Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders
Episodes
89 episodes
A Giant Leap for Healthcare: Dr. Bob Wachter on AI, Clinical Workflows and the Patient-Doctor Relationship
Dr. Bob Wachter describes his career as the result of “what happens when a political science major becomes an academic physician.” Rather than focus on one specialty or scientific domain, he became fascinated by the healthcare system itself and...
From Pilots to Production: Boston Children’s John Brownstein on the Next Phase of AI in Healthcare
Dr. John Brownstein has been on the leading edge of digital health since medical school, where he was drawn to epidemiology because of the opportunity to use data sets for large-scale impact beyond the exam room. He’s been on a hunt for data ev...
DC’s Ambitious Plans for Modernizing Health Tech: U.S. DOGE Service Administrator & CMS Strategic Advisor, Amy Gleason
The daughter of a hospital administrator, Amy Gleason never considered a career in the public sector – she went straight into healthcare. As an emergency room nurse, she started to see the dangers that unfold when healthcare providers don’t hav...
Glimmers of Nonpartisan Progress: Decoding ACCESS, TEMPO and the Latest Government Healthcare Initiatives
After three decades working to deliver easy, fast and cost-effective patient experiences through technology, Ryan Howells is more optimistic about the future than he’s ever been before.At a time when healthcare has been at the center of ...
340B Unpacked for the Holidays: Policy, Controversy, and Impact
Sitting at the intersection of healthcare policy, hospital finance, and patient access, the 340B drug discount program is a hot button issues in the pharmacy space. The program is critically important to providers that serve high volumes of low...
The Big Beautiful Maze of Health Policy and Innovation
From being at the center of some of the most significant shifts in U.S. healthcare policy over the past two decades, Liz Fowler can offer valuable perspective in uncertain times. In her most recent government role, Liz served as director of the...
Lessons from Public Sector Leadership: Former CMS Administrator and FDA Commissioner, Dr. Mark McClellan
Dr. Mark McClellan has served as a Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But his experie...
Emerging Technologies (Part 3): Microsoft’s Chief Architect for Health on the Saga of Interoperability and AI
Dr. Josh Mandel says his first love was software. But on a whim, while studying computer science and software engineering at MIT, he took a course that opened his eyes to the world of medicine and genetics. It changed the trajectory of his care...
Emerging Technologies (Part 2): Past, Present & Future of Healthcare Interoperability with HTD Health's Brendan Keeler
Brendan Keeler’s path into healthcare interoperability has been anything but straightforward. After early stints implementing Epic in the U.S. and Europe, he helped hundreds of startups connect to provider and payer systems at Redox, Zus Health...
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Emerging Technologies (Part 1): Inside Perspectives from Epic’s Seth Hain
Seth Hain has spent two decades at Epic, watching the electronic health record evolve from digital filing cabinet to care-delivery platform. Now he thinks the entire stack of software is being re-imagined, only this time it isn’t mobile or clou...
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How a Tech-Minded CEO Sees the Future: CareFirst’s Brian D. Pieninck on Medicare, Medicaid & the AI-Driven Inflection Point in Healthcare
Brian D. Pieninck didn’t take a conventional path to healthcare leadership. He started his career as an 18-year-old IT contractor and spent two decades working across the industry before becoming President and CEO of CareFirst Blue Cross Blue S...
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Medicaid Uncovered: Decoding the System
Kody Kinsley has been called many things—operator, innovator, Medicaid “nerd”—but above all, he’s a fierce advocate for the health and well-being of the populations Medicaid serves. Now a senior advisor at the Milken Institute and recently Nort...
Where Medicare Stands—And Where It’s Headed with Aetna’s Dr. Ali Khan
Dr. Ali Khan has spent his career at the intersection of medicine, public policy, and value-based care. He’s also been at the forefront of some of the country's most innovative care delivery models—from Iora Health and CareMore to Oak Street He...
Opportunities in Oncology (Part 3): Getting Deep Into Patient Care with Mass General Brigham’s Head of Radiation Oncology
The first two episodes in this Healthcare is Hard podcast series on “Opportunities in Oncology” explored the relationship between academic medical centers and community care, with guests
Opportunities in Oncology (Part 2): Balancing Cutting-Edge Research and Community Care
Dr. Harlan Levine began his career practicing internal medicine but soon moved into business leadership roles at national healthcare organizations to help improve the dysfunction with payer-provider relationships that he experienced firsthand a...
Opportunities in Oncology (Part 1): The Intersection of Clinical Care, Business and Policy
There’s been a massive gap in oncology where people who have been responsible for a dramatic increase in the standard of care have lacked a solid understanding of the business, payment and policy constructs required to deliver it. Dr. Stephen S...
Election Implications (Part 4): Forecasting For Healthcare As The Second Trump Administration Takes Shape
Elements of the new Trump administration are coming into focus as announcements of key healthcare appointments and nominations provide indications for what the market can expect starting in January. To dissect the impact these changes might hav...
Election Implications (Part 3): JP Morgan’s Read on Trump 2.0 and What’s Next for Healthcare
Healthcare was not a major focus during the 2024 election where other key issues drove most of the discussion. This left a vacuum around specific healthcare policies and what to expect from a second Trump Administration. With few details availa...
Election Implications (Part 2): This Wall Street Analyst Agrees, “Healthcare is Hard”
With the White House and Congress up for grabs this election, anticipation in the healthcare industry is high. Shifts in healthcare policy will influence how care is paid for and delivered, which will of course influence the flow of investment ...
Election Implications (Part 1): Angst, Uncertainty and an Urge for Calm from Maverick Health Policy’s Julie Barnes
Julie Barnes has made a career helping health plans, tech vendors, investors and others in the healthcare space decipher health policy. She’s a former Hill staffer who earned her law degree and spent a decade in corporate law serving healthcare...
What’s the Difference Between Innovation and Performance Improvement?
OSF HealthCare stands as a model health system for those who want to do innovation right. One of the defining characteristics of the Peoria, Illinois-based system is how it aligns innovation with operations for everyone – all 24,000 employees a...
Help or Harm? How CHAI is Mitigating the Risk of AI in Healthcare
With great power comes great responsibility and in healthcare, those words may have never held more meaning than they do with the advent of artificial intelligence. AI most certainly has the power to transform healthcare, and those in the indus...
Live from DHIS East: Mass General Brigham CIO, Christopher Coburn
Chris Coburn has been driving health system innovation for decades. He is currently chief innovation officer at Mass General Brigham (MGB), the nation’s largest academic research enterprise with over $16 billion in annual revenue, 1.5 million p...
Reinventing Pharmacy (Part 3): Optum Rx CEO, Dr. Patrick Conway, Brings the PBM, Provider and Payer POV
Optum Rx serves more than 62 million people, processes 1.6 billion prescriptions and generates more than $110 billion of revenue annually. Dr. Patrick Conway, CEO of Optum Rx, is the third and final guest in a series of Healthcare is Hard episo...
