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By Alexis Kayser

Healthcare Editor

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This is a preview of the January 15 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox on Thursday mornings.

We had both rain and snow in Chicago yesterday, so I’m jealous of that 60-degree weather you all are enjoying in San Francisco. And, of course, I’m, living vicariously through your J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference updates.

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Last I heard, there were about 9,500 health care leaders and investors in the Westin St. Francis Hotel. I haven’t looked into the square footage of the space, but it sure sounds like a full house.

My sources on the ground have helped me narrow down three trends from the event, which—now in its 44th year—has long served as a strategic barometer for the industry. Here’s what I’m hearing.

Innovation is not slowing, but major players are sharpening their focus. Biopharma conglomerates broke down their strategies for growth: from Bristol Myers Squibb’s multi-asset expansion playbook targeting neuroscience, immunology, cardiovascular and oncology over the next decade, to AbbVie’s pipeline diversification and new partnerships aimed at bolstering manufacturing and access. Across biotech, companies like Samsung Biologics highlighted how they’re expanding U.S. manufacturing footprints (I spoke with Philips’ CEO about this recently).

And amid a surge in biotech VC development, investors are signaling renewed confidence in venture-backed innovation. I take it that in 2026, we’re likely to see more early-stage deals, tighter strategic partnerships between biopharma and startups and a renewed emphasis on platform technologies that can scale efficiently.

AI is a measurable strategic asset—moreso than in years past. At this installment of JPM, executives from pharma and tech are emphasizing AI’s role in drug discovery, diagnostics, operational workflows and regulatory compliance. Companies are sharing figures to support these initiatives’ success. A great concept could have won the news cycle in the early days of automation tech, but now, it’s clear that the competitive advantage lies in outcomes.

And, finally, policy and system economics are front-and-center at this year’s event. Health care leaders are grappling with shifting policy backdrops, from national debates about Medicaid funding and regulatory direction, to the defense of the scientific enterprise itself amid rising skepticism. More on that in the next section as we discuss the new hires to the federal vaccine committee.

Science, economics and risk are all coming into focus there in sunny San Francisco. What are you seeing? What are you surprised that you’re not seeing? Email me at a.kayser@newsweek.com and let me know.

In Other News

Major health care headlines from the week

• Health care workers in the Twin Cities have reported ICE agents entering hospitals, sometimes without warrants, a local NPR affiliate reported.

  • Their presence has raised questions—and concerns—about where federal immigration officers are legally able to go. A local immigration advocacy nonprofit told the radio station that ICE officers were inside of a patient’s hospital room, at their bedside, for more than 24 hours while the patient was receiving medical care. The officers did not have a judicial warrant, the group alleged, and at times the patient was shackled to the bed.
  • Five nurses at HCMC Hospital in Minneapolis, speaking on the condition of anonymity, expressed discomfort with agents overhearing patients’ personal medical information. They also claimed that the agents have heightened tensions within the facility. One nurse said she found it hard to remain calm and focused while armed agents looked on, four feet away.
  • The ACLU advises hospitals to let ICE agents into any areas that are open to the general public. An individual’s hospital room is not one of them—however, if the patient is taken into federal custody even after they are admitted to a medical center, the government bears legal responsibility for their care.

• UnitedHealth Group deployed “aggressive strategies” to get higher-paying diagnoses for their Medicare Advantage beneficiaries, per a recent Senate report first covered by The Wall Street Journal.

  • The Journal previously attributed $8.7 billion in 2021 payments to insurer-added diagnoses. UnitedHealth initially denied the allegations.
  • However, according to Monday’s Senate report, the company used AI to search for additional potential diagnoses in patient records and gave doctors bonuses for weighing boosted diagnoses.
  • The Justice Department’s investigations into UnitedHealth Group are ongoing, and the report did not make any recommendations for reconciliation.

• Last week, OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT Health—and Anthropic has wasted no time in unveiling new capabilities of its own.

  • Anthropic introduced Claude for Healthcare on Sunday, describing it as “a complementary set of tools and resources that allow health care providers, payers, and consumers to use Claude for medical purposes through HIPAA-ready products.”
  • The company is also connecting more scientific platforms to its Life Sciences product, which was initially launched in October.

• One in eight U.S. families spent more than 10 percent of their income on health care in 2024, according to a new report from the Center for Economic Policy and Research.

  • The average U.S. family spent $3,960 on health care in 2024, while one in 10 working families paid more than $14,800 out-of-pocket on insurance premiums and other medical expenses throughout the year.
  • These are conservative estimates, according to the Center, and are expected to get worse in the coming years as rising health care costs continue to outpace inflation.

Pulse Check

Executive perspectives on key industry issues

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Earlier this month, I connected with Bruce Broussard, who served more than 11 years as CEO of Humana before stepping down in 2024. In total, he spent more than 30 years of his career as the CFO or CEO for a public health care company, gaining experience in virtually all areas of the industry—from payers to providers, pharmaceuticals to cancer research.

Find a portion of our conversation below, which covers Broussard’s decision to leave Humana and his thoughts on how AI could affect health care companies’ brand reputations.

