Ebola, AI, and Prevention as the Real Cost Cure

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Two outbreaks are spreading right now.

An Ebola strain with no approved vaccine and a hantavirus that has crossed dozens of borders before anyone connected the dots.

Both were caught late and that lag is expensive in lives and in dollars.

Dr. Ashish Jha, former White House COVID-19 response coordinator and now co-founder and CEO of BioRadar, joins me to connect early detection to the cost and quality levers health system leaders pull every day.

The through line is simple and underused.

Prevention is not only good medicine, it is one of the strongest cost control strategies in healthcare.

Right now, as we are recording this, there is an Ebola outbreak moving through the Democratic Republic of Congo and into Uganda, a strain with no approved vaccine.

And by the time anyone identified it, it had already been spreading for weeks.

That gap between when something starts and when we finally see it is the thread running through my guest's entire career and through what he is building now.

It's a real honor to welcome Dr. Ashish Jha, one of the most trusted voices in health care in this country.

You know his work.

He directed groundbreaking research on Ebola.

He led Brown School of Public Health through the pandemic.

And in 2022, President Biden named him White House COVID-19 Response Coordinators, calling him one of the leading public health experts in America.

You've seen a lot of him lately.

He's been on the news on these outbreaks.

And at the same time, he wrote a nine-part series in the Boston Globe called Cost Cure on why American health care costs so much and how to fix it.

Today, he is also co-founder and CEO of BioRadar, building the infrastructure to detect biological threats early.

What ties this all together is one idea, catch it early, act before the crisis, stop paying for the damage you could have prevented.

That is a public health principle.

It turns out it is also a cost and quality strategy.

And that is what we're going to talk about today.