The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast

A court ruling challenges patients’ access to ambient AI medical recordings. Oura delays its IPO amid shifting digital health markets and fierce wearable competition. Patients arrive with AI-generated medical requests, while AI-driven billing pushes healthcare spending higher. Meanwhile, the FDA considers how to regulate constantly evolving medical AI and assign liability when foundation models change.

Javier J. Rodriguez, DaVita CEO and longtime kidney-care leader, explores why he’d welcome the end of dialysis, the barriers blocking more transplants, and the realities of bringing treatment into patients’ homes. He challenges Wall Street’s fixation on metrics, shares a hard-earned leadership lesson, and discusses healthcare’s clinical progress, fragmented data, and path toward more human-centered care.

Dr. Azita G. Hamedani, Chief Clinical Officer at Bunkerhill Health and veteran physician executive, explores what comes after checklists and protocols. She discusses AI-driven quality measurement, chart summarization, and event-triggered care orchestration. The conversation also examines health system adoption, AI literacy, clinician productivity, and the irreplaceable human side of medicine.

Sarah Russell, a physician, healthcare technology leader, and Anthropic executive, explores the company’s healthcare strategy. She discusses “non-regrettable primitives,” AI agents and HIPAA, access to care, richer patient histories, and the regulatory tradeoffs shaping health AI. She also reflects on why clinicians still matter, building high-performing teams, and redesigning care around patients.

Dave Chase, Health Rosetta founder and former Microsoft healthcare leader, examines why rising medical costs erode workers’ pay. He explores community-owned health plans, transparent pricing, direct primary care, portable benefits, and cutting out costly middlemen. Chase also discusses self-funding, stop-loss protection, healthcare technology, and how open-source standards could reshape employer coverage.

A fast roundup of the month’s biggest digital health stories. They discuss betting markets for clinical trials and the ethical risks that creates. The fallout from a major tech settlement and new youth protections make headlines. AI is linked to rising near-term healthcare costs. Lawsuits challenge wearable accuracy and a celebrity-backed mental health startup. A study ties GLP-1 use to shifts in female employment.

Michael Gao, MD — CEO who led applied AI at NewYork‑Presbyterian and holds faculty roles. Joshua Geleris, MD — Head of Product with clinical informatics and Epic implementation experience. They recount 18 months without customers, a sharp pivot that unlocked growth, a counterintuitive contingency pricing workflow, AI that translates notes into billing codes, and rethinking moats as data-driven flywheels.

Lloyd B. Minor, surgeon-scientist and dean of Stanford Medicine, talks about training doctors for careers that may stretch into the 2070s. He discusses how generative AI is reshaping medical education, Stanford’s evolving curriculum and assessments, using AI in tumor boards and triage, and how precision medicine and new tech affect costs and access.

Tom Hale, CEO of ŌURA and tech veteran with 30+ years leading product growth, explains how a sleep-first ring turns overnight signals into actionable guidance. He covers why the ring form factor enables clean baselines, how clinical-grade accuracy builds trust, the line between wellness and medical devices, and Oura’s move into Medicare, women’s health, CGM integration, and clinical partnerships.

They dig into how GLP-1 care is shifting from prescribers to companion ecosystems and employer programs. A split FDA advisory vote on unapproved peptides and its implications for compounding and startups gets unpacked. The rollout of ChatGPT Health and a lawsuit over allegedly dangerous AI medical advice spark legal and safety questions. They also explore how health insurance traps workers in unwanted jobs and the push to make daylight saving time permanent.