Fixing Healthcare Podcast

Healthcare used to be a “country club competition,” in the words of past Fixing Healthcare guest Dr. Robert Burgelman. By this, he meant that doctors, insurers, drug makers and others worked well together and stayed out of each other’s respective lanes, trusting each other to keep the wheels of medicine churning slowly forward. Disputes, if any, were resolved quietly and kept behind the scenes. Th...

Fixing Healthcare welcomes Dr. Atul Gawande , a renowned surgeon, writer and public health researcher who currently serves as the Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID. He has a rich background as both a medical professional and a compassionate individual. Ten years ago, Dr. Gawande published the bestselling book “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,” which explored the...

Today’s episode of Medicine: The Truth looks at the latest in new drug approvals and new drug pricing, topics that have become inseparable in our nation’s healthcare conversation. One study found that the average “launch price” of new drugs has increased from $2,115 per year in 2008 to $180,007 per year in 2021. And there’s no sign drug makers are slowing down. Already in 2024, pharma companies ha...

This “Unfiltered” episode of Fixing Healthcare welcomes back Dr. Jonathan Fisher , a respected cardiologist and renowned advocate for physician well-being. Last Wednesday, January 17, was “Quit Day,” when most people give up on their New Year’s resolutions to get fit, eat better and try new things. Today’s show leads with an up-close look at the annual ritual of making (and breaking) resolutions....

This week, cohost Dr. Robert Pearl is on a plastic surgery mission trip to the Philippines where he will be repairing the cleft lips and palates of children. While he’s away, we’re revisiting one of the most popular episodes from 2023 featuring Dr. Zubin Damania, known to many as ZDoggMD. Zubin Damania is a UCSF- and Stanford-trained internist and founder of Turntable Health, an innovative primary...

Clinician burnout is a major problem in the United States. But as cohosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr discuss in today’s episode of Diving Deep , burnout is not a distinctly American problem. Recent data from The Commonwealth Fund indicates that primary care doctors in the United States are as satisfied as their peers in the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This seems surprisin...

What a year it was for American healthcare. Generative AI exploded onto the scene and scored in the top echelon of test takers on the U.S. medical licensing exam. America’s largest retailers made several multibillion-dollar acquisitions in the primary care, telemedicine and home-health arenas. Diabetes drugs stunned researchers with their ability to help patients lose weight. These are just a few...

Bubbly and precocious, Hunter was every parent’s dream child and every teacher’s ideal student. By age 14, she had already enrolled in classes at a local college to augment her course schedule. She played soccer, softball, basketball and ran track in high school. She was on the swim team. She even tried cheerleading, though that wasn’t her cup of tea, said Maria, Hunter’s mom. Maria describes her...

Welcome to season nine of Fixing Healthcare with cohosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr . This season tackles the difficult topic of death, examining end-of-life issues from multiple angles. Today’s episode features a reading from Dr. Robert Pearl’s most recent book “Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors & Patients,” which is available in audio book, eBook and hardcover. All pr...

As it was this time last year, ‘tis the season for sneezing once again. While carolers are coughing and shoppers are sniffling, podcast cohosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr are tracking the seasonal surge in Covid-19, influenza and RSV. Half a year has passed since the federal government declared an end to the public health emergency for Covid-19. But public health experts are worried that the...

The 21st century has granted humanity incredible access to medications and procedures that can extend life almost indefinitely. Ventilators can breathe for us, intravenous tubes and pumps can nourish us, and hemodialysis machines can filter waste and excess water from our blood, all but replacing healthy kidneys. The fact that medicine can extend human lives almost indefinitely is considered by ma...

This “Unfiltered” episode of Fixing Healthcare welcomes back Dr. Jonathan Fisher , a respected cardiologist and renowned advocate for physician well-being. Today’s show leads with an up-close look at a subject near and dear to Dr. Fisher’s heart, literally. “Empathy resides in the emotional heart, and it also has impacts on the physical heart and the physiologic heart, as well,” says Dr. Fisher ad...

