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

Consumerizing Healthcare — The CRM Revolution

·35 min·2 clips

"Healthcare is broken, period," Khanna says before arguing consumers deserve airline-style clarity.

1. The Business of Healthcare Podcast episode focuses on "Consumerizing Healthcare — The CRM Revolution" at the University of Texas at Dallas. 2. Dr. Bob Kaiser, Director of the Master's Program in Healthcare Leadership and Management, interviews Amit Khanna, SVP and General Manager of Health and Life Sciences at Salesforce. 3. The episode asks what healthcare looks like when it is treated as a customer system, not a "monolithic industry." 4. Kaiser opens with the "If Air Travel Worked Like Healthcare" example from his UTD program and uses fax machines, hidden costs, and separate luggage providers to show fragmentation. 5. Khanna says "Healthcare is broken, period" and argues that consumers should expect price clarity, service clarity, and optionality. 6. He says the U.S. healthcare system is a huge part of GDP and calls out the estimate that it is "20%" of the economy. 7. Khanna separates healthcare into two parts: the customer-facing experience and the operational backend. 8. He compares CRM to retail shopping cart experiences and ERP to inventory, supply chain, and accounting. 9. He then maps EHR to the supply-and-demand side of care delivery, including the right provider, nurse, bed, medication, and care journey. 10. He says CRM belongs before and after the hospital visit, including provider selection, appointments, home health, physiotherapy, virtual video, and transportation barriers. 11. Khanna says Salesforce applies "trusted relationships" as a first principle and treats trust as part of every product decision. 12. He says new technology can disrupt healthcare, but lives are involved, so trust matters before experimentation. 13. On compliance, he says Salesforce aims to be "HIPAA compliant day zero" and describes compliance as an infrastructure layer. 14. He gives Slack as an example and says the key requirement is securing the data pipe between systems. 15. On interoperability, he says MuleSoft and the FHIR standard let systems exchange information in the same format. 16. He compares FHIR adoption in healthcare to order interfaces that helped retailers and manufacturers exchange orders. 17. On AI, he says Einstein has already been used to address appointment no-shows and double-booking by recommending appointment slots. 18. He says generative AI can reduce overhead, but healthcare recommendations must be traceable to sources and protected by privacy rules. 19. The conversation stays interview-driven and practical, with Bob Kaiser pushing examples from airlines, retail, and UTD's health leadership program. 20. Listeners interested in healthcare operations, EHR integration, and patient experience will get the most value, while people wanting a purely clinical discussion may skip it.

As heard by us

Healthcare is treated as a service problem and a compliance problem, with HIPAA framed as something to design around.

The episode treats healthcare less like a narrow clinical workflow and more like a service system, where self-service, CRM tools, and care-team collaboration all have to fit together.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want healthcare tech explained as a service problem, not a policy maze.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Business of Healthcare Podcast