Healthcare’s Hottest Trends: AI, Layoffs, and a Measles Comeback Tour
Written by Dr Nick on March 3, 2025
This month’s episode of “News You Can Use” on HealthcareNOWRadio features news from the month of February 2025
News You Can Use with your Hosts Dr Craig Joseph and Dr Nick van Terheyden
The show that gives you a quick insight into the latest news, twists, turns and debacles going on in healthcare with my friend and co-host Craig Joseph, MD (@CraigJoseph) Chief Medical Officer at Nordic Consulting Partners and myself, where every diagnosis comes with a side of humor. We hope you stay curious, stay engaged, and keep seeking the truth in healthcare in a world that thrives on information.
Buckle up as we dive into the ER of excitement, the ICU of irrationality, and the waiting room of wacky wisdom in this month’s show that features a review of:
- Vive 2025
- Measles outbreak
- Teleladoc Train wreck
- F/U – should AI use come with a mandatory disclaimer?
- Him & Hers Crash and burn – no more compounding
- United Healthcare Government Suit on Denials
Ah, conferences—the land of networking, overpriced badges, and in this case, free food that actually wasn’t terrible. Vive brought the usual tech buzz, and if you weren’t talking about AI, were you even at the conference? Every booth, every session, and every napkin had some AI angle, but the organizers definitely nailed the logistics. No wandering the halls like a lost child looking for a sandwich. But amidst the excitement, a whisper went around—one big-name vendor allegedly laid off half their developers. Not because business was bad, but because AI had made them too efficient. Turns out, if AI can crank out code in an hour instead of two days, companies start questioning why they’re paying humans. Who knew developers would code themselves out of jobs?
Measles Comeback Tour
Meanwhile, in news that makes doctors collectively facepalm, measles is back. Yes, that measles—the one we had effectively eradicated with a vaccine that people are now inexplicably avoiding. With an R number of 18, this virus spreads faster than healthcare buzzwords at a tech conference. Pediatricians who had never seen a case in their entire careers are now getting a refresher course, all thanks to some people choosing YouTube over immunology textbooks. What’s next—polio? A resurgence of leeches as a primary care treatment? At this rate, we might as well bring back scurvy.
Telehealth Train Wreck
And just when you thought things couldn’t get messier, the telehealth industry decided to implode. One big-name company (we won’t say who, but if you Google “telehealth disaster,” you’ll find it) allegedly used AI to ghostwrite therapy sessions. Imagine pouring your heart out to what you think is a licensed therapist, only to realize it’s ChatGPT in a trench coat. AI may be great for generating text, but “pressing Ctrl+V on patient emotions” probably isn’t the future we were hoping for. As leadership bails and billions vanish, the real question is—was this ever about patient care, or just another Silicon Valley fever dream?
We hope you enjoy our take on the latest news and developments in healthcare and want to help you keep untangling the web of information, dodging the sensational pitfalls, and emerging victorious, albeit a little dizzy, on the other side. In the end, the stories we uncover, and the discussions we ignite, all shape the narrative of our shared future. We want to hear from you especially if you have topics covered or questions you’d like answered. You can reach out directly via the contact form on my website, or send a message on LinkedIn to Craig or me.
Until next week keep solving healthcare’s mysteries before they become your emergencies
Listen live at 4:00 AM, 12:00 Noon or 8:00 PM ET, Monday through Friday for the next week at HealthcareNOW Radio. After that, you can listen on demand (See podcast information below.) Join the conversation on Twitter at #TheIncrementalist.
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Raw Transcript
Nick van Terheyden
welcome to The month of February. I’m Dr Nick, and I’m Dr Craig. This week, we’ll be dissecting the latest healthcare news, unraveling the twists and turns and making sense of at least some of the debacles. Just
Craig Joseph
remember, life’s a lot like a breaking news story, unpredictable, often absurd and occasionally leaves you wondering if it’s all just a cosmic prank.
Nick van Terheyden
This week, we take a look at him and hers and the United Healthcare problems afoot,
Craig Joseph
and we dive into the measles outbreak and the teledoc train wreck.
