This is a preview of the April 23 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox on Thursday mornings.

Good morning, and an existential question: who are you?

Identity is difficult to define for a single person—much less an entire organization. But like Nike’s “Just Do it” and Subway’s “Eat Fresh,” a proper guiding principle can distill all of that corporate complexity into something consumers understand, remember and act on.

Mission statements can sound a bit shallow (I cringe when a CEO defers to a three-word slogan to avoid answering a nuanced question). Still, they carry weight and evoke expectations. If the lettuce on my Subway sandwich is wilting, or Nike’s customer service line puts me on an extended hold, I’m more likely to clock that as a broken promise. After all, why did you put it on a billboard if you didn’t mean it?

The health system “brand” has been a major conversation starter lately. On Tuesday, I hosted a webinar about building a health care brand that resonates with patients in an increasingly digital world. One recurring theme was the breakdown between systems’ promises and the operational realities that patients encounter in the care system.

“As marketers and care providers, we promise simplicity, but we deliver complexity,” Taylor Hamilton, chief digital officer at Ballad Health, told the audience.

Patients do not care if the EHRs weren’t built to communicate with one another, Hamilton explained. They care that they’re repeating their date of birth for the umpteenth time (at practices with the same system name on the signs above the door, mind you).

“If there’s any sort of experience breakdown, you have potentially lost that consumer experience,” she said. Every little friction point—a billing error, a complicated parking situation, a prescription delay—can chip away at even the best patient-provider interactions and outcomes.

One member of the audience asked a question that I’m still thinking about. To paraphrase, she said, “What about the actual care provided? Doesn’t that come first?”

Here’s how Adam Rice, chief marketing officer at CommonSpirit Health, responded:

“I don’t think we were trying to talk around the idea of clinical excellence and outcomes. I think those are table stakes. I think that what a consumer, a patient, expects from us is the highest quality care.”

“That being said, they expect it to come with more than just the outcome. If I’m booking a $2,000 hotel room—and heaven forbid, that’s a lot of money—I would expect to have the most amazing experience where they’re greeting me, they know me when I walk in that hotel and I might have a few extra delighters during that experience.”

“You shouldn’t have to check in three or four times and repeat the same information. My goodness, I hope you know who I am. I’m going under for surgery within the next few hours—make me feel that way. Make me feel comforted, make me feel like I made the right decision, I’m in the right place, I’m in the right, caring hands. Wrap that experience around me.”

“I know I’ve chosen you because you provide the best care, your outcomes are what I would expect, but make sure the rest connects as well. That is the full experience.”

To summarize, just because “health care” is on the signage does not mean that “health care” is the business case. Patients have choices—why should they choose you?

If you missed our panel on Tuesday, you can view a full recap here. And, as always, I’d love to hear your reflections on this topic. Email me at a.kayser@newsweek.com, and have a great week.

In Other News

Major health care headlines from the week

• Why is Cleveland Clinic so good at scaling AI pilots? President and CEO Dr. Tom Mihaljevic gave us the scoop in an exclusive conversation last week. 
  • The health system spans three continents, two dozen hospitals and 300 outpatient centers—but despite the Clinic’s size, it has committed to full enterprise-wide AI deployment. 
  • If you’d like to take a closer look at Cleveland Clinic’s playbook, Mihaljevic recently joined Newsweek’s “The AI Agenda” webinar series, hosted by Harvard Business School Professor Suraj Srinivasan. Read the highlights here.
    
• Within the next 30 days, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz will require every state to submit a plan for revalidating Medicaid providers, he announced at Tuesday’s POLITICO Summit.  
  • Oz’s anti-fraud agenda is not news, in and of itself. The Trump Administration has been vocal about efforts to slash “waste, fraud and abuse” across government institutions and programs—including Medicaid, which is projected to see $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade after the passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. 
  • But—although the CMS head previously sent letters to California, New York and Florida alleging fraud in their Medicaid programs—many health care leaders were surprised by this latest extension to all 50 states. Thirty days is a tight turnaround.  
  • Oz implied that states would either engage or face consequences, saying, “If you don’t take it seriously, it indicates to us that we might have to take the audits… more aggressively.” 
    
