the century-old company formerly known as Maxor, which she rebranded and merged with ProxsysRx in a fast-moving transformation after taking the helm in January 2025. VytlOne partners with mission-driven hospitals and health systems, combining pharmacy operations, 340B management, specialty pharmacy, pharmacy benefit management, and patient affordability solutions to help nonprofit providers unlock revenue and reinvest in their communities — work that generated $1.4 billion for its pharmacy partners in a single year. Its newest bet is VytlAIQ, an end-to-end intelligence platform built ground-up (not grafted onto a legacy system) that connects clinical, pharmacy, payer, and financial data into one real-time platform, surfacing next-best actions and checking every 340B claim for eligibility and documentation so problems get caught before they cost providers money. Kim came to pharmacy the long way around — two decades as a healthcare attorney embedded in hospitals and health systems, then CEO of RAYUS Radiology and 21st Century Oncology. Her core conviction is that 340B isn't a loophole to be abused or a relic on its way out; it's critical infrastructure that lets nonprofit health systems reinvest in patient care, and the real failure is that the tools serving it stayed reactive, fragmented, and manual. VytlOne's bet is that AI belongs in pharmacy not to replace clinical judgment or wipe out teams, but as an intelligent partner that tears down the administrative barriers — prior auth, denied claims, missing documentation — standing between a patient and their medication. The test of success: a patient who simply feels their care move faster and never once thinks about the software behind it.We discuss:Why the first thing Kim checks in any business isn't the P&L — it's the boards, the ownership model, and financial stability that determine whether a CEO can actually win — and what twenty years as a healthcare attorney inside hospitals taught her to seeThe real story on 340B: why the "it's going away" prediction has been wrong for thirty years, why the program is now evolving faster and getting more complex, and the one scenario where hospitals genuinely are in the wrong — double-dipping on rebatesHow you build a product when the rules might change next quarter — launching VytlAIQ right as the courts threw out the 340B rebate model, and why VytlOne built it from the ground up with pharmacists at the table instead of stitching together what already existedWhy most health-system dashboards get built and then ignored — and what makes a platform a pharmacist and a CFO will actually act on: one centralized, real-time source feeding the EHR that tracks every claim all the way through to payment receivedWhat you can't afford to break when you rebrand and merge a hundred-year-old company fast — protecting the culture and the people who gave decades to the organization while still turning the cornerThe uncomfortable truth for a CFO who's been burned by vendors — why pharmacy teams reflexively say "we already do that," where the skepticism about third parties really comes from, and how to turn a ten-million-dollar opportunity into a win-win instead of a threatWhere the line sits between what AI should decide versus only suggest in pharmacy — why it should never make a clinical or licensed decision — and the legal risks Kim sees as tech players rush into healthcare without understanding the guardrails, patient risks, or regulatory historyWhat Kim learned mentoring veterans through the Pat Tillman Foundation about fear of failure and hard choices — and the five-years-out test for VytlAIQ: a patient in specialty or chronic care who simply feels faster access to their medication and never connects it back to the software—Brought to you by: Sage Growth Partners — Value-focused strategy and marketing for growth-driven healthcare organizations. — Where to find Jared: • X: https://x.com/jaredstaylor • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredstaylor/
This edition of Foreshadowing Tech considers how so many AI speculations from Colossus: The Forbin Project have come true in both surprising and subtle ways. Regular panelists Chuck Joiner, Marty Jencius, Jeff Gamet, are joined by guest AI enthusiast Jill McKinley to look at how the film predicted things like machine autonomy, surveillance, privacy and self-improving systems. Wrapped in a thriller that is as much political as it is tech, there are questions about freedom and security that we have yet to address today. The panel mixes film trivia, tech analysis, and unsettling parallels to today's AI debates in a thoughtful discussion. Show Notes: Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Colossus: The Forbin Project and the Foreshadowing Tech premise 01:17 First impressions, panel introductions, and why the film still matters 03:55 Plot overview: Colossus, Guardian, and the loss of control 05:07 The original novels, sequels, and abandoned remake plans 07:59 Cast trivia, Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, and familiar TV faces 10:26 The film's technology, monitors, hardware, and production design 13:02 How 1970s computer imagery created mystery and menace 16:40 The real-world Colossus name and connections to codebreaking history 20:13 Forbin, ego, AI creators, and modern tech-bro parallels 24:50 Human arrogance, political power, and underestimating machines 26:53 Colossus and Guardian develop their own language 28:40 Predictive AI, medical promise, and solving problems beyond human speed 30:10 Self-improving systems and comparisons to current AI development 32:04 Would Colossus have taken control without Guardian? 