PointHealthTech Podcast

For the finale of season two, we sat down with Dr. Chris Larson and Dr. April Calderon of Euphora Health, a direct primary care practice in Austin, TX. After witnessing the deleterious effects of modern medical practice on relatives and loved ones, they decided to launch Euphora Health to practice medicine in an alternative fashion. Together, this direct primary care power couple is looking first and foremost to improve the lives of their patients, and secondly, to change the healthcare system for the better. Our host, Steven Cutbirth, discussed many topics with Dr. Larson and Dr. Calderon, including the benefits of direct primary care for both patients and physicians, who has the most pull to change the healthcare system in the U.S., and more.

We were joined by Kathleen Carberry, Assistant Professor at the Dell Medical School and Outcomes Program Officer at the Value Institute for Health and Care. She has been a registered nurse for 20 years and was the founder and director of the Texas Children's Hospital Outcomes & Impact Service that was dedicated to helping patients, families, and clinicians make better healthcare decisions using outcomes information. Our hosts for this episode, Steven Cutbirth (who is also Kathleen''s former student!) and Stephanie Pawlowski, discuss why measuring healthcare outcomes is so hard, the importance of value-based care, and why she is committed to improving the support system for caregivers.

Our host, Steven Cutbirth, sat down with Dr. Michael Richards, a healthcare economist and Associate Professor at Baylor University, who has published significant research on rising healthcare costs. They discuss the effects of consolidation on healthcare costs, healthcare insurance models, supply-side dimensions of the healthcare sector, and healthcare provider responses to public policies and evolving market environments.

This episode features Payal Agrawal Divakaran, a partner at .406 Ventures, who co-leads Digital Health investing activity. Prior to joining .406, Payal was at Harvard Business School, where she co-founded a company called SpotRocket in the job recruiting software space. Steven, Mark, and Payal had a great discussion on her thesis for digital health investing, financial incentives for patients and payers, her role as a trailblazing female engineer and health investor, and much more.

Our hosts this episode, Steven Cutbirth and Doug Bain, sat down with Carl Schuessler, co-founder and managing principal of Mitigate Partners. Carl has more than 30 years of experience in benefits consulting and financial services, and even pioneered the fiduciary approach to benefits advisory services. So obviously, we walked away from this episode with a lot of new knowledge and hope you will too! We discussed how to achieve best-in-class benefits without spending a fortune, how better benefits can lead to improved clinical and financial outcomes for health plans and their members, price transparency, direct primary care, and so much more.

In this episode, we discuss how complacency led to expensive healthcare and why transparency is the way out. AnnMargaret McCraw, CEO at Midlands Orthopaedics & Neurosurgery, joins us to share her experience as an ASC leader in price transparency and an innovator in bundled pricing. Our hosts discuss several topics with AnnMargaret, including how the U.S. got to where it is with high healthcare costs and how surgery bundles work for patients, TPAs, and health plans.

Steven Cutbirth and Josie Livengood sat down with Chris Habig, CEO and co-founder of Freedom Healthworks, a company that has vowed to put doctors and patients in charge of everyday healthcare. In this conversation, Chris explains how Direct Primary Care (DPC) works (and Freedom Healthworks unique model of DPC), how the economic system in status quo American healthcare constrains even the very best physicians, and why it's so important to have patient advocates and a good doctor-patient relationship.

In today's episode we talk with Deb Gordon, author of “The Health Care Consumer's Manifesto.” Deb is a former health plan executive, an Aspen Institute Health Innovators Fellow, and a former Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. In this episode, we discussed Deb's travels to Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore to explore the role of consumers in high-performing health systems, and how those learnings can make healthcare consumerism a reality in America.

Steven Cutbirth sat down with Taylor Rogers, a benefits expert and co-founder of Cairn Advisors, a partnership that guides employers through alternative health and welfare program design. Taylor helps businesses know and understand where their healthcare benefit money is going. From there, he helps them fix it the right way. In the conversation, they discuss what it looks like to design a health plan, what Taylor's time pitching for the SF Giants in pro baseball taught him and how he applies it to help businesses improve their healthcare benefits.

In today's episode, we talk with Dr. Elizabeth Teisberg, co-creator of the concept of value-based health care delivery and executive director of the Value Institute for Health and Care at the University of Texas, and his former professor! She discusses how she and Dr. Michael E. Porter developed the concept of value-based care, why she believes it's the ideal solution for improving outcomes and lowering costs, the misconceptions around value-based care, and much more. Dr. Teisberg also shares why she started the joint Masters of Science in Healthcare Transformation program at the Dell Medical School and McCombs School of Business and who should consider applying for the Master's program.

We're excited to share this special edition episode to kick off our second season! Our guest was Dr. Tony Dale, founder and Chairman of The Karis Group and Sedera. Tony has directly impacted the lives of millions of patients seeking the best possible care at fair and affordable prices. In the conversation, we discussed his career and dove into his newest book “The Cure For Healthcare: An Old World Doctor's Prescription for the New World Health System”.This episode was recorded in collaboration with the Race to Value podcast and its hosts Dr. Eric Weaver and Daniel Chipping of the Accountable Care Learning Collaborative.