Nick van Terheyden
But first off, this week, we have Vive, which both you and I attended. So that was a new experience. It’s been a while since we’ve both been at a conference together. In fact, maybe it’s been a while since you’ve been at a conference, is it? I’ve
Craig Joseph
been to conferences, but normally, for security reasons, you and I are not supposed to be in the same place at the same time. But that we overrode that we have insurance for that. I believe, I think there’s Lloyds of London. I think you arranged it. Key man, yeah. Key man, that’s what it is. Yeah, it was a good it was a good conference. It’s, it’s kind of developing. I think it only started three or four years ago.
Nick van Terheyden
Well, I’ve certainly been, I remember going to the first one. I couldn’t tell you which one it was, but it was a sort of speaker, was
Craig Joseph
Miami Beach, I believe was that the Long Beach. I think it was, I think
Nick van Terheyden
it was, I remember that very well, because that was, I think part of the boost it got was everybody was so desperate to get out of the house.
Craig Joseph
Yeah, I had to go somewhere warm. And it was warm.
Nick van Terheyden
And, you know, they had, they had a good concert too. I got the preview to that.
Craig Joseph
Yeah. Well, what did you What did you learn at five?
Nick van Terheyden
Well, I learned that AI is like a keyword in everything that people are talking about, selling, showing, doing. I think it was almost impossible to find anything that didn’t have aI involved in it. But I’m gonna let me start with a couple of the positives. First of all, I think they do a really good job. Number one, you know the free food or food included in your registration. And the registration is not cheap, to be clear, but you know, they include it, so there’s none of this horsing around trying to find food, getting you know, the sense that has to be better, particularly for what normally shows up, the food is pretty good, at least, that was my experience. Yep, and you don’t have to leave. It’s all in the hall, so it keeps everybody there. Part two of that is they put everything in there. They’ve done a really good job with the what do you call them, the stages and the various places. And shockingly, you can go sit in that area, listen, hear very effectively. But if you step outside of the zone, it’s it doesn’t transmit. And that’s really clever sound management. So that’s a, you know, smart thing to do, but importantly, it keeps you on the whole floors. So there’s no, you know, trooping off going to sessions. The place turns into a morgue at certain times. And, you know, would turn into a morgue at lunchtime or dinner time. So all of that was good. I thought, you know, certainly some of the sessions, as somebody else pointed out, the there was sort of mini sessions inside of which one of them was an AI, which was always, not a single time I was there that it wasn’t overflowing. So I think they misplaced, you know, the focal point for anything. They should have put that one of the largest stages in the corner. I overall, I had a good time. I had and it was great to see I saw people went to, you know, some of the events, they were a little bit chilly. I’ve got to say, I’m last time I was there for an event, I think it was vive I can remember riding around on scooters. It was that mild. That was not happening. In fact, I was somewhat cold when I was going between the hotel and the. Conference center. What about you?
Craig Joseph
It was very cold and it was snowing, so which I don’t expect and should not be allowed by law in in Nashville, I thought it was I thought it was a good conference. I agree with you that artificial intelligence and large language models seem to be the talk of the town amongst and we’re talking about healthcare, you know, digital companies, some of which were startups, and some of which were more, more advanced. One thing I will say that I did not expect, and this is all rumor, but I believe it to be directionally true. At the very least, I one of the, one of the bigger vendors that was there, and again, I shall not name because this is not confirmed, but they had previous about a week prior to the conference, had laid off half of their developers. Wow, that’s what I had heard from a highly placed source, half of the developers. Why? Deep Throat?
Nick van Terheyden
No source, that is, that
Craig Joseph
was not the source. No, they it wasn’t that business was bad. It was that business was great and that they didn’t need the number of software developers, software engineers, that they had to do the work because of
Nick van Terheyden
AI, right? Oh, my god, yeah.
Craig Joseph
So, so we’re and this is shocking to me. I have a My degree is in computer science from 1000 years ago, so it’s not that helpful now,
Nick van Terheyden
assembly code. I didn’t know that. I did.