35:40 Nuclear threats, punishment, and ruthless machine logic 39:28 Was Colossus protecting humanity or threatening it? 45:01 Public reactions, acceptance, fear, and the Colossus T-shirt moment 47:54 Surveillance, cameras, microphones, and today's self-built monitoring state 50:36 The human millennium: peace, control, and the illusion of freedom 54:36 AI, military efficiency, Flock cameras, and real-world surveillance debates 59:53 Creativity, totalitarianism, and stories of humans versus machines 1:00:54 Links to Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, 2001, WarGames, and Harlan Ellison 1:03:39 Forbin as a resistance figure and the “Wolverines” comparison 1:04:46 Who was most naive: the government, Forbin, Colossus, or the public? 1:07:13 Technology, unintended consequences, and AI that can advance itself 1:09:14 Guest wrap-up and where to find Jill, Jeff, and Marty 1:12:19 Closing credits and support information Links: Colossus: The Forbin Project (Wikipedia entry): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project Colossus: The Forbin Project [Blu-ray] https://amzn.to/4vKqGYk Colossus: The Forbin Project [Prime Video] https://amzn.to/3SD9LZ3 Guests: Jeff Gamet is a technology blogger, podcaster, author, and public speaker. Previously, he was The Mac Observer's Managing Editor, and the TextExpander Evangelist for Smile. He has presented at Macworld Expo, RSA Conference, several WordCamp events, along with many other conferences. You can find him on several podcasts such as The Mac Show, The Big Show, MacVoices, Mac OS Ken, This Week in iOS, and more. Jeff is easy to find on social media as @jgamet on X and Instagram, jeffgamet on LinkedIn., @jgamet@mastodon.social on Mastodon, and on his YouTube Channel at YouTube.com/jgamet. Marty Jencius, Ph.D.,is a counselor educator and technology pioneer who has spent 30 years bringing emerging tech into his field — from founding one of the first professional listservs (CESNET-L) to podcasting, virtual reality, and now AI and AR. He is the founder of ThePodTalk.net, where he produces Vision ProFiles, The Old Mac Gang, A.I. Productivity Workflow, The Tech Savvy Professor, 15 Minute Bytes, The Neo Notebook, and Fade to Chat: Golden Age Cinema. He is also a regular panelist on MacVoices Live!, In Touch with iOS, and The Mac Show. Find him on Bluesky and Mastodon. Jill McKinley is a Health IT professional, lifelong learner, and Northwoods dweller who believes wisdom hides in plain sight — in Scripture, in nature, in the habits we build and the questions we dare to ask. She publishes a variety of podcasts on those topics as well as productivity, AI, and tech at JillFromTheNorthWoods.com. Support: Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon http://patreon.com/macvoices Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect: Web: http://macvoices.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner http://www.twitter.com/macvoices Mastodon: https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner MacVoices Page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/ MacVoices Group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe: Audio in iTunes Video in iTunes Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher: Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss
This edition of Foreshadowing Tech considers how so many AI speculations from Colossus: The Forbin Project have come true in both surprising and subtle ways. Regular panelists Chuck Joiner, Marty Jencius, Jeff Gamet, are joined by guest AI enthusiast Jill McKinley to look at how the film predicted things like machine autonomy, surveillance, privacy and self-improving systems. Wrapped in a thriller that is as much political as it is tech, there are questions about freedom and security that we have yet to address today. The panel mixes film trivia, tech analysis, and unsettling parallels to today's AI debates in a thoughtful discussion. Show Notes: Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Colossus: The Forbin Project and the Foreshadowing Tech premise 01:17 First impressions, panel introductions, and why the film still matters 03:55 Plot overview: Colossus, Guardian, and the loss of control 05:07 The original novels, sequels, and abandoned remake plans 07:59 Cast trivia, Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, and familiar TV faces 10:26 The film's technology, monitors, hardware, and production design 13:02 How 1970s computer imagery created mystery and menace 16:40 The real-world Colossus name and connections to codebreaking history 20:13 Forbin, ego, AI creators, and modern tech-bro parallels 24:50 Human arrogance, political power, and underestimating machines 26:53 Colossus and Guardian develop their own language 28:40 Predictive AI, medical promise, and solving problems beyond human speed 30:10 Self-improving systems and comparisons to current AI development 32:04 Would Colossus have taken control without Guardian? 