In this episode, Rahul Vanjani, Co-Founder of ITO Health, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brown University, and Medical Director at Amos House, discusses the intersection of addiction medicine, social determinants of health, and Medicaid policy. He shares insights on the coming Medicaid changes, their impact on vulnerable populations, and how healthcare organizations can help patients maintain access to critical coverage and care.

Bridging Healthcare, Addiction Medicine, and Medicaid Access with Rahul Vanjani

Becker’s Healthcare Podcast

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Becker’s Healthcare Podcast

## Participants

- **Scott Becker** (Becker's Healthcare)
- **Rahul Vanjani** (Ito Health)

## Transcript

Every health system executive right now is being asked to do something that has no useful precedent. Make durable technology decisions in an environment that looks meaningfully different every six months. The pace isn't slowing, the vendor landscape isn't getting simpler, and the cost of missteps keeps rising. Beckers' 11th annual IT and Revenue Cycle Conference, The Future of AI and Digital Health, exists for exactly this challenge.

Here, you'll find more than 2,500 executive-level attendees, 600-plus speakers, and four days of sessions built around the questions leaders are actually wrestling with. How to scale AI responsibly, how to protect increasingly complex systems, how to wring more performance out of the revenue cycle, and how to make tech investments that hold up over time. Join us September 14th through the 17th at the Hilton Chicago.

You can register on our events page at BeckersHospitalReview.com by clicking on the Events tab in the upper right. This is Scott Becker with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant physician leader, someone who's at the absolute intersection of primary care and addiction medicine. We're joined today by Dr. Rahul Vanjani.

Dr. Rahul Vanjani is going to talk about both what he does, his company, and his focus, and a lot more. Dr. Rahul Vanjani, can you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your career and background and how you ended up founding the company that you founded, too? Thanks for having me, Scott. Yes, I would love to. I'm Rahul Vanjani.

I'm an internal medicine and addiction medicine physician, and I'll say up front that I come at all of this first as a clinician. I serve as medical director at Amos House in Rhode Island, where I care for people experiencing homelessness, substance use disorders, and a lot of overlapping social and medical challenges. A lot of my clinical work over the years has been in models built exactly for these types of patients.

I've worked in street medicine, helped stand up a community health worker program, a transitions clinic for people coming out of incarceration, and a recovery clinic. So my whole career has been spent with the patients who are hardest for the system to hold on to. And that turns out to matter a lot for the company I've started and the work we're doing. So I'm also the CEO and co-founder of Ito Health, I-T-O Health.

We started Ito as a group of clinicians and case managers because we kept running into the same problem in care delivery. We're really good at identifying our patients' needs, their competing social needs specifically. No insurance, food insecurity, unstable housing, no transportation. But we haven't historically had the infrastructure in healthcare to actually solve them efficiently.

So a patient...

Bridging Healthcare, Addiction Medicine, and Medicaid Access with Rahul Vanjani

Transcript

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Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
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Bridging Healthcare, Addiction Medicine, and Medicaid Access with Rahul Vanjani

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.