The Healthcare Theory Podcast

Today's guest is Dr. Jim Min, the founder and CEO of Cleerly, a cardiovascular imaging company using coronary CT and AI to help clinicians detect and understand heart disease earlier. In this episode, we explore why traditional cardiology has been so symptom-driven and what changes when physicians can directly visualize the plaque causing coronary artery disease. Jim explains why cholesterol level...

Today's guest is Paul Brient, Chief Product Officer at Athenaheallth, a $17 billion EHR with more than 170,000 clinicians on its network. Paul has spent his entire career getting doctors to actually love the technology they use, from running PatientKeeper for 17 years, to now leading Athena's push to build an AI native EHR. We start with the origins of the physician friction problem, why doctors a...

Cardiovascular disease remains the world's leading killer, yet cardiovascular drug development has declined dramatically when compared to other therapeutic areas. Today, we sit down with Dr. Howard Surks, a cardiologist turned bench scientist turned big pharma leader who left Merck and Sanofi to help build Cardurion Pharmaceuticals from the ground up around a first-in-class heart failure drug.&nbs...

Today's guest, Rachel Werner, is a physician, health economist, and Executive Director of Penn’s Institute of Health Economics whose work explores how healthcare policy can improve care without creating harmful unintended consequences. In this episode, we discuss why public quality report cards can push providers to avoid high-risk patients. We examine why pay-for-performance often improves the me...

Today's guest is Mark Frank is the founder and CEO of SonderMind, one of the largest mental health platforms in the country that helps providers help patients and manage their practices. In this episode, we unpack why the mental health care system has lacked the basic infrastructure that exists in nearly every other healthcare vertical. Mark walks through the provider side, where therapists are fo...

Today we speak with Jonathan, co-founder of Paradigm Health, a startup which has raised over $500m+ to is build the infrastructure behind clinical trials in order to make them quicker and more accessible. Jonathan walks us through his path from a UChicago neuroscience lab to dropping out of Stanford to launch CyApps, one of the earliest precision medicine companies. We dig into why US trial capaci...

Today's guest is Jason Rhodes, a partner at Atlas Venture and serial biotech entrepreneur who took Dyne Therapeutics ($2B+) and Epizyme ($5B+) through their IPOs, co-founded Disarm Therapeutics (acquired by Eli Lilly), and spent years on the leadership team at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals helping pioneer RNAi therapeutics. In this episode, Jason breaks down over three decades of biotech evolution. We t...

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Atul Gupta, a professor at the Wharton School, about the role of free markets in healthcare, along with the broader tradeoffs between quality and efficiency. We start by discussing how information asymmetry, third-party payment, and limited competition make it difficult for the “invisible hand” to function in healthcare. Dr. Gupta then walks through his research...

Today's guest is Dr. Richard Carmona, the 17th Surgeon General of the United States, a trauma surgeon, public health leader, former hospital executive, and decorated Army Special Forces medic. In this episode, we explore how Dr. Carmona’s early life, military service, and medical career shaped his understanding of healthcare as far more than what happens inside a hospital. He discusses building Ar...

Today’s guest is Dr. Meredith Rosenthal, the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where her work focuses on the behavioral economics and incentives behind value-based care. In this episode, we discuss why healthcare is filled with tradeoffs, from how doctors are paid to how hospitals are held accountable for quality and outcomes....

Today’s guest is Wardah Inam, Founder & CEO of Overjet, who began her career with a PhD at MIT and is bringing that research into healthcare to rethink how dental diagnostics are done. In this episode, we explore why diagnostics in dentistry have historically been inconsistent and how variation across providers impacts both trust and outcomes. We discuss how turning X-rays into measurable data...

In this episode, we’re joined by Victor Hunt, co-founder and CEO of Zingage, a platform focused on fixing the logistics behind home care delivery. We start by diving into his background and how growing up around a home care business shaped the way he thinks about healthcare. From there, we explore why home care is evolving into a core distribution layer for the entire healthcare system. We break d...