35:40 Nuclear threats, punishment, and ruthless machine logic 39:28 Was Colossus protecting humanity or threatening it? 45:01 Public reactions, acceptance, fear, and the Colossus T-shirt moment 47:54 Surveillance, cameras, microphones, and today's self-built monitoring state 50:36 The human millennium: peace, control, and the illusion of freedom 54:36 AI, military efficiency, Flock cameras, and real-world surveillance debates 59:53 Creativity, totalitarianism, and stories of humans versus machines 1:00:54 Links to Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, 2001, WarGames, and Harlan Ellison 1:03:39 Forbin as a resistance figure and the "Wolverines" comparison 1:04:46 Who was most naive: the government, Forbin, Colossus, or the public? 1:07:13 Technology, unintended consequences, and AI that can advance itself 1:09:14 Guest wrap-up and where to find Jill, Jeff, and Marty 1:12:19 Closing credits and support information Links: Colossus: The Forbin Project (Wikipedia entry): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project Colossus: The Forbin Project [Blu-ray] https://amzn.to/4vKqGYk Colossus: The Forbin Project [Prime Video] https://amzn.to/3SD9LZ3 Guests: Jeff Gamet is a technology blogger, podcaster, author, and public speaker. Previously, he was The Mac Observer's Managing Editor, and the TextExpander Evangelist for Smile. He has presented at Macworld Expo, RSA Conference, several WordCamp events, along with many other conferences. You can find him on several podcasts such as The Mac Show, The Big Show, MacVoices, Mac OS Ken, This Week in iOS, and more. Jeff is easy to find on social media as @jgamet on X and Instagram, jeffgamet on LinkedIn., @jgamet@mastodon.social on Mastodon, and on his YouTube Channel at YouTube.com/jgamet. Marty Jencius, Ph.D.,is a counselor educator and technology pioneer who has spent 30 years bringing emerging tech into his field — from founding one of the first professional listservs (CESNET-L) to podcasting, virtual reality, and now AI and AR. He is the founder of ThePodTalk.net, where he produces Vision ProFiles, The Old Mac Gang, A.I. Productivity Workflow, The Tech Savvy Professor, 15 Minute Bytes, The Neo Notebook, and Fade to Chat: Golden Age Cinema. He is also a regular panelist on MacVoices Live!, In Touch with iOS, and The Mac Show. Find him on Bluesky and Mastodon. Jill McKinley is a Health IT professional, lifelong learner, and Northwoods dweller who believes wisdom hides in plain sight — in Scripture, in nature, in the habits we build and the questions we dare to ask. She publishes a variety of podcasts on those topics as well as productivity, AI, and tech at JillFromTheNorthWoods.com. Support: Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon http://patreon.com/macvoices Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect: Web: http://macvoices.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner http://www.twitter.com/macvoices Mastodon: https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner MacVoices Page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/ MacVoices Group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe: Audio in iTunes Video in iTunes Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher: Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss
Behavioral health rarely gets the funding or attention it deserves. Relying on makeshift tracking for controlled substances is a massive liability.David Wilson, Vice President of Business Development at AdvancedMD, sat down with Healthcare IT Today to share the origin story of their new eMAR solution. He breaks down why mental health practices are shifting care in-house to combat shrinking reimbursements. You will learn how this targeted software rollout solves point-of-care medication administration and keeps organizations completely compliant.
On this episode of The Dish on Health IT, Tony Schueth, CEO of Point-of-Care Partners (POCP), welcomes Pooja Babbrah, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Industry Alignment at NCPDP, and Anna Taylor, Associate Vice President of Population Health and Value-Based Care at MultiCare Health System and Steering Committee member of the HL7 Da Vinci Project, for a discussion on the relationship between standards development and policymaking. Using the CMS “Interoperability Standards and Prior Authorization for Drugs” Proposed Rule (CMS-0062-P) as a backdrop, the conversation explores how standards communities, implementation accelerators, pilot programs, and industry collaboration influence healthcare interoperability long before requirements appear in federal regulations. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen
Rigid phone trees frustrate your patients. They also waste your staff's time.MyCare Medical decided to fix their digital front door. They implemented healow Genie AI to handle calls. Gary Moorefield, VP of Technology at MyCare Medical, explains how they did it. He breaks down why handling messy, non-linear patient conversations is critical. He also shares how automation gives valuable time back to front desk teams without cutting jobs. Are your patients still stuck on hold listening to bad elevator music? Or are you still forcing them into “press 1” or “say yes” decision trees? If you are, this video is for you!
