State Projects Under the Rural Health Transformation Fund
The federal Rural Health Transformation (RHT) Program is channeling $50 billion over five years—$10 billion annually—to all 50 states to overhaul rural health care. Administered by CMS, the initiative lets states design projects across five strategic goals, from telehealth to workforce development. State abstracts reveal a consensus on five themes: telehealth and data infrastructure, provider recruitment and training, chronic disease prevention, behavioral‑health integration, and hub‑and‑spoke networks. While the funding scale is unprecedented, execution and long‑term sustainability remain uncertain.
Utah’s AI Prescription Experiment
In January 2026 Utah became the first U.S. state to pilot an AI‑driven prescription‑renewal program, partnering with Doctronic under a regulatory sandbox that lets an autonomous system evaluate renewal requests for 192 chronic‑care drugs. The AI recommends renewals in 72%...
The ACCESS Model’s Behavioral Health Track
The CMS Innovation Center’s ACCESS Model launches on July 5 2026 with a behavioral health (BH) track that pays $180 per beneficiary in the Initial Period and $90 in the Follow‑On Period, contingent on meeting PHQ‑9 or GAD‑7 improvement thresholds. The track...
The AI Hype in Healthcare Needs Randomized Evidence
The article argues that the AI hype in healthcare must be grounded in randomized evidence. Venture capital is flooding AI decision‑support tools, yet most lack RCT validation. Two recent trials illustrate the gap: a 10,422‑patient UVA predictive‑analytics study found no...
Randomization Inside a Medicare Payment Model, It's Really Cool
The CMS Innovation Center’s ACCESS Model launches a ten‑year, national test of outcome‑aligned payments for technology‑enabled chronic care, offering fixed payments of $90 to $420 per beneficiary across four disease tracks. A distinctive feature is the 90:10 randomization of eligible...
AI in the Hands of Clinicians: A Look at the Digital Stethoscope
AI‑augmented digital stethoscopes such as the Eko CORE 500 are bringing machine‑learning diagnostics to the bedside. The device records heart sounds, a three‑lead ECG and runs cloud‑based algorithms that flag atrial fibrillation, murmurs and reduced left‑ventricular ejection fraction, with studies reporting...
The CMS ACCESS Model Update and Payment Rates
The episode breaks down CMS’s new ACCESS Model, which replaces fee‑for‑service chronic care payments with a per‑beneficiary Outcome‑Aligned Payment (OAP) that is partly withheld until specific clinical and patient‑reported outcomes are met. It explains the four clinical tracks—early and advanced...
Beyond the AI Hype in Health Care Services
The episode cuts through the hype surrounding AI in health care, focusing on real‑world evidence from three recent studies of large language models (LLMs). It highlights that LLMs can improve structured tasks like medication safety when used as a co‑pilot...
The U.S. Poison Center Network
The episode explores the U.S. Poison Control Center Network, tracing its history from the first center in 1953 to the modern system of 53 accredited centers serving all states. It highlights a new RAND study that quantifies the network’s value...