Geoffrey Hills

Transforming healthcare with AI requires industry. Industry requires capital investment. Capital investment requires return. Return requires revenue. Revenue requires reimbursement. Medicare (and transitively private insurance) reimbursement policy for clinical AI will define the incentives for the technologies we build and deploy over the next decade. Our existing fee for service codes are what the military would call cost-plus contracting. We pay for every nail, screw, and hour of labor and don't care if that was a good and efficient way to build the tank or not. Our CMS Innovation Center director, Abe Sutton, believes cost-plus is the wrong path for the future of American healthcare. ACCESS and VBC models pay for outcomes. When we have AI that can manage heart failure can we link payment to making people healthier? Doing so would unleash the might of American techno-capitalism on exactly the thing we care about in society, but there are devils in the details.

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Some of the most interesting conversations around payer data infrastructure are happening in California right now. But the questions being asked there, such as how to ensure encounter data integrity, how to enable cross-sector data exchange, and how to make clinical and claims data operationally usable, are the ones that health plans across the country are working through. Our own Sue Riddell will be attending California Association of Health Plans Strengthening Data Infrastructure seminar next week. If you’ll be there and would like to connect, reach out to Sue.

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Selling AI tools into a hospital is like selling a helicopter without a pilot. If you don't have a strong deployment team to co-develop the use cases and ensure adoption, you’re not going to get off the ground and drive speed to value. That was one of many key insights from our conversation with Aaron Miri, DHA, FCHIME, CHCIO on The Future of Healthcare AI. Aaron leads digital and information strategy at Baptist Health and has a rare ability to translate complex technology into meaningful change on the ground. He shared what really drives adoption in healthcare systems: trust, clinician buy-in, healthcare AI implementation specialists, and a focus on solving one clear problem at a time. Aaron also spoke candidly about what makes an AI pitch compelling and what gets ignored. If you’re building or backing health tech, his perspective is essential.

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At Team8, we believe the future of healthcare will be built on trust and data - the foundation for technology that empowers, not burdens, clinical teams. That belief led us to build Popai Health, which just announced an $11M round led by Team8, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Essen Health Care and other strategic partners. Popai is building the foundational platform for Patient Phone Conversation Intelligence: turning everyday phone interactions between care teams and patients into real-time clinical and operational insight. Why does this matter? Because the shift to value-based care depends on scalable, data-driven patient engagement. Yet, over 15 million patient calls happen every day in the U.S., and most of them vanish - unanalyzed, unused, and unconnected. Popai is changing that by giving voice data structure, meaning, and actionability. Already live with organizations like Essen Health Care and Clover Health , Popai’s AI is analyzing more than 18 million minutes of patient conversations, reducing documentation burden by over 20%, and unlocking entirely new capabilities in risk detection, care coordination, and population health. This is the Team8 thesis in action: combining deep domain expertise, technical infrastructure, and founder-market fit to build companies that solve systemic challenges. Voice is not just another dataset, it’s the most human, real-time, and underutilized source of patient intelligence in healthcare. Popai is turning that blind spot into a strategic advantage. Congratulations to Eyal Gurion, Michael Latar, Elad Levy and the entire Popai team. We’re proud to be building this together. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/dN2j6DqZ

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How will Medicare’s telehealth back-and-forth – and new developments like the 10-year CMS ACCESS Model – reshape the investor playbook? Markus Bolsinger, co-head of Dechert’s global private equity practice, joins Dechert partner Jennifer Hutchens and associate Brooke Meadowcroft to unpack shifts from pandemic-era expansion to the October 1, 2025 “telehealth cliff” and reinstatement through January 30, and what they mean for strategics and PE. They explore the convergence with DTC pharma and how digital-first infrastructure, data integration and safeguards can make telehealth the connective tissue between coverage and access to care. Listen and subscribe at the link in the comments or wherever you get your podcasts.

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