Editor’s Note: Transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

So, Bruce, you're no longer in the crazy rat race of running a public company. What do your days look like now?

Well, I stepped down mainly because I find health care is at an interesting time. I find that payment model changes that are coming will be more prevention-oriented [while] quality-oriented and outcomes-oriented [goals] continue to be an important part of the payment models. I think the recent examples that this administration has come out with are the perfect indication that [this trend] will continue.

The second thing is, I think technology will continue to change the trajectory of health care going forward, and that technology is both in devices and information velocity. In addition, there’s obviously the AI aspect of that.

The third thing I feel—and this has probably been accelerated by COVID—is that the population is becoming much more desiring of convenient care, and is really embracing care that's not institutional, whether it's in the home or using technology. They’re really looking to have an experience that's much more normal in different parts of their daily life, whether it's how they shop today, how they order their food, how they engage with their friends. I just feel that this demographic change is going to push the change in health care.

So to answer your question, I stepped down in a planned fashion. Five years ago, I mentioned to the board that I had five more years in me, and really wanted to go into the private world and work with private companies. There's a range of things [that I do now], all the way from investing to working side by side with the management team to being part of private equity firms that also invest, but are looking for people to help with the management of it.

I also sit on boards. I sit on the [HP Inc.] board. I sit on the Washington Planning Board. I sit on the Cleveland Clinic board, and am chairperson for the Trust for the National Mall.

You’ve seen so many sides of health care throughout your career, so give our readers some perspective. How do providers need to consider AI differently than payers, and vice versa?

Both sides today are starting out with what they feel has a return, and that is in the administrative area. Administration is probably the most go-to area for all parts of health care. [I’m] not saying that there is not a focus on the clinical side; I think there are a number of great things that are happening on the clinical side. But the lower risk, for both using the technology and paying for the technology, is [in the administrative use cases].

For the provider, I find that they've started out much more oriented to the billing and collecting side, as a result of small pennies making big differences there. On the payer side, it's much more oriented to areas that are causing a lot of time and processing: areas like preauthorization and call centers.

I think pharma is probably using [AI] in a more advanced fashion, clinically, to help with the research programs that they have and to digest the voluminous information that comes out of [those programs] to become much more thoughtful on the research side.

I missed your panel at HLTH back in October, but I did read the panel description. It mentions that in the AI age, executives need to “be able to admit that they’re not the smartest person in the room.” I know you didn't write that statement, but do you agree with it? How else do executives need to shift their mindsets with the advent of new technology?

Even before AI, [leaders needed to be] able to organize a diverse set of people to ask really good questions and utilize that [expertise] as a way to come to a conclusion, whether that is solving a problem or setting a strategy or whatever it may be. And I find that [it is important for leaders to have] the ability to be humble and be quiet and listen through asking questions, and be able to establish a group of people that complement each other and don't look the same—whether it’s culturally, but as importantly, technically and vocationally.

I find that is not a uniqueness to AI, [that] breadth of leadership that is required for you to be successful in an environment that has been changing for the last 20 years. I would say that it [has] just become a little more complicated because you are dealing with the complexity of [AI] models. You're dealing with the complexity of what agents do. You're dealing with the complexity of data access interoperability, especially in health care. And then on top of that, you're dealing with infrastructural needs that are much different than the infrastructural needs of installing a general ledger or a billing system or something like that, and you need really smart people around the table that both understand it, but then can be able to create a strategy and then execute on that strategy. And I think the leader is more of the conductor, as opposed to the expert.

You mentioned that you serve on multiple boards and work with a number of private companies at the moment. How are the leaders of those companies approaching AI implementation, and what are some of their main concerns right now?

Some companies I work with, that's their whole business model, where AI is at the heart of it and is driving their model.

The larger organizations will take a number of years to transition. And again, I think they're starting out in areas they feel comfortable with and then evolving over time to areas that are more complex. That approach, especially for the larger companies, is really [because] it’s more complicated [for them]. You have a business that you're running today that is doing quite well and earning an adequate return, or trying to earn an adequate return, and you don't want to break the business. So you have a need to focus on the here and now.

The second thing is that you do have a complicated infrastructure that has been built over the years. That infrastructure creates challenges relative to data access, data formatting and, in general, just being able to [format] the data in a way that the models will be able to utilize it.

The third thing is that you do have a risk, especially as a larger company—how is AI being used, is it biased, is it compliance-oriented, and all the other things that people will start to criticize. These larger companies have to be slower and more methodical on the use of AI, pick the appropriate use cases that they feel comfortable with, and test and learn.

And then lastly, I think you have a Humana. We had some 70,000 people [within the organization]. And that size requires you to have a change management within the organization relative to people understanding it, people not being threatened by it, people embracing it, people learning it, bringing the technicians in and incorporating them into the operations. It's significant change management that goes on.

I would say the early-stage companies are the most agile and the most advanced in the usage [of AI] because they're only looking forward. They don't have a platform, but they're not having to change. The larger companies are having to change. And in addition, [they’re] continuing to work to ensure that their brand is not hurt as a result of something they didn't think about that could have a compliance or public impact.