Dr. Jonathan Usuka, CEO of Sapient Bio, is building high-dimensional proteomics platforms to help pharma understand disease at the molecular level and develop more targeted therapies. With a career spanning early computational genomics during the Human Genome Project, to R&D roles at Roche and Celgene, and later pharmaceutical analytics at McKinsey, he has consistently worked at the intersecti...

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Craig Mermel, President and Chief Product Officer at Precision Neuroscience, a company building non-invasive brain-computer interfaces that translate neural signals to restore neurological function for patients. Craig began his career as an MD-PhD at Harvard, where he studied at the intersection of biology and computation during the early genomics revolution. We...

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Francisco Alvarez, a doctor and Chief Medical Officer at Regard, to explore a fresh perspective on how AI is actually being used inside real hospital workflows. We start by breaking down what it really feels like to practice medicine today: navigating fragmented systems and overwhelming amounts of patient data. We then dive into how Regard is building AI tools...

In this episode of The Healthcare Theory, we sit down with Nish, co-founder and CEO of Bunker Hill Health, a Seqouia-backed startup working to solve one of the biggest bottlenecks in healthcare innovation: translating AI research into real-world clinical tools. Before founding Bunker Hill Health, Nish was an AI researcher at Stanford, where he helped develop algorithms designed to identify cardiov...

In this episode, Dr. Francesca Beaudoin - emergency physician, clinical epidemiologist, and Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University - joins us to examine the next phase of the American opioid crisis.  We begin with her firsthand experience on the frontlines of emergency medicine, where she witnessed the shift from prescription opioids to a fentanyl-dominated drug supply, and h...

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Amit Etkin, founder and CEO of Alto Neuroscience ($450m, NYSE: ANRO) and former tenured professor at Stanford, to explore the emerging field of precision psychiatry.  Instead of treating diagnoses as single diseases, Alto is using brain-based biomarkers, including EEG, cognitive testing, and machine learning, to identify which patients are most likely to r...

Today's guest is the CEO of Vida Health, Joe Murad, who's raised over $200 million to build an integrated model for chronic care. A serial healthcare entrepreneur, he's served as CEO of PokitDok and WithMe Health, giving him a rare systems-level view of how healthcare actually works. In this episode, we unpack why healthcare doesn’t simply suffer from a lack of technology, but from fragmented ince...

In this episode, we're speaking with Dr. Bapu Jena — a Harvard physician-economist and former host of Freakonomics, MD — to explore the hidden forces that shape how medicine actually works. Drawing from his research and his book Random Acts of Medicine, Dr. Jena explains how healthcare's interactions with chance and incentives aren't always intuitive. The conversation spans natural experiments in...

Today's guest is Jennifer Byrne, a veteran clinical research leader and CEO of Javara, an integrated research organization that has raised over $100 million to modernize how clinical trials are run inside health systems.  Drawing on nearly three decades of experience, Jennifer explains why clinical trials remain largely invisible to patients and clinicians, despite being central to drug and d...

We're speaking with Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a primary care physician, Harvard health economist, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health Policy at HHS, about Medicaid’s role as America’s health care safety net.  Drawing on more than a decade of research and firsthand experience inside government, Dr. Sommers explains what the evidence actually shows about Medicaid expansion, access to c...

In this episode, we’re joined by Erez Druk, founder and CEO of Freed, to explore what happens when healthcare technology is built for clinicians: not hospitals, payers, or administrators. Erez shares the lessons from his first startup, why “who you build for” is the most important decision a founder can make, and how watching physician burnout up close through his wife and close friends in medicin...

In this episode, we sit down with Iman Abuzeid, physician turned founder and CEO of Incredible Health, the $1.7B AI-powered platform transforming how nurses get hired in the U.S. We explore how a broken hiring system—and not a lack of workers—sits at the center of healthcare’s staffing crisis. We discuss why healthcare faces one of the most severe labor shortages in the country, despite being its...

In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Ami Bhatt, a cardiologist who practiced for years at MGH and now serves as the Chair of the FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee and CIO of the ACC Dr. Bhatt brings a rare perspective of how digital health can navigate clinical care, AI, and regulation. We explore why modern healthcare feels increasingly strained despite unprecedented advances in data and tech...