• It was a bruising week over on Capitol Hill, where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. found himself defending the Trump administration’s health agenda in a series of heated health care hearings—amidst bipartisan skepticism.  
  • The most consistent line of attack was fiscal. Lawmakers pressed the Health Secretary on a proposed 12 percent cut to his HHS, including reductions to Medicaid and research funding. Kennedy argued the cuts were necessary to address federal debt and insisted spending would still rise in absolute terms, a framing critics said obscured the real impact on coverage and programs, according to the Associated Press. 
  • Vaccines and public health credibility hovered over nearly every exchange. Senators and House members repeatedly confronted Kennedy about measles outbreaks, declining vaccination rates and his long history of vaccine skepticism. He denied responsibility, described himself as “pro-science,” and pointed to broader post-pandemic distrust in institutions. Lawmakers from both parties—most notably Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana—warned that Kennedy’s rhetoric risks eroding confidence in federal health agencies while preventable diseases are resurging. 
  • Among the core disputes, there was a series of episodic skirmishes: clashes over drug pricing tools (including questions about whether TrumpRX steers patients to higher-priced medications), tense exchanges over pesticide policy and food safety tied to the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda and the Secretary’s attempts to distance himself from controversial FDA decisions.  
    
• Lastly, it wouldn’t be a proper week in 2026 if we didn’t have GLP-1 news. On Tuesday, Amazon One Medical launched a nationwide GLP-1 management program, offering same- or next- day delivery of the weight loss drugs in all 50 states through Amazon Pharmacy.  
  • In addition to the meds themselves, the program incorporates clinical support and oversight from One Medical’s network of primary care providers. 
  • Amazon anticipates that a “streamlined,” electronic prior-auth process will reduce the average approval time.  

Pulse Check

Executive perspectives on key industry issues

In last week’s newsletter, we covered Midstream Health, an AI company that’s stacking its senior leadership team with experts from Lyft and the self-driving vehicle company, Cruise.

That kind of move deserves a follow-up, so this week, I connected with Midstream Co-Founder and President Venkat Mocherla to learn more about the platform (which says it has generated more than $80 billion in new patient revenue for health system clients—including Houston Methodist, CommonSpirit and Mount Sinai—by analyzing payer and operational data for missed revenue opportunities).

When I asked Mocherla what he’s been hearing from the CFOs and CIOs in his circle, he said, “Somebody told me that AI is everywhere but the bottom line.”

“How do you translate these technologies directly to saving these institutions money so they can keep their doors open, so they can redirect it to patient care?” he continued. “That’s what’s most important, not some cool demo you’re showing one or two clients.”

Find a portion of our conversation below. Demo not included.

Editor’s Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How is Midstream Health different from the revenue cycle management AI solutions that so many systems have adopted—and what’s the argument for your approach?

Number one, we talk a lot about price transparency in this country. I think there’s a version of enterprise transparency where, if you’re just thinking about revenue, that’s not good enough. How are we purchasing medical devices? How are we purchasing drugs? How are we purchasing services? All of these decisions from a revenue perspective should marry the cost picture, and that complete image is what makes enterprise transparency work. It’s my point of view that if you just look at the revenue side of the equation, it’s not the complete picture.

Number two, I just don’t believe in zero sum games in American health care. I don’t believe that helping one side “win” or “lose” is the right way to do it. I think we should build a system that is sustainable for all, and that starts with actually understanding the complete picture on cost and revenue and then using [AI] agents to go reduce waste. I genuinely think everybody agrees we should reduce waste to zero, but a lot of people just didn’t have the time or the bandwidth or the compute.

Now we actually can, because this is the first time it’s possible using technology.

What’s an example of a missed revenue opportunity that your agents commonly locate?

Every day, health systems buy medical devices which have very long, complicated contracts. It takes heaven and earth to sign these contracts, let alone read them, let alone actually take full advantage of them.

In these contracts, if you read the minutiae, [many state that] you get to save more if you have certain variable conditions met: volume, market share. There are all these complicated “if-then” functions within just one medical device contract that will help you save money.

Rebates are a very small thing in one bucket of spend, in one term, in one contract. But that small thing ends up being $160 million for one of our clients.

[Traditionally] people look at the ERP. They look at EMR. “Hey, what about contracts? What about business context?” That’s quite literally in someone’s head, right? They’re making that decision.

