The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast

Healthcare is full of things that are easy to measure, from costs and outcomes to utilization and, increasingly, AI. But DaVita CEO Javier Rodriguez believes one of the most important parts of healthcare is also one of the hardest to put in a spreadsheet: the human relationship between a caregiver and a patient.This week, Halle sits down with Javier to talk about what he’s learned from three decades in healthcare. They discuss why preventing kidney failure remains so difficult and what it takes to run a public healthcare company while making investments that may take years to pay off. Javier also shares why he believes healthcare has made enormous clinical progress even as frustration with the system has grown. We cover:Why Javier would be thrilled if DaVita’s dialysis business disappearedWhat’s actually stopping more patients from getting kidney transplantsWhy more dialysis care is moving from clinics into patients’ homesWhy Javier believes Wall Street undervalues the human side of healthcareThe leadership blind spot that nearly got him fired early in his careerAbout our guest:Javier J. Rodriguez has served as Chief Executive Officer of DaVita Inc. since June 2019. Joining the company in 1998, Mr. Rodriguez has held senior leadership roles of increasing responsibility, with experience across operations, payor contracting, and finance, and has helped shape the company’s transformation in the delivery of kidney care. Prior to joining DaVita, Mr. Rodriguez worked in finance at Baxter Healthcare Corporation. He has served on the board of directors of Gilead Sciences, Inc. since June 2020. Mr. Rodriguez brings deep healthcare expertise, comprehensive knowledge of our business and regulatory landscape, and a proven track record of executive leadership.—📍 Connect with us:Heart of Healthcare websiteLinkedInYouTube See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

For decades, healthcare's quality movement gave us checklists, forcing functions, and protocols to catch human error before it reached a patient. It worked, to a point. But as medical knowledge and patient complexity keep outpacing what any human system can track, a new question is emerging: can AI pick up where that movement left off?In this episode, in her first interview since stepping into the role, we talk with Dr. Azita Hamedani, the newly appointed Chief Clinical Officer at Bunkerhill Health, an AI company backed by Sequoia and Khosla Ventures. After nearly her entire career in academic medicine, Azita made the leap to a startup chasing a promise she's been thinking about since medical school.We cover:The medical school moment that first pulled her toward patient safety over bench scienceWhy she believes healthcare has hit the ceiling of what checklists and protocols alone can doThe three different types of health system leaders who all understand a different piece of the AI puzzle, and why that's a problemWhat actually happened behind the scenes on one real patient's chart, without a single human triggering itHer take on the Khosla and AMA debate over whether doctors should stay in the loopA personal story from her own cancer diagnosis, and the one question she asked her surgeon that no AI could ever answerAbout our guest:Azita G. Hamedani, MD, MPH, MBA, is the Chief Clinical Officer at Bunkerhill Health. She joined the company based on the belief that its long-horizon AI agent is the first technology capable of ensuring every patient receives optimal care. She spent 25 years in various leadership roles within large-scale academic health systems. Most recently, she served as President and CEO of UNC Faculty Physicians and Vice Dean for Clinical Affairs at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. Dr. Hamedani also spent nearly two decades at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health, where she founded the Department of Emergency Medicine and chaired it for over a decade, while also leading system initiatives related to quality and innovation. She completed her emergency medicine training at Mass General Brigham, and completed a fellowship in hospital administration at Massachusetts General Hospital. She holds degrees from Yale University and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. —📍 Connect with us:Heart of Healthcare websiteLinkedInYouTube See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sarah Russell picked up a phrase at her new job at Anthropic: a "non-regrettable primitive." It's how she describes the kind of infrastructure she thinks Anthropic should be building in healthcare, and it says a lot about how one of the most closely watched companies in health AI is positioning itself. In this episode, Steve talks with Sarah Russell, MD healthcare and life sciences lead at Anthropic. This conversation comes as Anthropic heads toward what's shaping up to be one of the most anticipated IPOs in years.We cover:What Anthropic is doing in healthcareWhy HIPAA is struggling to keep up with AI agents Where she thinks AI will change care first (it’s not where you'd expect!)The two very different bars regulators are weighing AI against, and why the choice matters more than most people realizeThe one piece of advice from her father that still shapes how she builds teams, and what she tells doctors nervous about a career in medicine nowAbout our guest:Sarah currently works on healthcare and life sciences projects at Anthropic. She is particularly passionate about research that explores how to make Claude safer and less confidently wrong. Prior to Anthropic, she was at Google X, an innovation hub at Alphabet, where she learned to lead teams of smart engineers building ML- and LLM-based products. Seeing the earliest version of Google’s Med-PaLM summarize a patient chart made her excited about healthcare technology all over again. Prior to Google, she was a CMIO in the VA system and a start-up founder. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Sarah did her internal medicine residency at MGH and completed an MBA at Wharton. She still practices part-time in Urgent Care at Stanford, where she is an Assistant Professor.⸺📍 Connect with us:Heart of Healthcare websiteLinkedInYouTubeIf you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave us a review! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Healthcare costs are taking an ever-larger bite out of American workers’ compensation. This Labor Day, we’re revisiting a conversation with Health Rosetta CEO Dave Chase about why healthcare has become so expensive and what employers can do about it.Dave argues that healthcare itself isn’t the problem: clinicians receive only a fraction of every dollar spent, while price gouging, administrative bloat, and middlemen consume much of the rest. He explains how community-owned health plans are rebuilding employer healthcare around primary care, transparency, and better incentives—and how the savings can flow back to workers and their communities.We cover:Why rising healthcare costs ultimately come out of workers’ payHow community-owned health plans cut out costly middlemenWhy better primary care can lower costs while improving outcomesHow employers can rebuild health benefits from the ground upWhy Dave believes open-source healthcare could challenge entrenched incumbents ⸺📍 Connect with us:Heart of Healthcare websiteLinkedInYouTube⸺About our guest:Dave Chase is the founder of Health Rosetta and creator of the community-owned health plan (COHP) model, a movement that has helped thousands of employers covering more than 5 million Americans build health plans that deliver better care at 20 to 50% lower cost. In 2024 he launched Nautilus Health Institute, seeded with $4 million in Health Rosetta intellectual property, to publish open-source standards and contracting templates that reset market norms for employers, clinicians, and communities. Dave’s work has reached over 1 million people through bestselling books, including “CEO’s Guide to Restoring the American Dream” and his newest, “Relocalizing Health: Taking Back Healthcare. Rebuilding Communities,” along with TED talks and TV and film appearances. He received the World Health Care Congress’ Lifetime Achievement Award for Health Benefits Innovation. Before Health Rosetta, Dave led Microsoft’s $30 billion healthcare ecosystem and co-founded Avado, later acquired by WebMD/Medscape. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's our monthly Digital Health Download, and September's stories all circle the same tension: technology keeps promising to fix healthcare's problems, but just as often it moves them somewhere else, or creates new ones entirely. This week, Halle unpacks a news-heavy month, weighing who actually benefits as markets, algorithms, and AI get closer to our health decisions.We cover:Americans can now bet on clinical trials and FDA regulatory reviews - but do we want that?Meta's massive settlement over harming childrenThe surprising reason AI might be making healthcare more expensive instead of lessA new study on the biggest lever we're not pulling to bend the healthcare cost curveTwo lawsuits rattling a popular wearable and a celebrity-backed mental health startupWhat a widely used drug class reveals about bias in hiring, and the uncomfortable questions that raises⸺📍 Connect with us:Heart of Healthcare websiteLinkedInYouTube See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.