This is a preview of the January 8 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox on Thursday mornings.
I’m foregoing the New Year’s resolutions this year in favor of a New Year’s intention. It’s subtler than the life-changing promises I’ve made (and broken) in years past: like the running schedules that veer off course at the first sign of February flu-like symptoms, or the crisp new journals that are still crisp come December.
Setting an intention lets me move through the year more thoughtfully. It’s a phrase or a word—no numbers allowed—that I regularly revisit and use to evaluate my priorities.
My intention for 2026 is to seek out community. I’m at that awkward stage of life where friends are peppered across the country, some sleeping in vans as they traverse the National Park system, others in starter homes with nurseries at the ready. I’m making it a priority to call more, send more letters and stay in touch despite the distance. As last year’s NIA research demonstrated, loneliness increases dementia risk by 31 percent!
Building community is a professional goal as much as a personal one. Maybe you share that intention—to engage in dialogue outside of LinkedIn comments, to have more conversations that are intellectually stimulating and fewer that feel like a means to a strategic end. When I speak with folks in the health care industry, I frequently hear how much purpose is found in the human interactions of the trade. As a journalist, I can relate. But I’d wager that many of us spend more time answering emails than listening to/learning from those outside of our circles.
If any of this rings true for you, I invite you to join me for a series of virtual events in 2026. I’ll be moderating discussions throughout the year, from fireside chats with health care veterans to candid debates with industry thought leaders. You can tune into these 60-minute discussions from anywhere, and interact with the speakers using our real-time Q&A feature.
Registration is open for the first trio of panel discussions, and it’s entirely free to you as a health care stakeholder and a reader of Access Health. Here’s the lineup—you can click on the hyperlinks for more information and to claim your spot:
Collaboration Over Competition: Charting a New Path to Better Patient Care
Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026
2 p.m. – 3 p.m. Eastern
Speakers:
- Jeff Flaks, CEO, Hartford HealthCare
- Robert Stone, CEO, City of Hope
- Dr. Corey Casper, Chief Research Officer, Banner Health
Wearables: What’s the ROI For Health Systems?
Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026
2 p.m. – 3 p.m. Eastern
Speakers:
- Dr. David Battinelli, Physician-in-Chief, Northwell Health
- Patrick Sheehan, Vice President of Value-Based Care, Withings
- Alex Vannoni, Head of Healthcare Product, WHOOP
Preventing Chronic Disease Patients from Falling Through the Cracks
Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026
2 p.m. – 3 p.m. Eastern
Speakers:
- Dr. Lakshmi Halasyamani, Chief Clinical Officer, Endeavor Health
- Dr. Ricky Bloomfield, Chief Medical Officer, Oura
- Dr. Richard Milani, Chief Clinical Innovation Officer, Sutter Health
- Dr. Kevin Pantalone, Director of Endocrinology, Cleveland Clinic
If you can’t fit any of these into your schedule, don’t sweat it. I’ll keep you posted on new events throughout the year.
What’s your intention for 2026—or if you’d also like to focus on community, how do you plan to cultivate it this year? Email me at a.kayser@newsweek.com and let me know.
In Other News
Major health care headlines from the week
- Affordable Care Act subsidies expired in the final minute of 2025 after lawmakers left Capitol Hill for the holidays without settling on an extension plan. As a result, approximately 22 million ACA enrollees are expected to see premiums increase, and another 4 million will become uninsured.
- There is hope on the horizon, Politico reported on Wednesday afternoon. Senators from both parties are negotiating a deal to reinstate the tax credits for two years—but the compromise will likely include new income caps and minimum premium payments.
- The Senators’ draft plan could be released as early as next week, one negotiator told the news outlet.
- The CDC has officially overhauled its childhood vaccine policy, no longer recommending that all children receive shots against influenza, COVID-19, RSV, rotavirus, dengue, meningococcal disease and hepatitis A and B. My Newsweek colleagues break down the changes here.
- Physicians, epidemiologists and health policy professionals have expressed alarm at the loosened recommendations, especially when comparing the U.S.’s vaccine schedule to other wealthy countries.
- HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., defended the changes in a statement on January 5, claiming the new vaccine schedule aligns with “international consensus.” But does it really? Newsweek reporters conducted a fact-check.
- Novo Nordisk is pulling ahead in the oral GLP-1 race. The pharmaceutical giant has released a pill version of its weight loss drug Wegovy, starting at $149 per day for the lowest dose.
- The pill could make semaglutide more accessible—especially for patients who are weary of the injectable form. Wegovy tablets are now available at more than 70,000 U.S. pharmacies.
- In the wake of Novo Nordisk’s announcement, I spoke with Orr Inbar, CEO and co-founder of QuantHealth (an AI-powered clinical trial simulation platform used by many top pharmaceutical companies). He had a warning for prescribers and health care executives: “As the [GLP-1] drug becomes more accessible and probably also cheaper, there might be an even higher predisposition to give the drug to patients. Just like we saw with the opioid epidemic in the U.S., we may find out in a decade or two that we have a GLP-1 epidemic. I think we should be careful about the next drug craze—as always, review the evidence and consider exercise and natural weight loss solutions first.”
- Malnutrition is the fastest-growing cause of death in America, according to a new analysis of CDC death certificate data from The Washington Post. Deaths from malnutrition surged sixfold over the past decade, particularly amongst Americans ages 85 or older, who die of malnutrition 60 times more frequently than the rest of the population.
- Some of that exponential increase may be attributed to a 2012 report including research about the causes and impacts of malnutrition, and a subsequent campaign to name and address the problem, according to WaPo. But food insecurity amongst older adults is also a culprit, especially as living expenses climb.
Pulse Check
Executive perspectives on key industry issues
Before the new year, I sat down with Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services, to reflect on 2025 and discuss the company’s strategy for 2026. It’s off to a busy start, as Amazon Pharmacy kiosks debuted at Los Angeles-area One Medical clinics last month—and on Monday, Rush announced a collaboration with One Medical to expand primary and specialty care access throughout Chicago.
“Amazon has a really interesting mission to be Earth’s most customer-obsessed company,” Lindsay said, “and that gives us a lot of opportunity to invest anywhere we see a customer experience that has an opportunity to be improved.”
“And as you might imagine, in health care, there’s quite a bit of friction that we believe could be addressed.”
Find a portion of my Pulse Check with Lindsay below.
Editor’s Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Neil, we last spoke in July 2025, when I toured one of the One Medical offices here in Chicago. A lot has changed in the health care industry since then. Has your business strategy shifted?
Not much at all, really. We often talk at Amazon about it always being “day one.” The reason we talk about that is we believe there’s always an enormous amount of opportunity for invention to improve the customer’s — and in this case, the patient’s—experience. There’s just so much friction in health care that our mission drives us on two fronts.
The first is, how do we address paper cuts? How do we take the things that are obviously frustrating—for example, not knowing an upfront price—and how do we try to improve on that, partnering with payers and others?
And the second dimension is, how do we invent to take things to a whole new level? For example, AI is providing enormous opportunity to improve the provider experience and to improve the patient experience in many, many ways.
So I would say that our strategy has been pretty consistent, actually, since we formed Amazon Health Services about four years ago: just keep moving forward on each of those dimensions of choice, clarity, cost, convenience and continuity of care, and just keep getting better and better at it every day.
How is AI being used across Amazon’s health care businesses, and what benefits have you seen so far?
There are three ways that we are constantly inventing to use technology, and AI specifically. Clearly, there’s a lot of opportunity at the back end to simplify manual processes that AI can make easier, faster and more efficient. [We use it] when we get a prescription [at Amazon Pharmacy], checking it against other prescriptions the patient might have, checking availability and all those sorts of things. Technology enables that to go faster, which is what enables us to deliver within hours in many locations.