Listeners of Fixing Healthcare keep writing in and reaching out with questions about two hot-button healthcare topics: the high price of healthcare and the impact generative AI (like ChatGPT) will have on the future of medicine. This episode of Diving Deep begins with a look at “skimping,” which refers to the many ways in which healthcare prices are constrained, but at the expense of American pati...

Season eight of the Fixing Healthcare podcast continues its focus on the role of leadership in driving change. Our guest today is an expert in this area. Jenny Chatman is Acting Dean at the Haas School of Business and the Paul Cortese Professor of Management at UC Berkeley. She’s a world-renowned researcher, teacher and consultant on leveraging organizational culture to boost team performance. Cha...

This year, the cost of health insurance for a working family of four exceeded $24,000 for the first time ever. That’s up 7% from last year (the largest rate increase since 2011). But increased spending has not equated to happier patients. New research has uncovered an “unprecedented decline” in patient satisfaction throughout United States. In today’s episode of Medicine: The Truth , podcast cohos...

This “Unfiltered” episode of Fixing Healthcare welcomes back Dr. Jonathan Fisher , a respected cardiologist and renowned advocate for physician well-being. Today’s show leads with an in-depth look at bias. In particular, the kind of cognitive biases studied by Nobel Prize researchers Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, who identified the many reasons why the human brain makes illogical and irratio...

Like magicians, the U.S. biopharmaceutical industry has used diversion to distract the public’s attention away from where the real action is really happening. This Fixing Healthcare episode of Diving Deep begins with a look at three illusions drug companies have crafted to maintain massive profitability and keep Americans from  seeing important truths about pharma pricing, innovation and regulatio...

Dan Ariely is an expert in irrational behavior. He has extensively researched it, mulled it over and, more often than not, produced brilliant insights into what it means to be a human. His studies and observations have resulted in three New York Times bestsellers on human psychology. During the Coronavirus pandemic, he was attacked for his efforts to save lives through vaccination and mandatory ma...

Last year, around this time, the CDC alerted physicians about the triple threat of Covid-19, seasonal influenza and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus). The result was one of the worst flu seasons in more than a decade. In today’s episode of Medicine: The Truth , podcast cohost Dr. Robert Pearl discusses the return of the “triple-demic” this winter and what listeners should do about it. According to...

This “Unfiltered” episode of Fixing Healthcare welcomes back Dr. Jonathan Fisher , a respected cardiologist and renowned advocate for physician well-being. On today’s show, Dr. Fisher serves up a question for Dr. Robert Pearl . He recalls the classic Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, a medical school textbook that now comprises more than 3,000 pages of vital information. And yet, d...

It’s no secret that doctors hold themselves to incredibly high standards, driven by a dedication to patients and a desire to save lives. It’s also understood that, in medicine, self-imposed high standards are fully reinforced by colleagues, administrators and an endless chain of performance metrics. However, less commonly understood (and almost never discussed) is how the pursuit of 24/7 perfectio...

He’s back! Dr. Zubin Damania (aka ZDoggMD), one of the show’s most popular returning guests, rejoins Fixing Healthcare hosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr for a heartfelt look at the ugly, imperfect and oh-so human side of medicine. In this episode, the trio discusses: The roots of our anxiety as patients and as clinicians Why so many Americans put off preventive screenings and treatment for ch...

Albert Einstein pointed out that time is relative. And when it comes to healthcare, five years can feel like a long and short amount of time. That’s certainly true of this podcast, which began five years ago and recently eclipsed 100 episodes. During that time, this show has welcomed dozens of world-renowned experts, both inside and outside the healthcare arena. Cohosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy...

The weight-loss drug Wegovy reduces serious heart disease, the nation’s No. 1 cause of death, according to a new clinical trial. Proponents of the drug describe this finding as an added bonus to the drug’s prescribed purpose: shedding excess pounds. In a nation where 60% of the population is obese or overweight and where 600,000+ die from cardiovascular events each year, the question is how can we...

Dr. Robert Burgelman is the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management and the Director of the Executive Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. As a worldwide expert on strategy, Burgelman has authored multiple books on leadership and consulted with more than 100 companies around the globe. Throughout the program, Burgelman: Helps healthcare leaders understand the tools needed to...