Craig Joseph
I did, actually, I did. I wanted my children to become programmers, like everyone I thought, zero out of the four took me up on that, and now developers are kind of developing their way out of jobs. Because instead of me spending two days develop, you know, writing some code, as long as I kind of know what I want to do and I know how things work, I can have an AI do it in an hour, hour and a half. And so their developers, their top developers, are so efficient now with the code generation that they didn’t need as many. And to me, like that’s that’s amazing and scary and turning everyone’s lives upside down. That’s,
Nick van Terheyden
I did not know or hear that. That’s, I guess, actually not surprising. I think the one caution I would have around this is what I’ve heard from programmers that you know understand code of today, which you know would be a lift for me, because I’m like you, is that the quality of the code that’s output is pretty scrappy. And, you know, it’s worth having tight code if you can, for efficiency, although, you know, maybe we just show or throw a quantum computer if you saw the new state that’s been published by Microsoft Research. Absolutely fascinating. Sounds like sci fi, but apparently, you know the basis of potential qubits. It doesn’t matter anymore. We’re just going to throw more at it so, but wow, that’s, that’s quite the thing. And did you stay till Wednesday? I’m curious. I did. Oh, was it? Was it empty.
Craig Joseph
It was about half empty. Yeah, a lot of people left early because there were supposed to be a snowstorm on Wednesday morning, which never really materialized. And so a lot of people left early for no reason at all, but, but hey, more food for the rest of us. Dr, Nick,
Nick van Terheyden
well, and it was good food too, and good drink too. I mean, it’s this. This is, you know, well serviced experience. Anyway, it was, it was good, and, I think, content, you know, not bad from a conference standpoint. So moving on. I can’t even believe I’m going to say this, but measles outbreak.
Craig Joseph
Yeah, measles, measles.
Nick van Terheyden
I I’m just, I am beside myself. And to be clear, you and I sort of hail back from period of practicing medicine. I personally, I think I may well have seen measles, but I don’t recall it. But my wife, who was a nurse midwife, health visitor, she saw measles, and she saw, you know, severe impacted measles encephalitis, with, you know, crippling, ongoing impacts. And here we are with a entirely preventable disease, which I happen to know the r number, it is 18. I can’t remember exactly where COVID Lay, but I think it was like 1.3 or something. Flu was 1.2 I don’t know, but don’t quote me on that, but I know that Measles is 18, which means for every one person who gets measles. So 18 folks are going to get infected by them. That is really infectious.
Craig Joseph
Yeah, it’s very easy to get measles in my pediatric in my time as a pediatrician, I never saw measles, never, never, not as a resident at a big Children’s Hospital in a big city never saw measles. And that’s, I don’t think that’s luck. That’s because it’s a vaccine preventable disease. If you get your MMR vaccine, you’re not, you’re you’re not going to get it. And just that simple. And so now we have an outbreak in in Texas and and it’s we know why we’re getting these things. Because people are electing not to get themselves or their children vaccinated. This
Nick van Terheyden
is, I thought you were going to say people are electing and I had a different No. This is
Craig Joseph
pretty straightforward science if you don’t get vaccinated. And if let’s, let’s be clear, you know, if there’s a small number of, and there always have been a small number of people who don’t get vaccinated against some of these diseases, yet, yet, they’re protected by the vast majority of us who do get vaccinated, because they can’t get a disease, even if they have no protection against it. They can’t get a disease if I don’t give if I don’t, if the people around them don’t, yeah, and so and so, you know, beasles is back, and who knows what else is going to be back if we continue to not take a polio. I guess Polio is next. Maybe, dear Lord,
Nick van Terheyden
I’ve seen the consequences of it, but I didn’t see anybody with it. It’s Wow. All right. So I think the next thing on our list is the tele dot train wreck for a company that was so it was flying high, certainly in during the pandemic when you know they leading, at least appeared to be leading in terms of delivery of virtual services and so forth. But boy, have we seen I’m not even sure where the stock price is, but the reveals that keep on coming, not least of all, this use of AI to replace real therapists and, you know, gimmicks to inflate the financial whilst the business is sort of cratering. Is, you know, not unheard of, but now it seems like, you know the senior leaders are bailing, and you know we’re seeing multiple folks rotate through, and they’ve managed to burn through. I’m going to say billions. I think that’s right. Just shocking to me that we’re at this point. This is another I don’t know what was the puppet that was in the football advert for delivery. I can’t read the sock puppet. It’s, it feels like another one of those at this point.