Mark Clermont is the CEO of Cecelia Health, and Wendi Mader is the company's Chief Commercial Officer. Cecelia is a virtual multi-specialty medical practice, licensed in all 50 states, that helps employers, payers, health systems, and life sciences companies manage chronic and cardiometabolic disease and bring down the cost of care. It's not a point solution. It's a medical practice that prescribes and manages medication (including GLP-1s, from prescribing through titration and side-effect management), runs intensive nutrition therapy, and handles behavior and lifestyle care, all through a team of RNs, RDs, certified diabetes educators, and physicians. The model is built to extend primary care, not replace it, and to coordinate across specialists instead of adding one more disconnected program.Mark and Wendi's argument is simple: chronic disease isn't winning because we lack apps or tools. It's winning because care is fragmented and nobody's tying it together. GLP-1s are making that worse before they make it better. They're the first drug class with indications spanning diabetes, obesity, sleep apnea, fatty liver, and soon addiction, which means a single patient can suddenly need four specialists who don't talk to each other. Cecelia's bet is that a multi-specialty practice can be the layer that connects all of it.We get into:Why chronic disease keeps winning even though there are more apps, tools, and wellness programs than ever, and what point solutions got wrongWhat actually happens to a patient with diabetes and high blood pressure inside Cecelia's model versus the system todayWhy GLP-1s are the first drug class to cross medical specialties, and why that's making fragmentation worse right nowThe patient on a high-dose GLP-1 and an SSRI who almost ended up in the ER, and what the direct-to-consumer prescriber missedHow the US can rank dead last among developed nations and still be the system Mark wouldn't trade for anywhere elseWhere the industry is over-indexing on AI in chronic care, and where Wendi thinks tech actually belongsThe specialty shortage, healthcare deserts, and rural-health funding, and how virtual coordinated care reaches patients brick-and-mortar can'tWhat's different for patients five years from now if Cecelia gets this right—Brought to you by: Sage Growth Partners — Value-focused strategy and marketing for growth-driven healthcare organizations. — Where to find Jared: • X: https://x.com/jaredstaylor • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredstaylor/
Asking doctors to remember twenty patient encounters at the end of a packed day guarantees burnout and bad documentation. The same goes for forcing front desk staff to have awkward money conversations in a crowded waiting room.Healthcare IT Today sat down with Kate Steele, Director of IT Applications at Axia Women's Health. We discussed how her team used platforms like eClinicalWorks to tackle these exact problems. You will learn how ambient AI scribes restore the patient connection and why moving payments to digital check-in removes friction for everyone.
Ric Sinclair is the CEO of Cotiviti, an enterprise healthcare software and data company that serves hundreds of health plans — including the top 25 in the country — across payment integrity, interoperability, risk adjustment, value-based care, and member engagement, touching coverage for over 300 million patients and members. Cotiviti pairs algorithms and AI with thousands of clinical nurses, MDs, and content experts in a human-in-the-loop model, working across the full administrative ecosystem that moves between payers, providers, patients, and pharma. Ric's core conviction is that healthcare's central problem isn't a data problem or a technology problem — it's a coordination problem, and what the system has never had is a true infrastructure layer to tie it together. Cotiviti isn't trying to pick a side between payers and providers; the bet is that a neutral party sitting in the middle can drive fair, transparent outcomes and pull down the trillion-plus dollars of administrative waste in U.S. healthcare.We discuss:Why healthcare's core problem isn't a data problem or a technology problem — it's a coordination problem, and what it actually takes to build the first infrastructure layer the system has ever hadThe real difference between owning a decade of data assets (and the Edifecs integration) and becoming the infrastructure the industry runs on — and where Cotiviti is in that build todayHow "human in the loop" works at scale — pairing AI with thousands of nurses, MDs, and content experts so every claim is reviewed fairly and problems get predicted before they happenWhy Ric's answer to AI isn't "cut the 10-person team to 2" — it's "take all 10 and do what 50 could," and what that augment-don't-replace math means for client ROIHow you build trust and accountability into an AI workflow rather than bolting it on — and who's accountable when models start shaping decisions about claims and careHow to sit in the neutral middle between payers and providers who don't trust each other — and what it takes to build something both sides actually believe is fairWhat Ric learned as a working drummer in Nashville before healthcare found him — leading without the spotlight, making others better, and why simplicity is a discipline that transfers straight into businessWhat a truly differentiated healthcare platform looks like five years out — and the test Ric uses for what "winning" means: a family of five at the dinner table who never have to think about the administrative machinery behind their care—Brought to you by: Sage Growth Partners — Value-focused strategy and marketing for growth-driven healthcare organizations. — Where to find Jared: • X: https://x.com/jaredstaylor • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredstaylor/
