You thought running a community health center was hard before? Now with pending Medicaid cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), rural providers say they’re prepping for more financial strain.

Fairview Community Health Center in Bowling Green, Kentucky, is no different. The federally qualified health center (FQHC) serves about 15,000 patients a year in a city with 79,076 residents, according to Census data, though there are other providers like the Medical Center at Bowling Green nearby. That care is solely medical (no dental or vision) and includes a prenatal care unit, a pediatric department, a family practice, and behavioral health services. Patients vary from Medicare and Medicaid members to commercial insurance policyholders and cash-only customers.

CEO John Lillybridge is far from new to rural healthcare’s challenges. Before leading the C-suite, he was CFO of the health center from 2011 to 2021, meaning he knows how to deal with operational costs and reimbursements. But with these changes coming from the OBBBA, the now CEO took us through a day in his life at the clinic and how he’s planning to prevent it from falling off a potential “fiscal cliff.”

Read more about Lillybridge’s day to day here.—CM

After a long hunt for the next CDC director, former Deputy Surgeon General Erica Schwartz officially got the nomination on April 16.

But in the $5.3 trillion healthcare industry that makes up 18% of the country’s GDP, what sort of impact can just one job really have? Especially considering how the Trump administration has made major shifts that have impacted how federal agencies are used and viewed over the last year and a half.

Experts told us the role can shape the healthcare industry and the future of patient care as it did during the Covid-19 pandemic and AIDS epidemic. And as the industry has already seen in policy changes like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s cuts to Medicaid, it also has the power to hinder how the industry is able to operate and can stymie potential progress.

According to David Dodd, president and CEO of drug company GeoVax, the CDC director has a few levers they can pull to yield power over healthcare: guidance to shape clinical practice, data on and surveillance of real-time disease intelligence, and instilling public trust.

Learn more about the role’s importance to the industry here.—CM

A medical imaging company is deploying AI to assist in its operations—and turning to an industry powerhouse for help.

Chicago-based Hoppr is integrating Nvidia systems into its AI development framework, the Hoppr AI Foundry. It’s a partnership that the company hopes will accelerate its existing platform. The company already used Nvidia GPUs, Hoppr founder and CEO Khan Siddiqui told IT Brew, and reached out to the AI chip-making giant to deploy its models as a natural next step to add reasoning capabilities to the existing image generation and text conversion that Hoppr already provides users.

“Now our customers can cherry-pick what functionality they need,” Siddiqui said. “They can combine multiple models for similar tasks, they can take the finding model and then run it against the reasoning model.”

Keep reading on IT Brew.—EH

Rather than a lack of supply, David Warrick, EVP of enterprise at supply
chain risk management firm Overhaul said he’s concerned drug prices will
increase as a result of the war. Learn more about the Iran war's impact on US
healthcare.

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