Craig Joseph
Well, I don’t know the name of the sock puppet, but you know who I’m talking about. Don’t you think I think I do, I think I do,
Nick van Terheyden
van or something. I don’t know anyway. It doesn’t matter. I think
Craig Joseph
the report that I read about some tele doc. Maybe it was a lawsuit or, or a patient, many patient complaints, but that that they were getting, patients were getting were doing kind of virtual counseling or, or having some sort of psychology therapy, but and they, they started getting messages when they thought they were interacting in real time with a human that looked very much like they were being generated by a computer with flowery language, and, and, and, yeah. And it turned out that some of their employees or or agents who were licensed, who are licensed therapists were we’re using something either chat GPT, or something like chat GPT to to to print responses, to generate responses, and then just copied and pasted them into the into The chat, into the conversation they were having with the with the patient online. And that’s a no no on an 85 different for 85 different reasons. That’s something that you should not do.
Nick van Terheyden
Wow, just shaking my head. Can’t see it, can’t you can’t hear it, but it’s true,
Craig Joseph
yeah, but imagine being the patient. And you know, you thought you’re having a conversation with a human, and in fact, what that human is maybe having three conversations at that one time, and and, and leveraging an large language model to generate text to paste. Into your conversation, not not, if accurate, if true, which I sounds like it is true. It’s not a good look. So
Nick van Terheyden
you know, following on from that, one of the things that I’ve seen repeatedly, that you know folks have been talking about is, should AI generated content. We could say programming language in one instance. But you know, for things that are outward facing come with at least a subtext of warning.
Craig Joseph
You know, I think it depends
Nick van Terheyden
or disclosure. At a minimum,
Craig Joseph
you know, it’s, it’s becoming, so it’s kind of, it’s reminds me of the calculator, you know, the calculator controversy from calcuone. Yeah, exactly. From, from, from years ago, if, if, if you didn’t learn how to do, you know, if you weren’t really, if you couldn’t become proficient at adding, subtracting and and doing other sorts of math, either in your head or on paper, then something, you wouldn’t be able to deal with life, right? That this was a concern. And then so when calculators were first started being used. Of course, you couldn’t use them in school. And nowadays, no one’s tested on being able to multiply. I don’t think large numbers, and because no one does that, is it going to be, are we going to rapidly get to the point where it’s just assumed that you are leveraging tools like these, and and and to require me to tell you about that is also maybe requiring me to is it similar to me? You me telling you that I used a calculator?
Nick van Terheyden
Well, you use Grammarly or spell check or any of those? Yeah,
Craig Joseph
exactly, exactly. I don’t know. I agree with you for once. Oh my gosh. You know, I get it. It’s funny because I see this now with in some of the electronic health records or the patient portals, when a physician leverages an AI to help generate a response to a question you might have posed, most organizations now are putting that mandatory disclosure in there, saying some are part, all are part of this came from an LL and and I personally as a patient, I’m not sure I want that like I just want to know I actually, I don’t care who, who who developed this answer was this, the physician from scratch. Was this a medical assistant who queued it up and sent it to the physician who then read it? I just want to know that the person that sent it to me fully stands behind the state
Nick van Terheyden
right, which, you know, one would hope they do. But if you remember the old disclaimer, which, you know, personal, shaking my head favorite, you know, for the signatures for transcribed when that read transcription, the document above has, has been generated or whatever it said and has not been reviewed. And then there’s a signature
Craig Joseph
which is horrible,
Speaker 1
yeah. And so, I don’t know, I can’t see that standing up in a cause of law. No, and this,
Craig Joseph
it’s in the same way that, why do I care that the computer helped create this response to my to my query, I’m assuming that the doctor or nurse who signed it, who sent it, is taking full responsibility for everything in there. Yes, they are, whether they want to be. They are and and so how that text was generated is of no use to me. Now, having said that, I know that that’s I’m probably an outlier and that most people want to know, and they might say, well, I don’t really trust the AI, which, again, fine. But now what? So, so now what? When you get a response from your doctor, and it says that part or all of this might have been generated by an AI, which is the case. Now, what are you going to do with that? What am I supposed to do with that? So, like, should I question that? Now, should I question it? Do I do? I have an automatic response that says, really? Question mark and just
Nick van Terheyden
No, no, I reply and say, Please give me your your response, not the AI response. Yeah, right. But
Craig Joseph
again, you know they’re not telling you that it might be that the doctor got a canned response and just chose to ignore all but the Hello, Craig, you know it doesn’t tell me that. Yeah, they know that, but I don’t know that. And it’s written by a lawyer. It’s not written by a regular person. And yes, I just called lawyers, not regular people. I’ll stand by that statement. I will stand by it.