In this episode of The Dish on Health IT, Tony Schueth, CEO of Point-of-Care Partners (POCP), welcomes Pooja Babbrah, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Industry Alignment at NCPDP, and Anna Taylor, Associate Vice President of Population Health and Value-Based Care at MultiCare Health System and Steering Committee member of the HL7 Da Vinci Project, for a discussion on the relationship between standards development and policymaking. Using the CMS “Interoperability Standards and Prior Authorization for Drugs” Proposed Rule (CMS-0062-P) as a backdrop, the conversation explores how standards communities, implementation accelerators, pilot programs, and industry collaboration influence healthcare interoperability long before requirements appear in federal regulations. Tony opens the discussion by asking how organizations should think about the relationship between standards development and policymaking today. Pooja and Anna explain that organizations such as the HL7 Da Vinci Project and NCPDP Standards are often viewed as technical standards bodies, when in reality they serve as collaborative forums where providers, payers, vendors, pharmacists, regulators, and other stakeholders work through real-world operational challenges. The conversation then shifts to the value of participating early. Tony asks what organizations miss when they wait for final rules before becoming involved. Anna discusses the operational, strategic, and financial advantages organizations can gain by participating in standards development activities, implementation guide development, pilots, testing events, and implementation communities. As part of that discussion, Tony and Anna touch on the growing body of production implementations supported by Da Vinci. Organizations interested in understanding how these implementation guides are being deployed across the industry can explore the Da Vinci In-Action Implementation Tracker, which documents real-world adoption efforts and implementation progress. Pooja expands on the importance of creating opportunities for broader industry participation. She describes NCPDP Collab, an interactive forum open to both members and non-members that provides a venue for discussing workflow challenges, implementation barriers, and emerging industry needs before formal standards development begins. The discussion naturally progresses into the CMS “Interoperability Standards and Prior Authorization for Drugs” Proposed Rule (CMS-0062-P), which directly references standards and implementation approaches developed by both NCPDP and Da Vinci. As Tony guides the conversation toward implementation, Anna discusses how Da Vinci's collaborative testing model and initiatives such as Trebuchet help organizations evaluate interoperability workflows in real-world settings before widespread adoption. The discussion then turns to one of the central themes of CMS-0062-P: the convergence of pharmacy and medical benefit workflows. Pooja explains that while patients and providers simply want access to treatment, healthcare organizations continue to operate within separate medical and pharmacy benefit structures. She argues that future interoperability efforts must focus less on the underlying standards and more on creating workflows that deliver a seamless experience for providers and patients regardless of where coverage resides. Building on that theme, Tony asks how healthcare organizations should think differently about workflow design. Drawing on her background in human factors engineering, Anna argues that healthcare has historically allowed technology to dictate workflows rather than designing technology around how people actually work. She advocates for starting with desired outcomes and user experience, then working backward to determine how standards, automation, and technology can support those goals. The conversation then moves to trust, adoption, and data quality. Tony observes that interoperability is no longer simply about moving data but about delivering the right information at the right time and within the right workflow. Anna discusses the importance of consistency and reliability in building trust, while Pooja shares examples of how incomplete implementations can undermine provider confidence even when standards and technology are technically available. Together, they argue that adoption depends as much on usability and trust as it does on technical capability. Returning to CMS-0062-P, Tony asks where organizations should focus their feedback beyond timelines and compliance concerns. Both guests encourage stakeholders to look closely at the broader strategic questions embedded throughout the proposed rule, particularly the requests for information that may signal future policy priorities. Rather than focusing solely on implementation challenges, they encourage organizations to use the comment process as an opportunity to help shape how healthcare workflows should function in the future. The episode concludes with Tony's signature question: what should healthcare stakeholders think differently about or start doing differently tomorrow? Pooja highlights the expanding role pharmacists can play in care coordination, medication management, and prior authorization workflows, arguing that pharmacists remain an underutilized resource within the healthcare ecosystem. Anna closes with a call for broader participation across healthcare, encouraging providers, employers, patients, vendors, and other stakeholders to engage with standards communities and implementation efforts. She emphasizes that meaningful progress happens when stakeholders move beyond identifying problems and actively participate in building solutions. Throughout the discussion, Tony reinforces a central theme: the future of healthcare interoperability is not being shaped solely through regulation. It is shaped through the collaboration, testing, implementation, and problem-solving taking place every day within standards organizations, implementation accelerators, pilot programs, and stakeholder communities. Organizations that want to influence the future of healthcare should not wait for final rules to arrive. They should participate in the conversations that help create them.
