Bedside: Stories from the Future of Medicine

The health system has seen Mara Whitfield’s work and makes an offer: funding, support, legitimacy, and scale — in exchange for integration with its compliance, data, and oversight infrastructure. The Circle understands what is being offered. It is not partnership. It is capture. As Mara, Kwame, Helen, Loretta, Wen, Yolanda, June, and Dr. Kofi Mensah gather, the Circle expands beyond the United Sta...

Helen Park has stage III ovarian cancer and a spreadsheet with 412 papers in it. She has fired oncologists, found better care, and learned to run her own architecture because the system was not going to run it for her. When she learns that Mara Whitfield has been helping coordinate her care from a distance, Helen does not ask for an apology. She asks a better question: how many of us are there? Ma...

In Window Rock, Loretta Begaye receives a notification: the wellness pilot that provided her continuous glucose monitor has ended, her device will stop transmitting, and her historical data may be retained for research. She tries to export it. She cannot. She tries to delete it. She cannot. Then she learns from Darlene Yazzie, an Indian Health Service nurse, that de-identified community data is be...

Wendell “Wen” Hartfield has lived with back pain for twenty-two years. A former coal miner, a husband, a father, and a man marked by the opioid crisis, Wen has not taken anything stronger than ibuprofen since 2014. When his pain becomes unbearable, his doctor refers him for a non-opioid pain procedure. But the system flags him for high-risk opioid history and demands a substance-use review before...

In Boyle Heights, Yolanda Ortiz is eight months pregnant, frightened, and developing signs of severe preeclampsia. Her clinic appointment is weeks away. Her calls have not been answered. But Aurelia Vega, a midwife connected to a quiet network of women across the country, knows what to do. That same night in Cambridge, Kwame tells Chiron something he has never said aloud: he has spent twenty years...

Two weeks after his stent, Kwame Mensah is told he is doing extraordinarily well. But when he asks who is actually managing his care, the answer is devastatingly simple: he is. Naomi Tran-Mensah begins making the calls. Primary care, cardiology, cardiac rehab, lipid clinic, dietitian, pharmacy, insurer, benefits portal — each piece exists, but almost none of them connect. Chiron shows Naomi the ar...

PULSE — EPISODE 1: THE PULSE Season 1 of Bedside. A pulse is what they call it when the heart, after a moment of silence, beats again. Kwame Mensah ran five miles on a Tuesday morning in March. He was forty-two years old. By every external metric American medicine knows how to read, he was well. He was, in fact, six months from dying.  ABOUT BEDSIDE Bedside is a storytelling podcast from Doctor AI...