There’s also a real opportunity to have a big impact on the provider experience. I’m sure you’re aware that a primary care provider’s job is pretty challenging. There’s a lot of after-hours work that is quite burdensome in terms of coding, doing preapprovals, responding to patient queries by email, etc. AI does a number of things to really help improve a provider’s life, like ambient listening with HealthScribe from AWS enables a provider to not be looking at a screen and typing away while they’re engaging with the patient, so they can engage human to human, face to face, and know that record has been accurately captured. AI enables us to extract insights from 1000s of pages of records so that the provider can be more informed before they see a patient. And as the communications with patients become more digital, it’s easier and easier for patients to send messages to providers (which is fantastic), but some of those messages, in many cases, can be answered quite simply. AI makes it easier for a provider to just answer those with a couple of clicks, versus typing out a response to every patient. Of course, they [should] type out whatever response is needed to make it personal. But in some cases, a simple response can be made much easier.
There’s a big shortage of primary care providers, and one of the reasons is that the job can be overwhelming because of that after-hours work that’s required. So if we can really simplify and make this job more enjoyable for primary care providers, I think we can address that shortage.
And then there’s a third dimension, which is making the patient’s lives easier. If you look at the One Medical app today, you can ask questions and get simple answers from AI. Over time that can become more personalized—for example, you could imagine that [AI in the One Medical app] could be personalized to your health record so it can answer questions specific to your own health situation.
What excites me about AI for patients is it’s so much better than going to social media and trying to get health advice or doing a standard Google search and just getting whatever popular documents that may or may not be credible. AI can go to a whole nother level in terms of giving you information that can help you be more informed and ask the right questions when you’re with a [health care] professional.
What are you looking forward to in 2026?
There’s a lot to be excited about. I’m very excited about how AI can improve this provider experience. We already know, for example, that some of these tools are saving one to two hours for most of our providers in work they have to do after seeing a patient, and we think the opportunity to reduce that further is really substantial.
I’m excited about AI as a tool for patients to help them be more informed and to make that [information] increasingly actionable. One of the problems right now in generalized AI use for health queries is that it tends to be a dead end. You might get an interesting answer, but then you still have to wait two, three weeks to get an appointment with a provider. One of our missions is to make it really easy for people to access professional health care advice when they need it, whether asynchronously via text or video, or being able to meet a provider in person at any of our 200+ offices.
We’re also continuing to increase the number of places we offer same-day delivery. And our mission is to make that available to as many Prime members as possible so that you can get prescriptions in the morning and have the medications [by] the afternoon. The [Amazon Pharmacy] kiosks, we’re launching those into more One Medical locations, and also expanding One Medical as appropriate with our partners. Sixty percent of everything we sell on Amazon is sold by a third party. And when you think about health care, it takes a village. So if we’re going to make it easy for people to engage with and have that continuity of care, then we also need to make it easy for people to find third-party solutions that are valuable for them. [We plan to] continue adding partners in our Health Benefits Connectors program, working with health systems around the country to make it easy for our patients to access specialists when they need them.
There’s a lot of work going on, and it’s a very exciting time at Amazon Health Services and in the industry as a whole.
C-Suite Shuffles
Where health care leaders are coming and going
- Suki has named Abhi Pathak its inaugural chief product officer.
- Pathak joins the health care AI company from Accolade—a care delivery, navigation and advocacy services provider—where he also served as chief product officer. His resume includes product and customer growth leadership at Amazon and Dropbox.
- Sanford Health is sliding Dr. Tommy Ibrahim—the president and CEO of its health plan—to a new position as enterprise chief transformation officer, overseeing digital and technology initiatives including AI, data analytics and research.
- Matt Hocks, chief operating officer of the Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based system, will take over leadership for its Sanford Health Plan and Security Health Plan.
- Don Woodlock is the new president of InterSystems after serving eight years as its vice president for health care.
- Woodlock will oversee the data technology company’s daily operations, while its Founder, Owner and CEO Phillip Ragon will scale back his management role to “focus on guiding [InterSystems’] business and technology strategy,” according to a Tuesday news release.