This is a special episode in collaboration with Accountable Care Learning Collaborative's podcast, Race to Value. Our host, Steven, is joined by Eric Weaver of ACLC in leading a discussion with Dr. Keith Smith and Sean Kelley. Keith is the co-founder and medical director of Surgery Center of Oklahoma and an outspoken advocate for broader price transparency in healthcare. Sean is the founder and managing partner of Texas Medical Management and has more than a decade of experience in healthcare, including holding executive-level roles in hospitals and health systems. This joint episode between Race to Value and PointHealthTech is released alongside the ACLC Intelligence Brief entitled “Revealing Value? Hospital Price Transparency”. This brief can be downloaded at https://www.accountablecarelc.org/hpt

Marshall Allen is a ProPublica healthcare journalist digging deep into why Americans pay so much for healthcare, yet get so little in return. Marshall joined us to discuss the complicated topic of healthcare billing and his brand new book, “Never Pay the First Bill: and Other Ways to Fight the Health Care System and Win.”

In this episode, Steven is joined by three of PointHealthTech's very own patient advocates, Alejandra Vineski, Justine Hearn, and Patrick Gaul to discuss the important role patient advocates play in helping navigate the stressful burdens that can often come with healthcare. In the conversation they share impactful stories from patient's they've supported and cover topics like bill negotiation, healthcare navigation, and the impact of price transparency on the patient experience.

Jennifer Lannon is a super connector in the digital health world, the business development lead of Savvy Cooperative, and a health tech entrepreneur. She is the co-founder of Freeze.Health, an informational platform that helps women decide if, when, and where to freeze their eggs. She's also this episode's special guest! She joined us to discuss what the current patient experience is like and what can be done to change it.

Dr. Bryan Vartabedian (@Doctor_V), a physician leader and writer covering the intersection of medicine, technology, and culture joined us to discuss how technology is connecting (and disconnecting) patients and their doctors.

To round out Women's History Month, we wanted to use our 10th episode to host a very special roundtable discussion with a few of the amazing women at PointHealthTech. Our host for this episode, Josie Rasberry, sat down with our Senior Director Client Services, Teresa Heinitz, Director of Operations, Haden Marrs, Director of Engineering, Rose Hogan, Senior Product Manager Stephanie Orkand, and Executive Assistant, Robin Paniccia to discuss the need for diversity and equality in the workplace, the importance of having women in leadership, and why women shouldn't be intimidated or doubtful about their voices or abilities in the roles they hold.

To help us answer the question, “why is it so hard to understand healthcare?” we invited Jenny Aghamalian, Vice President, Public Affairs and Strategy at Sedera, to join this episode. We discuss what factors contribute to the complexity of healthcare, how healthcare sharing communities work, and why so many Americans have health insurance but still struggle with affording healthcare.

One of our favorite healthcare podcasts is “An Arm and a Leg Show”, so we were pretty stoked when host Dan Weissmann agreed to join us on an episode of our podcast. In this episode, we discuss healthcare affordability, the complexities of patient consumerism, and why healthcare stories hit us all so personally.

In this episode, Niall Brennan discusses his experiences as the first Chief Data Officer for CMS, his current role as President and CEO of the Health Care Cost Institute, and why private sectors, insurance silos, and consolidation have made U.S. healthcare so unaffordable. Niall also discusses the issues of price transparency being pushed as a consumer only issue, and points out the current healthcare buzzwords that aren't really “moving the needle.”

Dr. Nick van Terheyden joined us to discuss his experiences in the early days of healthcare technology, the need for systemic change in U.S. healthcare, and his incremental approach to healthcare transformation. Dr. Nick brings a distinctive blend of medical practitioner and business strategist to the realm of digital healthcare technology. After several years as a medical practitioner overseas, he was part of the team that developed the first EHR in the early 1990s, was a business leader in one of the first speech recognition companies, and later served as Chief Medical Officer of Dell Technologies.

Dr. Bonnie Clipper, Chief Clinical Officer at Wambi, joined us to discuss her work at Wambi and her experiences in healthcare innovation. In this episode, we discuss the importance of collecting positive feedback to encourage healthcare professionals and prevent burnout. We also talk about the importance of patients controlling their healthcare experiences, and giving nurses the resources to be innovators.

In this episode, Shakil Haroon, founder and CEO of MPIRICA, joins us to discuss why quality, affordable healthcare is hard to find (Hint: It was designed to be this way.) Shakil explains that hospitals have no interest in making quality data available because specialties with poor quality scores would lose revenue. With this in mind, Shakil created the MPIRICA Quality Score system to help patients find the best places to receive care.

In episode three of the PointHealthTech Podcast, Jan Oldenburg joins us to discuss the misalignment of goals between key healthcare players, why it's so difficult to make rational decisions in healthcare, and how we can understand the goals of the person, not just the goals of the system. When we asked Jan why it's difficult to find quality, affordable healthcare, she told us: “We keep pretending we've got an actual healthcare system rather than a collection of fragmentary parts.” Listen as Jan explains why and gives advice on how we can start fixing it.

Here at PointHealthTech, we are focused on making healthcare easy to find, easy to understand, and easier to afford. To start season 1, we focus on “finding” care by speaking with David Balat, Director of the Right on Healthcare initiative at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He discusses how price transparency will change the face of healthcare and explains why Direct Primary Care is the ideal way to go for patients who want affordable, quality care that they can actually know the price of.

Launch Trailer for PointHealthTech with Matthew Dale and Steven Cutbirth