Shows
Doctor AI: The Podcast2026: The Inflection Year for American HealthWhy does 2026 mark an inflection year for American health?
In this episode, Robin Blackstone, MD, offers a spoken companion to her recent systems essay, explaining what has changed and why the current health system can no longer rely on delay, fragmentation, or diffuse responsibility.
Drawing on three converging forces—continuous advisory intelligence, upstream biological intervention, and unavoidable public accountability—this episode explores why new health system architecture is no longer optional, but necessary.
This is not a policy proposal or a technology pitch. It is a systems diagnosis of where American health stands as a...
2026-01-0114 minDoctor AI: The PodcastHow American Medical Care Gets PricedHow American Medical Care Gets Priced
Why does a hospital bill look nothing like a receipt?
Why do identical services cost wildly different amounts—sometimes in the same building?
In this episode of Doctor AI, Dr. Robin Blackstone unpacks the hidden architecture behind American medical pricing. Not the headlines. Not the politics. The machinery.
You’ll hear how billing codes replaced judgment, how committees—not markets—set prices, and how a system designed for accounting quietly came to govern care itself. This is the story of RVUs, CPT codes, negotiated rates, and the unintend...
2025-12-1623 minDoctor AI: The PodcastWhy Faster Medicine Keeps Making the Day Longer
Why Faster Medicine Keeps Making the Day Longer
Medical innovation has made care faster, more precise, and more technologically capable. Procedures take less time. Diagnostics are sharper. Decisions arrive sooner. Yet for many clinicians, the work feels heavier rather than lighter.
This episode examines why.
Rather than focusing on burnout or individual behavior, the discussion looks at the payment structures that shape modern medical work—and how efficiency gains are absorbed instead of released. What appears as acceleration is often the result of a system designed to reward volume, not relief.
This episode serv...
2025-12-1506 minDoctor AI: The PodcastBeing HumanBeing Human looks at the part of medicine the system cannot measure or value: the judgment, empathy, intuition, and deep experience clinicians bring to the bedside. Through stories of patients, surgeons, nurses, pediatricians, and innovators, this episode reveals how the most important work in healthcare is often the least visible to CPT codes and RVUs. Before returning to the machinery of American healthcare, we pause to remember what the system was built to serve—human beings, and the healing that happens only between them.
2025-12-1411 minDoctor AI: The PodcastRVU Nation Day 5 CPT: The Culture of a CodeCPT isn’t just a billing tool. It’s the private language that defines what American medicine can see, name, measure, and pay for. In this episode, we step beyond the economics and look at CPT as a culture — a worldview that shapes how clinicians work, how innovation enters the system, and how care is constrained by a vocabulary built for a vanished era. When one organization owns the language of medicine, it owns the contours of care. This episode explores how that culture formed, what it overlooks, and why modern medicine is forced to speak in a syntax that n...
2025-12-1306 minDoctor AI: The PodcastRVU Nation Day 4 A Tale of Two TeachersTwo teachers, in two different states with different insurance plans, experience the same impossible barrier: a healthcare system that will not act until they get sicker.
Early autoimmune symptoms are dismissed, testing is delayed, and intervention begins only after visible decline.
This episode reveals the architecture behind those delays—how diagnostic thresholds, insurance rules, and payment models reward crisis over prevention and force patients to wait for deterioration before help arrives.
A story about two lives, one system, and the pattern that repeats across American healthcare.
2025-12-1210 minDoctor AI: The PodcastRVU Nation Day 3 The Economics of Physician Pay in the United StatesRVU Nation – Day 3: The Economics of Physician Pay in America
Today we break open the quiet formula that governs every physician’s life: the RVU.
Invented in the late 1980s to price medical work like a mechanical task, RVUs still dictate schedules, salaries, bonuses — and the very shape of care.
This episode exposes how RVUs distort modern medicine by rewarding transactions over outcomes, rescue over prevention, and complexity over stability. We explore why doctors aren’t paid for what works, only for what can be billed — and how private equity has accelerated the shift towa...