Nick van Terheyden
Lawsuits on his way, all right, him and hers, so they have been hit pretty hard. I saw their stock. Price plummeted on the news that compounding of GLP ones is now going to be off the table as of, I think, may 2025, and this was, I think, foundational, not just to their business, but pretty much, it would appear, almost all of their business based on the stock price, I guess, to be expected, but I don’t know, what do you think? Well, let’s,
Craig Joseph
let’s give the background medications that are, I think trademarked is the right word. You can’t just take a new medication and figure out how to create it and then start selling it right, because the people that developed it have the right for X number of years because of their trademark being
Nick van Terheyden
a number that keeps getting larger and larger. Yeah, but go on, well that, but
Craig Joseph
that. You know, they spent no millions of dollars in general, creating it. And you can’t just go and copy it however you can in the US, if there’s a shortage of it, if the if the company that owns the patent, or whatever it is that they own, can’t create enough of it to meet demand, then the FDA says anyone can go and just make it Well, that was the case for a lot of these weight loss drugs, and now, as the patent owners have have rushed to make up the their production. We don’t need these third parties anymore. And so hims and hers and many others who’ve made, yeah, it’s not just them, right? No, there are others who have just kind of stepped into that market and said, We will create these drugs for you. Are going to lose that ability, which means they can still remember, theoretically, they weren’t making their money by selling the drugs. Theoretically, they were arranging for a physician or other healthcare professional to evaluate you based on your problems, and if you qualified for some of the meds, you would get them either from the pharmacy, like many of us do, from a drug store, or, in this case, from from the company themselves. And so they can still do the first part, right? I can still call up and say, I have these problems, and someone could say, Yes, we have a solution. It’s a medication. But now, instead of them making the money off of the medication itself, they just have to send a prescription to your local drugstore.
Nick van Terheyden
There’s a big Delta there too. There’s a big difference there
Craig Joseph
in the amount of money that you can make. Yeah, you’re right.
Nick van Terheyden
All right. So finally, United Healthcare, they’ve been in the news a lot, and they’re now subject to a number of ongoing actions based on their Medicare Advantage plan, I think, is under scrutiny for too many denials. I figure I did see the number of or percentage. It’s, I think it’s 20% and the other thing that’s notable about that is that only 1% of denials actually are appealed. And you know, that’s part of the methodology in some of these instances. And then there’s, you know, the general sort of denials, space trouble ahead, as we used to say at Mill.
Craig Joseph
Yeah. Well, and just I translate to take up that point. You know, most, as you just said, 1% whatever the numbers is, very small. Most of these denials are not, are not, are not appealed. But the vast majority that are are
Nick van Terheyden
overturned, overturned. Yeah, so you, you just
Craig Joseph
have to, you have to go to town and appeal these, and then you stand an excellent chance of of of winning.
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah, there’s going to be a cascade. Is this, you know, just the start of action, or is, is this just,
Craig Joseph
you know, if it’s this is one of those, if you incentivize people or companies to do something and then they start doing it very, very, very effectively. And you’re like, whoa, whoa. We didn’t mean to incentivize you that much. I feel like that’s, you know, I fully understand, I fully understand both sides of this equation. And, yeah, yeah, it might be too much of a good thing. Is not such a good thing?
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah, I think anybody that knows me has probably heard me say this. But you know, just for posterity sake, I have told my family that however I end up, whether it’s buried i or, you know, earn or whatever I want follow the money to be, you know, inscribed on whatever it is, because if there was ever a prevailing piece of wisdom that I have learned through the ages, if you want to understand behavior, you need to follow the incentive, and ultimately, mostly the incentive turns out to be money. But there you have it, unfortunately true, we find ourselves at the end of another. Episode exploring Healthcare’s mysteries before they became your emergencies. Until next time, I’m Dr Nick
Craig Joseph
and I’m Dr Craig. You.
