AI in Healthcare | What Comes Next Ep. 16

“Sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin.”

Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman of Strategy (Feb 2025)

A complete reversal. The man who said hold Bitcoin at any cost now leads a company doing the opposite: as prices fell, Strategy began selling its Bitcoin in 2026 to fund dividend payments after a $12.54 billion first-quarter loss.

State of the Economy: inflation is rising, up for a third straight month, while gas prices are falling and the S&P 500 is up roughly 9% through the first half of 2026. Unemployment edged down, though largely because more people left the labor force.

National Heart Centre Singapore built CARDIA-GM, an AI platform that reads cardiac MRI to measure post-heart-attack scarring and microvascular obstruction in under 60 seconds at 95% accuracy. Validation is accepted by the Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance. A 12-month buildout targets deployment across multiple Singapore medical centres. Healthcare Asia

Anthropic unveiled Claude Science, an AI research workbench bundling 60-plus tools and high-performance computing to speed drug discovery, now in beta for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users. It also began an in-house program targeting neglected diseases. Rivals are moving too: OpenAI signed Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Moderna. Inc.

Wharton and Penn researchers built a decision-support AI that forecasts demand and allocates scarce medicines across Sierra Leone, published in Nature. A pilot lifted medicine consumption 19%, and 32% in the poorest clinics. Now national, it supports 70-plus products for two million women and children on $30 monthly. EurekAlert

Time's 2026 Most Influential Companies named ten in health and life sciences, including Novo Nordisk, Epic, Tempus, and Medtronic, spanning GLP-1s, health IT, AI diagnostics, and gene editing. No acute-care health system made the cut, a signal that influence is concentrating among drugmakers, device firms, and technology platforms, not hospitals. Becker's

Elevance Health wired more than $342 million to CMS after the agency threatened to suspend enrollment over years of billing noncompliance on unsupported diagnosis codes. The company, which denies wrongdoing, estimates total liability near $1 billion. It signals intensifying federal scrutiny of Medicare Advantage risk-adjustment across every major payer. Health Care un-covered

Medicare Advantage now covers 55% of eligible beneficiaries, 35.2 million people, but growth is decelerating and the market is reshuffling: Humana added 1.3 million enrollees while UnitedHealth shed 647,000 and Elevance lost 346,000. MedPAC pegs MA overpayments at $76 billion this year, keeping payment reform in policymakers' sights. KFF

At least 21 health systems have dropped or are exiting Medicare Advantage contracts in 2026, including Mayo Clinic, Mount Sinai, and Memorial Hermann, citing prior authorization denials and slow reimbursement. With MA covering more than half of seniors, these breaks threaten patient access and pressure insurers to fix the friction. Becker's

Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson and ADP's Nela Richardson now track the damage live: employment for workers 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles is falling 3.8% a year. The split favors augmentation over automation. For health systems, the warning is a thinning talent pipeline feeding tomorrow's clinical and operational leaders. Fortune

Microsoft's Satya Nadella says there should be as many AI models as firms, arguing a company is a learning system that cannot outsource its learning. He warns model concentration carries economic risk. For health systems, it sharpens the build-versus-buy question around proprietary clinical and claims data. Business Insider

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says the company cut AI spending nearly in half while token usage kept climbing, not through caps but through cheaper open-weight defaults, smart routing, and caching that lifted one tool's hit rate from 5% to 60%. A playbook for health systems scaling AI without runaway cost. X

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