Executive Edge
How health care execs are managing their own health
Before we went offline for the holidays, I introduced you to Brian Schubring and Dr. Linda Schubring, the husband-and-wife duo behind Leadership Vision Consulting: an executive coaching firm for teams and individuals that has helped some high-profile health care leaders find their footing over the years.
I have a few more insights from the Schubrings for this week’s Executive Edge section. Below, find a portion of our December interview—with some actionable tips on identifying and rectifying burnout as a health care executive.
Editor’s Note: Transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How does burnout typically show up in health care leaders?
Brian: Burnout is sneaky. People believe they know what burnout looks like. I think that most people are looking in the wrong places.
Burnout has an eroding effect on our emotional wellbeing, and that’s happening prior to our understanding what’s really happening. When it comes to executive leaders, there’s so much external pressure to focus on what is changing within the outside landscape that they’re losing connection—not only with their emotional wellbeing, but also in some of the ways that they know how to creatively think and make decisions for the benefit of other people.
Linda: Many people in health care, have an MD or an MBA. Why burnout is so significant right now is that their education and expertise, their practice, everything that has led them to today is not enough. It’s not enough to be able to tackle the pressures at hand, in part because there are no known solutions available. They’ve prepared well, they have gone through the paces, and then something new comes up in the news cycle: a crisis or an opportunity to respond in a significant way. And all of a sudden, healthcare professionals have to rely not necessarily on their education or expertise, but their lived experience, and draw some thread that will allow them to navigate [the situation] without completely burning out.
You mentioned that burnout can be sneaky—what are some of the concrete signs that an individual is suffering from it?
Linda: It’s sneaky because all of the expectations these leaders have been able to navigate all of these expectations [in the past], and now, it feels heavier than before. [You might find yourself asking], “What am I supposed to do? Do I have what it takes?”
Brian: The signs [of burnout] are hard to measure. They [can show up as] increasing anxiety, which can impact your appetite, your mood swings, how much you sleep or don’t sleep, your interpersonal interactions, your emotional reactivity. Some people say, “I just can’t keep up in the same way.” There’s a loss of patience, diminishing comprehension.
Linda: Fatigue is a big one. There have been people that have reported falling asleep in their meetings, in their offices. Because physical pain and emotional pain are registered in the same place in the human brain, people often just say, “I need a little bit more sleep.” [But] maybe you need to take the edge off of the emotional weight that you are carrying, because it is coming out as fatigue in your body. It is coming out as feeling like you don’t know how to answer questions, feeling that you’re not making sense.
Brian: People often misinterpret those signs of burnout as a stress that’s coming from the outside. It’s actually our bodies, our hearts and our minds reminding us that we may be out of calibration with how we think we’re doing in navigating the stress threat and negativity in life. And it’s those signs that we’re experiencing, but often ignoring, that are pointing to burnout, and then when we do finally pay attention to them, that they may be so exponentially great that we may feel helpless to even combat one of the several symptoms.
Those are pretty significant symptoms, and I imagine that they take time to rectify. What are the first steps that anyone reading can take to recalibrate that internal environment?
Brian: The first thing that we recommend is that the individual starts with themselves, because usually executives will come to the table with a lot of reasons of why they’re so stressed and they’re on the edge of burnout. We’re asking them to do some introspection and reflection right away: “How am I doing?”
The power of naming the [cause of the] stress or the negativity can often be a great neutralizer and [reveal] how much of a threat those outside forces are. Start with yourself, name your need, and then add some concrete steps of what you are in control of to make some of the small, incremental changes.
Linda: We will often say, “pick one step.” Do you want to start with your diet? Do you want to start with your exercise? Do you want to start with your sleep? If you try to boil the ocean and do everything at once, New Year’s resolution [statistics] say that we won’t accomplish those things. Pick one, try it, practice it, and when you can incorporate one into your new lifestyle or new way of being, then add another.
Brian: I find that executives love to see outcomes and progress, and by starting with themselves, they begin to get some resilience and inner strength through this process that can then transfer to their teams.
This is a preview of the January 8 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox on Thursday mornings.