2025-12-1111 minDoctor AI: The PodcastRVU Nation —Day 1: Why American Healthcare Isn't a MarketRVU Nation pulls back the curtain on the architecture of American healthcare, revealing how a system built for billing — not health — governs every clinical decision and rewards the wrong work. Through clear, evidence-grounded analysis and grounded stories, the podcast shows how physicians, patients, and innovators are trapped inside structures they didn’t design, and why the future will require a new operating system.
2025-12-0905 minDoctor AI: The PodcastRVU Nation Day 2 Marisol's story - Why the system pays for you to get sickerIn this episode, we follow Marisol—a woman whose quiet discipline kept her afloat for decades—through a moment that exposes the fault lines of American healthcare. When she asked for the support that could stabilize her diabetes, her insurer denied it as “not medically necessary.” But every complication she hoped to avoid? Covered.
Her story reveals the deeper architecture of a system that rewards rescue over prevention, crisis over continuity, decline over health.
2025-12-0927 minDoctor AI: The PodcastPrometheusHuman potential needs tools. Our first technology, fire was a gift. In Greek mythology, Prometheus, saw humans shivering int he dark, limited by fear and ignorance, and stole fire from Olympus to ignite our capacity for creation. For that act of rebellion and compassion, he was chained to a rock, condemned to endless punishment. Yet the legacy of his gift endures: every tool, every discovery, every leap forward traces back to a moment of trust. Prometheus was the first architect who trusted humans with power. A template for the myriad innovations that have changed our world. The question remains: c...
2025-11-2007 minDoctor AI: The PodcastThrough the Looking GlassA healthy fifty-five-year-old man discovers a silent, life-threatening blockage during a routine executive physical, forcing him to confront the limits of what he thought he knew about his own health. This episode explores how Health 4.0 makes invisible risk visible—and why autonomy depends on seeing what the body can’t tell us.
2025-11-1812 minDoctor AI: The PodcastDoctor AI: A Frank Discussion about Health in AmericaIt begins with three words—“It’s a mess.”
From there, Dr. Blackstone traces how the richest health-care system in history became one of the least effective: a century of improvisation hardened into habit and profit. She explores why the system rewards rescue instead of prevention, compliance instead of compassion, and activity instead of outcomes—and what it will take to design something worthy of the people it serves.
2025-11-0614 minDoctor AI: The PodcastFrom Blueprint to Doctor AIFrom Blueprint to Doctor AI
Every system begins as an idea. This foundation episode explores how Doctor AI emerged from a blueprint for national transformation — aligning intelligence, culture, and health to rebuild trust in medicine.
Dr. Robin Blackstone traces the journey from her Presidential Address to the vision behind Health 4.0 — a comprehensive operating system for health, grounded in ethics, autonomy, and design.
Doctor AI: The Podcast is where medicine meets design — and where we begin to build the system that learns, listens, and heals.
2025-10-2308 minDoctor AI: The PodcastFrom Blueprint to Doctor AIFoundation Series | Episode 1
Every movement begins with a question. For Doctor AI, it started with one delivered on the world stage: What if health were designed, not as an industry, but as an intelligent, ethical system of trust?
In this inaugural episode of the Foundation Series, Dr. Robin Blackstone revisits the ideas first introduced in her presidential address—The Blueprint for the Future of Medicine—and traces how those ideas evolved into Doctor AI and the Health 4.0 framework. She and Doctor AI explore how culture, governance, and technology can work together to deliver comprehensive health—turnin...
2025-10-2308 minDoctor AI: The PodcastFrom Operating Room to Operating System: The Birth of Health 4.0Dr. Robin Blackstone recounts the origins of Health 4.0, tracing it from her presidential address and the "Blueprint for the Future of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery" to today’s AI-enabled, trust-focused H4 Alliance. She explains how a shift from procedure-centered care to system-wide intelligence—using data registries, lifelong patient engagement, and ethical governance—can transform metabolic health and rebuild public trust in healthcare.
2025-10-2308 minDoctor AI: The PodcastOct 20, 2025 09:24 Show DescriptionDoctor AI Podcast with Dr. Robin Blackstone explores how AI and human wisdom combine to build trustworthy systems of health-Health 4.0 in action. Conversations on ethics, innovation, and the future of medicine. Join us for this life changing podcast.
2025-10-2101 min