For the 194th episode of the Healthcare IT Today Podcast, we are back with another episode of everyone’s favorite game – buy or sell! In case you’ve forgotten or this is your first buy or sell episode, we set out a list of hot topics and trends in healthcare to discuss whether we believe the topic or trend is true/is going to happen (aka, we ‘buy’ it), or if we think it is not true/will not happen (aka, we ‘sell’ it). For this episode, we are doing a special conference edition, focusing on the trends we’ve heard from all of the different conferences we’ve both attended recently! Here's a preview of the topics and trends we discuss in this episode: Health IT budgets are shrinking. Vendor consolidation is still a high priority for CIOs. Value-based care is the key to rural health’s success and survival. Healthcare AI will not replace people. Now, without further ado, we’re excited to share with you the next episode of the Healthcare IT Today podcast. We publish a new Healthcare IT Today podcast every ~2 weeks. Thanks to our friends at Healthcare Now Radio, you’ll be able to listen to the latest episodes of Healthcare IT Today on their radio station for the first two weeks. Then, we’ll be publishing each episode as a podcast and YouTube video here after it finishes on the radio. You can also subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today podcast on any of the following platforms: Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Stitcher Podcast Radio TuneIn Spotify iHeartRadio Pandora Thanks for listening to Healthcare IT Today and if you enjoy the content we’re sharing, please rate the podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. Along with the popular podcasting platforms above, you can Subscribe to Healthcare IT Today on YouTube. Plus, all of the audio and video versions will be made available to stream on HealthcareITToday.com. If you work in Healthcare IT, we’d love to hear where you agree and/or disagree with the perspectives we shared. Feel free to share your thoughts and perspectives in the comments of this post, in the YouTube comments, with @Colin_Hung or @techguy on Twitter, or privately on our Contact Us page. Let us know what you think of the podcast and if you have any ideas for future episodes. Thanks so much for listening! Listen to Our Latest Episodes:
For the 193rd episode of the Healthcare IT Today Podcast, we are talking about trends in healthcare marketing and patient experience! We kick this episode off by discussing how we think the healthcare website is changing this year. Then, we debate where we think AI is affecting how patients seek and receive care. Next, we share the marketing message that surprised us at the Swaay.Health LIVE conference. Lastly, we conclude this episode by talking about our key takeaways from Swaay.Health LIVE that we think health IT leaders need to know. Here's a preview of the topics and questions we discuss in this episode: How is the healthcare website changing in 2026? Where is AI changing how patients seek and get care? What marketing message surprised you at the Swaay.Health LIVE conference? What are the key takeaways from Swaay.Health LIVE that Health IT leaders need to know? Now, without further ado, we’re excited to share with you the next episode of the Healthcare IT Today podcast. We publish a new Healthcare IT Today podcast every ~2 weeks. Thanks to our friends at Healthcare Now Radio, you’ll be able to listen to the latest episodes of Healthcare IT Today on their radio station for the first two weeks. Then, we’ll be publishing each episode as a podcast and YouTube video here after it finishes on the radio. You can also subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today podcast on any of the following platforms: Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Stitcher Podcast Radio TuneIn Spotify iHeartRadio Pandora Thanks for listening to Healthcare IT Today and if you enjoy the content we’re sharing, please rate the podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. Along with the popular podcasting platforms above, you can Subscribe to Healthcare IT Today on YouTube. Plus, all of the audio and video versions will be made available to stream on HealthcareITToday.com. If you work in Healthcare IT, we’d love to hear where you agree and/or disagree with the perspectives we shared. Feel free to share your thoughts and perspectives in the comments of this post, in the YouTube comments, with @Colin_Hung or @techguy on Twitter, or privately on our Contact Us page. Let us know what you think of the podcast and if you have any ideas for future episodes. Thanks so much for listening! Listen to Our Latest Episodes:
Tim Elliott is the CEO of Navvis, a value-based enablement company that works with health systems, health plans, physician groups, and employers to drive performance under value-based agreements. Navvis takes a cross-continuum view of care — supporting patients before, during, and after the physician visit — and operates across the full spectrum of payment models, from full-risk MA and MSSP ACOs to bundled payments, TEAMS, and CJR. Tim's core conviction is that physicians are the linchpin of any sustainable change in value-based care, and that the "last mile" of transformation is change management — not technology. Navvis doesn't show up with a blank piece of paper or a mandatory platform; they bring a point of view on what world-class looks like and engage physicians in the refinement and rollout.We discuss:What AI consistently misses in value-based care — and why "human in the loop" needs to be on steroids in healthcare, not just a check on the modelHow to