Top insights from JPM Conference 2026

Unsurprisingly, AI dominated the headlines at this year’s JPMorgan Healthcare Conference, but there were some other exciting developments that shouldn’t be overlooked.

CareTalk hosts, David Williams, President of Health Business Group, and John Driscoll, Chairman of UConn Health, share their on-the-ground insights from JPM, including where AI is delivering substance over hype, why government partnership will play a larger role in health sector reform, and what’s driving a renewed sense of optimism across healthcare.

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CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (Chairman, UConn Health) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

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Transcript

David: 0:00

AI has been the biggest theme at this week's JP Morgan Healthcare Conference here in San Francisco. But we've also hearing, been hearing a lot about China Federal collaboration and doing more with less. Welcome to Care Talk, America's home for incisive debate about healthcare, business, and policy. I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group. And I'm John Driscoll, the chairman of Yukon Health. Well, this is a very special episode coming from JPM. We've been immersed this week in presentations and meetings that will set the agenda for this year. And John, you and I are right. Right next to each other too, which is too many

John: 0:37

presentations and meetings. David, we just thought it was important for our community to hear the hot takes from JP Morgan. Well, we have a more reflective episode, hopefully in a week or so. But David, what are the headlines for you from JP Morgan?

David: 0:51

You know, I thought it was gonna be all about AI, and there is a lot about ai, but someone came up to me and said, well, all I've been being asked about is about China and about federal policy. So maybe it's the

John: 1:00

wrong

David: 1:00

person. Maybe it's at the wrong conference. We are in San Francisco. He was, uh, there were some other oddities here, but no, I, I'm seeing, I, I still see AI as the main thing that's being talked about, but there's a bunch of other stuff, uh, too in a generally, generally positive mood overall, I,

John: 1:15

you know, JP Morgan is the annual conference that, uh, the big, the mega bank JP Morgan holds in San Francisco, which brings together. Uh, the industry from all levels, from early stage startups to Chinese, uh, uh, companies, to non-profit hospitals. It really brings together the industry in many ways, the for-profits and the not-for-profit stocks, hospitals, AI companies. I think to your point about. AI being a theme here. Yes. We're in San Francisco where AI seems to be in the water, uh, but at a healthcare conference you had Nvidia, the chip manufacturer in this particular hotel, Microsoft, the next day in this hotel, open AI had a big presentation and chat with about the, one of the leaders of, uh, Nate Gross from chat g uh, to talked about how healthcare and chat GPT and open ai. Philanthropic had a big announcement that that, uh, a, you know, seemed, seemed to affect, you know, the stock that I'm most familiar with. Waystar, where I'm chairman. So AI is definitely part of this, but because, you know, this is really a, a conference that touches five to $5 trillion market we play in, I don't think it stops there. At least for me, the big takeaway was. The federal government leaning in, in a big way to say we want to partner with the private and the nonprofit sector to reform healthcare. There was a really interesting presentation on Monday night, uh, coordinated by John Doer and, uh, former CMS administrator, Andy Slatt with uh, CMS Administrator, the famed me. Who brought his entire team, the head of Medicare, Chris Clump, the head of Medicaid, Dan Biman, uh, a lot of folks who come from the private sector and their teams to literally talk to some of the larger nonprofits. The, the faster growing for-profits, uh, about how they can partner to make the government a better partner.'cause government still pays 52 cents out of every healthcare dollar. So for me. That was the, the, the, the headline news and whether it's the replatforming of the entire Medicare database, which could make data more interoperable and accessible, uh, for Medicare or Medicaid. The Dan Broman talking about how they're gonna remove the bureaucratic layers that made it hard for people to stay on Medicaid or Meau talking about how it's just so much more important to do more and less with less. But he's gonna partner, CMS wants to partner with docs to make it easier to get there. I thought that to me broke through in a novel way. What else was a novel hot take for you during this conference?

David: 3:43

You know, one of the things I like is a chance to catch up with some former colleagues I used to work at, at Boston Consulting Group way back when, and I went to an event they had actually, uh, they asked me to do a bit of a video on my view, really on ai. They still like you. They, well, it's, everything's relative. They had to fill up a certain amount of content, but we'll link to that one in the, uh, in the clips and let in the, in the comments like, make people make their own assessments. They did a really good panel. Um, with the head of healthcare for AWS, uh, they had somebody from a hospital. And the one that I thought was the most impressive though was from Hippocratic ai, the CEO there, Munjal, uh, Shaw. He was everywhere. Well, that's probably gonna be one of his challenges. That could be, uh, there were a couple things that he said in particular that I thought were good. So one, uh, is they were asked about, panelists were asked about, uh, is AI gonna take jobs? Mm-hmm. And I said, look, you know, in, in healthcare and education are two places where we can deal with that abundance. And in fact, the right ratio of like getting rid of jobs, the right ratio of, you know, a physician to patient is one-to-one, and teacher to student is one-to-one. And that we really shouldn't be worried about job loss because it's gonna provide opportunities to do all sorts of new things that we wouldn't, well, particularly for

John: 4:52

Munjal, not for the people who are losing their jobs. I mean, but to be fair. We're about a couple of hundred thousand clinicians short in a couple of years, but Munjal and Hippocratic was, was showing up everywhere. But I don't you think, Dave, that some people do run the risk of losing their jobs with this AI wave coming.

David: 5:10

Uh, there may be. I mean, his, his point was that, that that's always been the case. We've been concerned about job loss, but the focus was more about, uh, you know, what are the new things you could do? So on the pharma side, it was something as mundane as, well, only 20% of drugs are actually promoted. You can't afford sales reps for, for them. Oh lord,

John: 5:26

what we need is more drug promotion, more of those fun dancing people on tv. Well, and then talking about horrible conditions.