Could you expand on how AI could impact a brand’s reputation, and what steps you see leaders taking to mitigate that risk?

I mean, you saw just over the last year or two on the payer side with preauthorization that AI is making clinical decisions. Some of the government officials have made a big deal out of it. And then, in addition, lawyers have used it as a litigation platform. And you’ll see this happening more the closer [AI gets] to the person, especially in health care, in the clinical areas.

But you also see it in vehicles, and I always get a kick out of when a person is injured in an autonomous vehicle of some type, and that hits the news. But then when you compare the number of people that are impacted by autonomous cars versus the [higher number of people who are impacted by human] daily drivers, it's a completely different [public] reaction, because it's technology and not a person.

What I find is anything that is going to have some personal harm to an individual, whether it’s a service or some kind of personal harm as a result of a decision that's being made, I find that to be the highest risk of the degree.

That’s why [in health care,] AI priorities are more on the administrative side, where those risks are much less. The second area I do find is that if your models are built with a significant amount of bias in them, or if your models are going to be built off of unverified data, there’s a higher likelihood of a brand problem associated with that. So the verification of data is also important.

The closer the area of application is to an individual or a decision that impacts an individual, I find that to be higher risk from a brand point of view. And anything in the model that could be viewed as negative relative to biasness or inaccuracies, I find these to be high-risk areas as well.

C-Suite Shuffles

Where health care leaders are coming and going

• eMed Population Health snagged Tom Brady as its inaugural chief wellness officer—yes, the football star.

  • Brady will help the digital health company “raise awareness of a more accountable approach for employers to offer medically supervised GLP-1 management,” according to a news release shared with Newsweek.
  • There’s not enough evidence to declare it a trend, but I’ve noticed more health care companies turning to celebrities to aid with advocacy efforts. I spoke with Rob Lowe about his partnership with Lilly in the fall.

• Mike Ramseier, president of Kaiser Permanente’s Colorado market since 2019, has been promoted to an enterprise role as senior vice president of national health plan markets.

  • Before joining the Oakland, California-based system, he held leadership roles in the insurance space with Beacon Health Options and Anthem.

• HHS tapped two new leaders for the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel this week, Reuters reported. The committee has been under construction since HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., abruptly fired all 17 standing members in June.

  • The appointees, Dr. Adam Urato and Dr. Kimberly Biss, are both obstetricians who spoke out against COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, according to The Washington Post. Biss is also a senior fellow at the Independent Medical Alliance, an organization that has falsely linked coronavirus vaccines to rising infant mortality rates. And she has referred to herself as an “anti-vaxxer” on at least two podcasts between 2022 and 2023, per the Post.
  • In other HHS news, Dr. Gary Gibbons is retiring as the director of the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute on January 31. Upon his departure, 15 of the NIH’s 27 institutes will be under interim leadership.

Executive Edge

How health care execs are managing their own health

Millions of Americans are currently participating in Dry January—the annual, increasingly popular practice of abstaining from alcohol during the first month of the year. But 27 percent of people who attempt the challenge will not complete it, according to a new survey from Oar Health, a digital health platform offering prescription pharmaceutical interventions for alcohol use disorder.

This Friday, January 16, is expected to be “Quitter’s Day,” as the average Dry January attempt lasts 15 days and roughly half of people quit on a Friday.

In summary, if you’re feeling the new-year motivation wear off, you’re not alone.

For this week’s Executive Edge, I’d like to share an encouraging thought leadership piece from Dr. Victor Raul Castillo Mantilla, CEO and president of Hospital Internacional de Colombia-FCV, a specialty hospital in Latin America. He is also a member of Newsweek’s CEO Circle.

In this article, Mantilla discusses the challenges of building a specialized hospital in the historically underserved region and explains how he overcame them. It’s an uplifting read for anyone struggling with those mid-January blues (which, in my opinion, are far worse than the Sunday Scaries).

Here are a few quotes from Mantilla’s piece that serve as strong reminders to keep the faith and trust in the possibilities. I encourage you to check out the full article at Newsweek; it’s a timely one for all health care stakeholders, regardless of geography.

• “Limited access, system fragmentation and reliance on imported models showed us—time and again—that what was missing was not knowledge, but determination. From that understanding came our conviction: If the solutions did not exist, we had to create them.”
• “From the outset, we understood that if we aimed to deliver the highest level of cardiovascular care, we had to benchmark ourselves against the best in the world. Declaring standards was not enough—we had to prove them, sustain them and continuously elevate them."
• “We would not trade excellence for convenience. Even when resources were limited, we chose rigorous training, demanding clinical protocols and continuous improvement.”
• “On October 30, 1997, we took a defining step with the inauguration of our first hospital center: the HIC Cardiovascular Institute. That day, while standing alongside Columbia’s then-president, I understood that this dream—so often questioned for seeming “too ambitious”—was no longer an illusion but instead, a project of national interest. As the ribbon was cut, images crossed my mind: children who had undergone heart surgery under precarious conditions, international trips in search of alliances, countless nights of financial planning and repeated insistence that “it can’t be done.””

This is a preview of the January 15 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox on Thursday mornings.

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