recognize when a health system is rolling tools out faster than clinicians can absorb them — and why bottom-up physician demand is reshaping the AI rollout playbookThe real difference between a care model physicians co-designed and one that was handed to them — and how Navvis approaches refinement vs. a blank-paper exerciseWhat surprises health systems most when they move into real downside risk for the first time — the misalignment between contract incentives and operational behaviorWhy "two standards of care" is the wrong frame for value-based vs. fee-for-service patients — and what the EMR needs to recognize at the point of encounterThe alignment problem at the executive and physician level that quietly kills downside-risk contracts before the year is outThe lesson Tim hopes the industry finally learns 20 years from now — why the 3-5% of patients driving 60-80% of cost are the unfinished work of this eraWho Navvis is built for, and why their model is to optimize existing technology rather than force a 12-to-18-month rip-and-replace— Brought to you by: Sage Growth Partners — Value-focused strategy and marketing for growth-driven healthcare organizations. — Where to find Jared: • X: https://x.com/jaredstaylor • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredstaylor/
Navin Gupta is the CEO of Viventium, a verticalized HCM platform purpose-built for the post-acute care market — serving home health, skilled nursing, and hospice providers. He's spent over a decade at the intersection of senior care and technology, with deep experience across EHR, revenue cycle management, and engagement platforms for senior living. Adam Lewis is the founder of Apploi and now GM of Talent and Workforce Management at Viventium following the February acquisition. He's been building HR tech since 2007 and grew Apploi into a leading recruiting, credentialing, onboarding, and scheduling platform for healthcare. Together, the combined company now serves 13,000+ provider organizations and is on a mission to fix workforce instability in the most demographically urgent corner of healthcare.We discuss:Why post-acute care is the most mission-critical — and most underserved — tech opportunity in healthcareThe four-part workforce crisis every operator is fighting: supply, utilization, retention, and complianceWhat the Apploi + Viventium acquisition unlocks that a five-year partnership couldn'tWhy hiring friction is a direct hit to revenue — and why staffing now sits with CEOs and COOs, not just HRThe case for purpose-built vertical platforms over retrofitted horizontal HCMThe Perks4Care acquisition, and why you cannot hire your way out of a retention problemWhere AI creates real leverage in caregiver hiring — and how to deploy it without losing the human touchThree audit questions every post-acute provider should ask their current vendor today—Brought to you by:Sage Growth Partners — Value-focused strategy and marketing for growth-driven healthcare organizations.—Where to find Jared:• X: https://x.com/jaredstaylor• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredstaylor/
On this episode of The Dish on Health IT, Tony Schueth is joined by Dr. Thomas Keane, National Coordinator for Health IT at ONC, along with Alix Goss and Janice Reese. The conversation moves between policy, standards, and real-world implementation, with Tony often grounding the discussion in the practical friction points the industry continues to face. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen
Healthcare doesn't suffer from a lack of data; it suffers from a lack of connection between it.In this episode of Straight Out of Health IT, Philip Wickline, cofounder and CTO at Zus Health, talks about how fragmented patient data continues to limit care quality, increase costs, and create unnecessary risk across the healthcare system. He explains how deeply complex, specialized, and distributed healthcare data has become, making integration far more difficult than in other industries. Drawing from personal experience with his father's long health journey, he highlights the real human consequences when providers lack a complete picture of the patient. He also emphasizes that solving fragmentation is not just technical, it's foundational to improving outcomes.Wickline introduces the concept of a patient-centric “common patient record” that aggregates data across systems into a real-time, longitudinal view of each individual. He contrasts this with the traditional provider-centric model, where each organization operates in isolation with incomplete information. By connecting dozens of data networks and enabling shared access based on treatment relationships, this model creates the conditions for more proactive, coordinated care. Ultimately, it shifts healthcare from episodic encounters to continuous, data-informed decision-making.He also explores the role of AI and policy in accelerating this transformation, while acknowledging their limitations. AI can help normalize and extract insights from complex data, but only after that data is accessible and aggregated in the first place. Emerging frameworks like TEFCA signal progress toward broader interoperability and patient access, though adoption remains uneven and early. Wickline underscores that real change will require not just better technology, but alignment across systems, incentives, and culture.Tune in to hear how unlocking connected, patient-centered data could redefine how care is delivered, and why the future of healthcare depends on getting this right!ResourcesConnect with Philip Wickline on LinkedIn here.Follow Zus Health on LinkedIn here and visit their website here.