I would say that a lot of financial decision-making is, like, pre-Google Maps. It’s like the MapQuest era, where we rely on a lot on the person—and these people make heroic decisions every day. But how do we give them better tools?

Speaking of roadmaps, let’s talk about your talent strategy. You recently tapped Lyft Healthcare co-founder Omar Nagji as your chief commercial officer, and Anisha Mocherla, a former Cruise manager, to lead product. Your head of engineering also comes from a tech background that isn’t rooted in health care. What’s the benefit of hiring talent from the fringes of—or even outside of—the industry?

At the end of the day, the best teams have an interdisciplinary approach and can understand the rules inside the box while thinking outside the box. Omar worked at Lyft Healthcare, but Omar also started his career as a health care consultant. You can look at leaders inside the company that have spent literally decades inside a health system as leaders to people like Anisha or Aneesh [Kulkarni, our VP of engineering], who come from outside.

It takes a village of minds. We want the best of AI technology from both inside and outside of health care, [along with] deep domain experts who have thought about these areas like supply chain, pharmacy, managed care, financial decisions inside hospitals for decades.

My favorite example is, it literally takes days—not months, not weeks, days—to solve problems for our customers. It takes an AI engineer, a domain expert, a product person, all working with that hospital team on-site. That, to me, is the new problem-solver unit. And it’s the most exciting piece of recruiting people from both outside and inside of health care.

Sticking with the car analogy, how long does it realistically take for health systems to reach cruise control—to fully automate that savings process with AI agents, hands-free?

So much work has gone into a self-driving car before you can sit in it. You mapped the roads. You’ve thought about every rule. You had enough training data. And then one day, you have a safety driver sitting there [just in case]. And then, you finally sit in the Waymo and it drives itself. And it’s like magic.

Some health systems are further along in the automation/augmentation journey than others. Even within the most sophisticated health systems, there are still many areas—especially within cost transformation—where they’re still sitting in L1. They’re still in cruise control.

It just varies. Some systems are in L3, some systems are in L1, but that’s the fun of it. How do you map them? How do you help them, and how do you bring them along? And ultimately, how do you help them empower themselves?

C-Suite Shuffles

Where health care leaders are coming and going

• Dr. Jonathan Green was named CEO of the NIH Clinical Center,the largest research hospital in the world, based in Bethesda, Maryland. 
  • Green joined the NIH in 2018 as director of its Office of Human Subjects Research Protections. He led a restructuring of the program, consolidating 12 separate Institutional Review Boards into a single, centralized hub.  
  • Previously, he was a professor of medicine, pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and served as its associate dean for human studies and executive chair of the IRB.  
  • Green is still working as an attending physician in the NIH Clinical Center’s Medical Intensive Care Unit and Pulmonary Consult Service, according to the Institute. He will assume leadership of the research hospital on May 17. 
    
• The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Institute tapped Dr. Jaime Bland as its chief data strategist, where she’ll be responsible for “building trusted data networks that are responsive to MAHA priorities, interoperability that works for people, apply transparent governance and measurable implementation across state jurisdictions that create a longitudinal record,” according to a news release from the organization. 
  • Bland—a credentialed RN and DNP—joins the nonprofit policy and advocacy organization from Aquila, the health care data integration platform that she founded. She will continue to serve as Aquila’s CEO while at the MAHA Institute. 
    
• UnitedHealth Group has turned over roughly half of its top 100 executives in the past year, The Star Tribune reported after the company’s earnings call on Tuesday. 
  • Four of the eight leaders present on last year’s Q1 earnings call have switched positions or left the company entirely.  
  • UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley is leading the sweep, which includes external hires like CFO Wayne DeVeydt, a former managing director in Bain Capital’s portfolio group.  
  • “Hemsley appeared to see the need for fresh ideas at the top to turn around this top-tier managed care organization in a tough regulatory environment,” Julie Utterback, a Morningstar analyst, told the Tribune.  
  • Those “fresh ideas” were backed by Q1 revenue and earnings reports that outperformed Wall Street’s expectations. UnitedHealth Group shares rose seven percent after Tuesday’s call. 

This is a preview of the April 23 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox on Thursday mornings.