My Top 10 Favorite Quotes of 2025

Each year as we approach the holidays I go back over all the interviews I’ve done and webinars I have attended with a sense of gratitude that I get the opportunity to interview so many interesting clinical and operational leaders who are having such a big impact on improving the nation’s health systems. As I have done in years past, I have picked out 10 quotes that I found thought-provoking, and have provided a brief setup to help provide context. I hope the quotes intrigue some readers enough to make them want to go back and read the full interviews. 

1. I think my favorite interview of the year was with Sachin H. Jain, CEO of California-based SCAN Group and SCAN Health Plan, one of the nation's largest nonprofit Medicare Advantage plans. I asked him about a recent Forbes opinion piece he’d written about the concept of “ethical erosion.”

“When we talk about leadership in healthcare, we talk about the titles that people have, and what they sold their companies for. We don't actually talk about whether they made anything better or whether they did the right thing even when no one was looking. And did they do the right thing even when it might be the wrong thing for their financial bottom line? And in this time when healthcare is so complicated and when there are so many different actors and rent seekers in the system, we need more people who step up and do the right thing. Frankly, it’s the only protection we have from the healthcare system becoming even more of a profit center than it already is for people.”

2. At a time when many health systems are downplaying their health equity efforts, another interview that stood out to me was with Whitney Haggerson, M.H.A., Providence’s vice president of health equity and Medicaid, who described a fellowship program aimed at embedding health equity into daily operations. She said they are now expanding that fellowship model:

“Internally, we've taken this fellowship model and we've adapted it, and now we have a fellowship that's specifically focused on delivering success in value-based care. So we are taking the model of adult learning in a fellowship type setting and applying it to other bodies of work. I think those are my three goals: to be able to scale the health equity fellowship, see it applied externally with other healthcare systems, and then also take the concept of a fellowship and apply it to other challenges that have eluded healthcare all along.”

3. In discussing a partnership with Humana to improve payer-provider interoperability, Michael Westover, Providence’s vice president of population health informatics, first described the current state of affairs:

“The EHRs have these big reporting databases — ours with Epic has 60,000 tables in it. Someone has to go write a query, and that takes a long time; then the data is wrong, and you go back and forth, and then you automate that query, and then two years later, the query breaks; then the person who wrote it doesn't work here anymore, and you have to go figure it out. That’s not the way to manage a business, but that's how data exchange is usually done right now.”

4. In an in-depth interview, HarmonyCares’ Will Robinson outlined how high-needs ACOs helped CMS identify and address huge spikes in wound care spending:

“Medicare has had both a payment and a coverage problem for these products. On payment, Medicare has paid for them like physician-administered drugs and biologics, even though most of the products are not regulated that way. As a result it led to explosive growth in product launch prices, total Medicare spending, and incentives for providers on the ground to use the highest-cost products. And patients and Medicare are paying the price. We see this with our vulnerable patients, some of whom have had multiple millions of dollars worth of skin substitutes applied with at best suspect clinical benefit.”

5. Nina Kottler, M.D., associate chief medical officer for clinical AI at Radiology Partners, discussed with me the evolution of AI in radiology since 2021. She explained why she thinks so many hospitals are using AI superficially so far:

 “I think part of the reason why is not the technology. What’s really important about it is the integration of that technology into their systems and all of the change management that has to go into educating the end users to make sure they know how to use it.”

6. Lara Jehi, M.D., chief research information officer at Cleveland Clinic, spoke to me about a partnership with a startup called Dyania Health to accelerate clinical trial recruitment by using medically trained large language models (LLMs). Using traditional methods, Cleveland Clinic was only meeting 51% of its enrollment goals across its clinical trials portfolio. First, Jehi described the inefficiency of the traditional clinical trial recruitment process:

“It is a very inefficient, archaic, frustrating, painful, excruciating exercise for everybody involved — all the way from pharmaceutical companies who are funding this exercise to healthcare systems who are trying to execute it, to research coordinators, patients, you name it. I mean, the whole cycle is very inefficient and slow because it is very manual, and it is very manpower-intensive. When you are 50% efficient and that is one-third of your whole volume for clinical research, that’s not a good place to be.”

7. Maulin Shah, M.D., CMIO of Washington-based Providence health system, described how he and colleagues set up a program that includes randomized trials to help them understand the impact of new technology deployments internally:

“We're not only doing this for research. We're really doing this to understand the impact internally, and not get persuaded by observational, fun data that people show to say that this has a clear impact, and now let's scale. We're doing this in areas where we have high-value, high-impact tools that we think will make a big difference. Let's randomize, let's do formal studies to drive our business, in addition to contributing to the literature.”

8. Fawad Butt, CEO of Penguin Ai, spoke with me about payers and provider organizations building AI agents to do battle with each other:

“That war has started. The agent wars are here, right? It is not this futuristic thing that's going to happen. It's happening today. I sat with the CEO of one of the largest regional health plans in the country. He said what they are seeing is that, in some ways, the providers have adopted agents a lot quicker than the payer side, because the payers’ processes are more complex. In one scenario, he said, a small network of providers that used to do 5% appeals on denials is now doing 100% appeals on every denial the health plan is sending them. He believes the provider group has an agent on their side, and the health plan has eight people on its side. So how are they going to win that?”

9. Kristen Valdes, CEO of b.well Connected Health, spoke about the concept of shifting regulatory certification from EHRs to APIs:

“The overwhelming majority of EHRs today have APIs that will show you what availability exists for an appointment. But unlike Epic, which is much further along, they don't allow you to actually book the appointment through that API. So we need that regulatory approach that says everyone can compete on a level playing field, which is where innovation is going to emerge, but we need to standardize it so that consumers can have a more holistic picture of what they're after.”

10. I got a chance to speak with Tom Spiegel, M.D., chief quality officer of UChicago Medicine, about their partnership with MDClone to create de-identified and synthetic data and the impact of the shift to a self-service approach to data sets for research. 

“We started off with a small cohort of our champions, who are now out talking about it with their colleagues. We’re going to be doing this campus-wide. And by campus I mean not just the medical center, but also the business school, the public policy school — all across the campus of University of Chicago, to say, hey, the healthcare system has data that you can use in a de-identified, synthetic way to ask and answer your questions and really open up the doors to research.”