AI in Health Care: Who Gets Left Behind?
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
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The speaker reports that many healthcare systems and insurance companies learned about bias from the Obermeyer algorithm but the core lesson is that using healthcare expenditure as a proxy for health needs fails because patients face barriers to care and underutilization, not lack of need.
The speaker reports that a large portion of healthcare AI investment is directed toward operations-side functions like billing, coding, and revenue rather than patient care delivery or closing care gaps.
“it was argued earlier in our series that most healthcare ai a large portion of it is invested in the operations side back room the the billing coding and revenue functions you know rather than focusing on delivering a care or finding unique ways to close gaps like you just described”
The speaker reports that assessing intersectionality of patient groups (e.g., gender, ability) and setting thresholds to trigger investigation or correction is important when evaluating AI tools in healthcare systems.
Health care's AI future is being built right now. The open question is “for whom?” Dr. Uché Blackstock — emergency physician, former associate professor at NYU School of Medicine, founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, and author of The New York Times bestseller “Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine” — joins host Chip Kahn to argue that AI governance should be shaped not only by regulators and review boards, but by the communities the tools are meant to serve. Dr. Blackstock explains why she is skeptical of technology that presents itself as neutral, how average performance can conceal unequal harm, and what equitable AI design would require. She also makes the business case for equity and describes trust as infrastructure that can be designed into the system. Will the AI revolution reach the patients American health care has historically failed — or pass them by? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
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