Understanding Healthcare with Zack Kanter

Ayo Omojola is the co-founder and CEO of Substrate, an AI agent platform for revenue cycle automation. Before starting Substrate, Ayo saw the friction firsthand working in primary and urgent care. In this episode, Ayo explains why Substrate moved from browser automation to agentic AI, why there's so much friction in the revenue cycle, and how healthcare billing could be 5x faster and cheaper using...

Eliana Berger is co-founder and CEO of  @JoyfulHealthRCM . In this episode, Eliana and Zack discuss revenue recovery – how healthcare practices lose revenue through unpaid insurance claims. Eliana explains denials management, why fixing denials requires more than just filing appeals, and how Joyful Health's AI platform recovers that revenue without requiring practices to change their existing syst...

Dr. Will Morris is Chief Medical Officer at Tennr. He's also a practicing hospitalist, a former hospital CIO, and former Chief Medical Officer at Google. In this episode, Will explains how Tennr manages the full referral lifecycle from the receiving provider's perspective, why most referrals end up in a black hole for patients, and how intelligent triage and closed-loop communication can match pat...

Varun Krishnamurthy is the co‑founder and CEO of Assured Health, an AI-powered provider credentialing and enrollment platform. In this episode, Zack and Varun talk about credentialing – how insurers check that a healthcare provider is qualified to practice. They cover how provider credentialing works, the bottlenecks it can cause, and how to improve it. 0:00 - Intro 0:44 - How Varun started Assure...

Megan Struxness is Head of Payer Operations and Revenue Cycle Management at Bridge, a healthcare platform that helps telehealth providers accept insurance nationwide. In this episode, Megan and Zack discuss payer enrollment – the industry term for what healthcare providers need to do to accept insurance. They cover payer contracting, credentialing, what superbills are, how out-of-network claims wo...

Dr. Eric Bricker is an internal medicine physician and Chief Medical Officer at ‪AHealthcareZ , a popular healthcare finance YouTube channel. In this episode, Eric and Zack break down revenue cycle management (RCM), the flow of money in U.S. healthcare. They cover how healthcare plans are funded, how Medicare Advantage differs from traditional Medicare, how eligibility checks work, medical coding,...

Brendan Keeler is Interoperability Practice Lead at HTD Health and author of the Health API Guy Substack. In this episode, Brendan explains why healthcare standards are actually a good thing, how HIPAA and X12 enable interoperability, the history of FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), how information blocking and related laws are changing health tech, and how AI may reshape the heal...

Caroline Loy is Principal Product Strategist at Turquoise Health.  In this episode, she explains what health plan design is, the decisions employers make when designing or buying plans, and how plan design affects care. (00:00) - Intro (00:15) - What is health plan design? (01:35) - Who decides plan design? (02:32) - What are self-funded vs fully insured plans? (04:32) - How do employers choose be...