Health Tech Nerds Radio The Grand Roundup: Peptide boom, payer pressures, AI and Medicaid, clearinghouse innovation, and nearly $600M in health tech funding
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Mar 30, 2026 
Toyin Ajayi, CEO of Cityblock Health, a leader in Medicaid-focused care, urges building AI for safety-net populations first. Zach Kanter, CEO of Stedi, runs a high-volume clearinghouse scaling to billions of transactions and recently raised growth capital. They discuss AI built for Medicaid, equitable deployment principles, clearinghouse infrastructure, processing huge claim volumes, and the surge of peptide/longevity interest and funding.
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Value Based Incentives Make Ethical AI Practical
- Aligning business incentives with social mission makes AI adoption in value-based Medicaid models feasible and sustainable.
- Toyin said Cityblock's outcome-driven model lets AI both improve care and support a profitable, scalable business.
Change Healthcare Outage Made Clearinghouses Visible
- Zach explained clearinghouses as invisible middleware between millions of providers and thousands of payers responsible for HIPAA administrative transactions.
- He said Change Healthcare's cyberattack made clearinghouses visible and urgent for EHR vendors and providers.
Clearinghouses Must Support UI EDI And APIs
- Modern clearinghouses now expose three submission methods: UI, legacy EDI (SFTP/CAQH), and APIs, with most startups using API while volume still flows via legacy channels.
- Zack said Steady is API-first but processes majority volume from legacy EDI.