The Business of Healthcare Podcast · Center for Healthcare Leadership and Management

AI in Healthcare Operations with Felixia Colón

·38 min·2 clips

The episode opens with an analogy about iPhones and Androids upgraded from 2022 to 2025, asking whether AI has moved just as fast. It places that question inside the broader healthcare-business conversation the show is built around. The discussion then shifts from back-office AI uses to AI in healthcare delivery from a provider’s perspective. Felicia Colon joins the conversation to help unpack what that looks like in practice. A major thread is the smart hospital idea. The show slows down to frame that concept from an administrator’s perspective instead of treating it like a slogan. AI is presented as a tool for forecasting growth, seasonality, and age mix so leaders can plan ahead. The conversation looks at how administrators might predict where growth will show up in a metropolitan area. It also points to the need to think ahead about clinician supply. The example of a growing suburb becomes a way to talk through when a new hospital should be built. The logic is framed as a financial and operational judgment, not just a clinical one. The episode also connects AI to decisions about what kinds of physicians a region will need, including geriatricians, pediatricians, and OB-GYN coverage. The conversation then widens to the nursing shortage. That shortage is treated as a real constraint any serious hospital strategy has to face. The episode keeps returning to AI as support for making those choices earlier and with more confidence. It does not sell AI as a cure-all. Instead, it treats it as one more instrument for reading demand and aligning capacity. The tone stays practical throughout. Technical terms are translated into everyday cause and effect. The result is a discussion that sounds like a management class for healthcare leaders. By the end, the episode has tied together planning, staffing, expansion, and patient access into one operational frame.

As heard by us

AI here means forecasting growth, staffing, and where the next hospital should go.

Healthcare AI comes across here less as a chatbot story than as an operations problem: where to build, whom to staff, and how to make the numbers work.

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Why you'd press play

Want AI framed as a hospital planning tool, not a hype cycle?

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