David: 5:32

Exactly. And then for, uh, recruitment, for clinical trials, he mentioned that. You know, the AI could learn all of the inclusion and exclusion criteria for trials. So when it's speaking with somebody, it can actually learn about whether they might be qualified by asking things that aren't in the EMR. Like do you get a rash from wearing your continuous glucose monitor? So the EMR being the

John: 5:50

electronic medical record, which is really effectively the, the, when the doctor's not looking at you and their type or the nurse or the. With PA tech, they're typing things in. That's the electronic medical record that really effectively gets in the way of all workflow. If you could build some intelligence in there, that'd be interesting. The, the interesting thing on job loss and, and job creation is what I heard over the week in a number of different healthcare presentations is the biggest job loss is actually in the IT area. Yeah. There's a 40% improvement in coding and coding production. Um, and what the, the, the folks who are trying to engineer healthcare it, leveraging AI are trying to make. The employees, they have more effective and more efficient. So actually I think it, it might, it might allow us to get more leverage from clinicians, but it felt like the AI conversation is much the, is the promise of AI outside of healthcare, of outside of, uh, technical coding. Software building is a little bit. Over overrun. Um, why do you think people are more optimistic this year, David? Because it, I definitely was, was a, a feeling of optimism around investment growth and healthcare in general.

David: 7:03

I think that there's a sense of some stability or, or new normal, the drug industry in particular, pharma has sort of made peace with the Trump administration and they're not worried that they're gonna be, you know, put outta business. I think they, they found it's

John: 7:16

kinda like NATO and Trump, that they've sort of made their peace, Europe and the Ukraine

David: 7:21

that they're. I don't know if it's like that or not, but there's a sense of, okay, there's a stability and then you can invest and you sort of understand where the, uh, where the rules are. I think actually, and just, and just to your point, I, one

John: 7:32

of the things that Medicare pointed out that Chris Klaw pointed out, they've cut like 15 or 16 deals with the 15 or 16 top people from pharma. I mean, it's, it's, it's really remarkable that how effectively that the Trump administration has put both pressure and collaborated. To create solutions. It's, it's really

David: 7:50

amazing. So John, it's been actually a couple years since I've been to San Francisco and in fact, um, uh, when I was looking to come to the conference a couple years ago to see if it made sense, actually what a lot of people were telling me is like, San Francisco itself is dangerous and you may wanna stay away. I just wanna say it's been a quite a positive experience, uh, this time. So the,

John: 8:07

the Trump administration is no longer dangerous for healthcare ai. Is the friend of healthcare and San Francisco's open for business? Is that the hot take?

David: 8:15

Well, let's, let's talk about yes, the, I'll, I'll just gonna vouch for the, uh, the third one and there's, there's a couple of interesting things. I, I actually took my first, uh, Waymo. Mm-hmm. This morning I've about you explain what a Waymo trip is. It sounds like you're taking transit to some kind of drugs. Well, that was the bonus that we're not, not for, uh, you know, not for, not for consumption here, but we'll talk about that in in a second. So, Waymo, when you walk around San Francisco, you see all of these actually Jaguar SUVs with a bunch of kind of, you know, space age sensors and things spinning around and, you know, it's driverless, uh, vehicles. And a couple of people encouraged me to try it. So I took one this morning. You summon it like. An Uber, um, and it moves along, you know, drives a little bit differently, which they warn you about, but it's, it's very smooth. It's a good experience.

John: 8:58

I, I, I agree with you. The Waymo's are, it feels a little bit like lost in space or Star Trek for folks from our generation, but there's no driver. It's all automated, it's all app driven, but the, the cars are clean, they're effective, they come quickly, and the pricing's pretty good. I, I think that from an artificial intelligence perspective, that may be the most impressive demo we saw this week in San Francisco.

David: 9:20

So we've talked a lot, John, about kind of, you know, substance abuse and deaths of despair and so on. And, and the truth is in San Francisco right near where you've got these very expensive hotels and boutiques and so on, you see a lot of this, uh, despair now in previous years during the, uh, the meth crisis. You'd see people that were actually psychotic and like activated. I don't know what they were seeing, but there's a lot of screaming. It wasn't what we saw so on. No, and this time I saw something very odd, and I posted about this on LinkedIn, which was, I was walking along pretty early in the morning, maybe through a neighborhood I, I shouldn't have been. And I saw three or four people kinda like bent over, you know, like that. And I thought. This is a start of some sort of like street performance, like a dance or something. And then I saw a number of others and I looked it up and it's called the Fenty Fold or Fentanyl. Yeah. Fold. And people are just sort of like stock in place. It's, it's, it's, it's terrible. It's really sad. And I

John: 10:12

think although the San Francisco's made an enormous amount of progress under the new mayor, Dan, Lori, they still get some work to do. And I, I met the, uh, the former, uh, former Biden guy who's working with the mayor on this. And I do think they've got some great pro the. Plans on this, but San Francisco is much safer than it was, but they've still got some real street challenges that they need to, to, to figure out. So Dave, um, I think maybe we leave it there and, and, and dig a little deeper into the presentations from this week, and we will have. More for our Care Talk community next

David: 10:43

week. Great. Well that's it for this special JPM edition of Care Talk straight from San Francisco. I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group,

John: 10:51

and I'm John Driscoll, the chairman of the Yukon Health System. If you like what you heard or you didn't, we'd love you to subscribe on your favorite service and we'll talk to you next week. Take care now.