Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders

Growing up on a farm in rural Missouri, and even through college, a career in healthcare was never in the forefront of Laura Wilt’s mind. She studied finance at Tulane and thought she might go into banking, but a decision to take a job at Epic changed everything. What began as an unexpected first step into healthcare IT quickly became a career, as Laura found she could use technology to make a real difference for physicians, ...

Cedars-Sinai has evolved from a community hospital to a major academic health system with an international reputation for quality care, community service, research and education. Much of that evolution and expansion took place under the leadership of Tom Priselac, who served as President and CEO for 30 years, until his retirement in 2024.

After joining Cedars-Sinai in 1979, Priselac spent nearly half a century at the organization, r...

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 has spent more than 40 years examining how care is organized, where it breaks down, and how technology can help make it better.

The author of more than 300 articles and six books,...

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 ever since, shaping a career that has spanned public health, technology, startups, and healthcare innovation.

Dr. Brownstein helped develop Google Flu Trends, served as a healthcare adviso...

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 have access to the information they need to treat patients. Those experiences drove her towards a tech career in the emerging electronic health records space before a very personal e...

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 polarizing and partisan politics, Ryan is focused on an area foundational to digital health that he says draws consensus across party lines: data exchange and interoperability. Freely moving d...

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 income and vulnerable patient populations, but it’s drawing increasing scrutiny.

340B was established in 1992 as part of the Public Health Services Act to help providers stretch scarce ...

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 Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), an organization she helped create a decade earlier. 

As Chief Health Counsel at the Senate Finance Committee, Liz played a major role ...

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 experiences before, and accomplishments following these leadership roles at the highest levels of government health policy are equally important to his perspective on the healthcare ecosystem ...

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 career away from software – but only temporarily. He entered medical school after earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science and began rotating through Boston-area hospitals at t...

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 and Flexpa before taking the reins of the Interoperability Practice at HTD Health. Along the way, his Health API Guy blog turned dense policy updates into plain-language guides, earnin...

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 cloud driving the change, but generative AI.   

In a conversation with Keith Figlioli, Hain explains how new tooling, cheaper compute and larger context windows are pushing healthc...

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 Shield. He now also serves as Chair of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, bringing both local and national perspective to the role. 

In this episode, Keith Figlioli speaks with ...

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 North Carolina’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kinsley joins Keith Figlioli for a wide-ranging conversation about how Medicaid works, why it matters,...

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 Health and now Aetna, where he serves as Chief Medical Officer of Medicare at Aetna, a CVS Health company. In this episode, Keith Figlioli sits down with Dr. Khan for a conversation...

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 Dr. Stephen Schleicher from Tennessee Oncology, and Dr. Harlan Levine from City of Hope. For the third and final episode in the series, Dr. Daphne Haas-Kogan joined Keith Figlioli for a conversation that dives more deeply into patient c...

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 as a physician.

At United Health Group, Dr. Levine joined as clinical lead of the team that launched Optum, where he subsequently served as chief medical officer for more than six years. He als...

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 Schleicher has spent the early part of his career working to fill that gap.

Dr. Schleicher entered medical school with an interest in oncology, anchored by an appreciation for the...

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 have, Wall Street Analyst Jeff Garro joined Keith Figlioli to wrap up a four-part series of episodes on election implications. Previous episodes featured conversations with JP Morgan’s Lis...