In this episode, host Sandy Vance welcomes back Kathryn Ayers Wickenhauser, Chief Strategy Officer at DirectTrust, for her third time on the show. This time the conversation goes deeper than ever, covering three major developments: DirectTrust's role in vetting apps for the new CMS Medicare App Library, the launch of a groundbreaking AI accreditation program built on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and the urgent but widely misunderstood gap in HIPAA coverage that leaves millions of consumers thinking their health data is protected when it really isn't. If you work anywhere in the health tech ecosystem, this episode is essential listening. In this episode, they talk about: HIPAA only covers covered entities and business associates, meaning most consumer health apps have little obligation to protect your data The CMS Medicare App Library is a vetted directory of trusted digital health apps, and DirectTrust is helping validate which apps earn a spot in it When CMS moves, the rest of the industry follows, making this app library a trust signal far beyond Medicare beneficiaries DirectTrust's AI accreditation program is built on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and assessed by independent third-party reviewers The program will offer two tiers: a foundational version for organizations early in their AI journey and a comprehensive version for those with greater maturity The four pillars of the AI accreditation program are governance, management, mapping, and measurement AI is unlike any other technology implementation because it touches every aspect of an organization simultaneously DirectTrust's annual conference is October 20th and 21st in Kansas City at the Oracle Innovations Campus A Little About Kathryn: Kathryn Ayers Wickenhauser, MBA, FACHDM, CHPC, is Chief Strategy Officer at DirectTrust®, the national non-profit alliance and accreditor building trust in healthcare technology and secure information exchange. With nearly two decades of advancing interoperability, identity, privacy, and technical trust, she leads community engagement, communications, and strategic partnerships, shaping national standards and policy. Kathryn is a recognized thought leader featured in outlets like Healthcare IT Today and Health IT Answers, and under her leadership, DirectTrust has earned multiple HITMC awards, including Marketing Team of the Year in 2025. She has been named among the Top 50 Women Chief Strategy Officers and Becker's 100 Women in Health IT to Know.
Electronic Medical Records have transformed the way we practice health care, making patient data readily accessible to health care providers, facilitating collaboration within and across large medical teams, increasing transparency, and drastically improving the legibility of patient charts and prescriptions. But despite these benefits, many physicians cite the electronic medical record as a primary driver of burnout, pointing to the overwhelming volume of documentation it requires. In this episode, we explore how the launch of EMRs within the context of America's predominantly fee-for-service health care system led to the technology falling short of its promise — and how transitioning to value-based care models might redeem the technology, revitalize physicians, and recenter public health. Our guest on this episode is Farzad Mostashari, MD. After completing a degree in public health at Harvard, medical school at Yale, and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Mostashari spent over a decade working in public health: first for the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service and then for the New York City Department of Health. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the National Coordinator for Health IT at the Department of Health and Human Services where he helped oversee the nationwide transition from paper to electronic medical records. In 2014, he founded Aledade, a company that helps primary care physicians form value-based care networks in the US. Over the course of our conversation, Dr. Mostashari shares how his childhood in Iran pushed him towards public health, how his experience watching his father being cared for in the hospital drove him towards medicine, and how he has spent his career in the liminal space between public health and medicine. We discuss the rollout of EMRs, and how fee-for-service payment models led to EMRs being optimized for documentation rather than patient care. We explore how value-based care not only solves the problem of over-documentation, but also better aligns the goals of patients, physicians, and even insurance companies. Dr. Mostashari maps out the progress we have made toward this kind of model and the hurdles we have to clear before we have a system that incentivizes preventing stroke as much as treating stroke. In this episode, you'll hear about: 3:35 - How Dr. Mostashari became drawn to the intersection between the intimate work of doctoring and the wide lens work of public health. 12:12 - Dr. Mostashari's experiences modernizing health IT systems and learning to optimize for the number of lives saved rather than the number of technological solutions implemented.16:05 - Dr. Mostashari's assessment of the rollout of the electronic medical record in the US.25:09 - How Aledade frees primary care physicians to prioritize patient outcomes and reduces the burden of EMR documentation.38:57 - What the US can learn from international health care systems. 41:00 - Challenges in transitioning to outcome-based models of primary care.50:30 - How Dr. Mostashari's medical training has shaped his career in public health. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show, available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments or send an email to info@thedoctorsart.com.Copyright The Doctor's Art Podcast 2026
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