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Dr. Marschall Runge is the author of the new book, “The Great Healthcare Disruption,” but he’s also someone who has studied primary care both in the US and across the world, and while he agrees it is currently failing, he offers some hope that it can get better.  In this episode, we talk about Dr. Runge’s research for the book that shows that the cost of healthcare per capita in the US is 2-3x what it is in other developed nations and yet our healthy life expectancy ranks 60th in the world! How is it that we are paying more for less? Dr. Runge believes there are lessons we can learn from other countries and ways to support the incredible and rapid development of effective means at treating chronic diseases that, frankly, we’re just not doing…but we could. And that, as he sees it, offers not just hope, but a framework. Dr. Marschall Runge is a distinguished physician-scientist, a leader in academic medicine, and an advocate for the integration of advanced technologies into healthcare systems. He currently serves as Dean of the Medical School at the University of Michigan and CEO of Michigan Medicine. With numerous accolades and awards, Dr. Runge has earned a reputation as one of the foremost experts in healthcare innovation. His work in bridging technology and medicine has been pivotal in reshaping the modern healthcare landscape. Dr. Runge’s groundbreaking research has been published in top-tier medical journals, and he is a sought-after speaker at international conferences on healthcare innovation, technology, and policy.

Back in 2011, Sean Duffy had a vision to change healthcare. So, he dropped out of Harvard Business School and Harvard Medical School to found this company, Omada Health, that brought healthcare to people instead of the other way around.  Now valued at over $1 billion, Omada remains an innovative example of how to manage and treat chronic disease. But Sean’s not done yet. In this conversation, we talk about how we’re living in a time where we have the most innovative medicines ever created for metabolic disease. And, the most innovative technology landscape of all time. But the services landscape is absolutely failing, and so we have to look at how to redesign services and the business models that support those services so that we can realize the potential of those technology and treatment innovations.  Sean has always been a visionary, but the way he sees the field of healthcare rivals the best quarterbacks in history. Sean is the Co-founder and CEO of Omada Health, a between-visit care provider that addresses cardiometabolic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, prediabetes, and obesity, as well as musculoskeletal issues. As a former MD/MBA candidate at Harvard, he also holds a BS in neuroscience from Columbia University. He has written extensively about digital health and the future of healthcare in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and TechCrunch, among other publications. Prior to Omada, Sean worked at both Google and IDEO.

You can’t boil the ocean, and wow, does the state of primary care sometimes feel like an ocean. And if a behemoth like CVS Health can’t do it, it’s no surprise that the rest of us in healthcare feel at a complete loss for how to right this ship. But our guest today, Amy Compton-Phillips, Executive VP and Chief Medical Officer of CVS Health, takes a different approach. If ⅓ of Americans don’t have a primary care provider and even if they wanted one, there aren’t enough to go around, AND there is no pipeline to train and certify new ones, then how do we take the resources we do have and stretch them in different ways? That is the work we talk about today – how CVS Health is using their 900 clinics and 9,000 stores to step into that void and help more people access basic primary care, or, as Amy puts it, “giving people the tools they need to live their best life.”  Amy has more than 30 years of clinical and operational experience, coming to CVS Health from her role as president and chief physician executive at Press Ganey, where she guided provider organizations and health plans through system-wide clinical transformation. Prior to Press Ganey, Amy served as president of clinical care at Providence, a national healthcare system, overseeing clinical operations across 51 hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics. A Board Certified internist herself, Amy serves as a medical analyst for CNN, where she communicated critical public health guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Welcome to a new season of Creating a New Healthcare!  This season, we’re diving into primary care. That’s right, primary care. Because right now, we are sucking at primary care, and the problem has reached critical mass. AND, we are sitting on the precipice of a revolution in primary care – the ability to provide contextual care, the ability to assess precursors to disease, and the ability to treat those conditions far more effectively – they are all on our doorstep. So, in this first episode, I sit down with my Producer, Jess Greenwood, to share my rationale on focusing this season on the revolution in primary care and what you, the audience, should be listening for with this season’s guests.

We’re quick to blame genetics for our health and wellness issues, but the reality is that genetics only makes up 18% of our health destiny. That means the rest is up to us.  Our guest today, Dr. Grant Zarzour, has seen that first hand in his own family. When his son was diagnosed with moderate autism, he and his wife refused to accept the predictions for his future. They dove head first into the data and in so doing, revolutionized not just their son’s life, but their own. Now a relentless proponent of diet, sleep, and exercise for physical and mental health, Dr. Zarzour feels like we all have a hand in our own destiny. We just have to commit.  Dr. Zarzour is a practicing hip and knee surgeon in Mobile, AL.  He is the president of the largest orthopaedic practice in Alabama. While treating thousands of patients a year, Grant has developed a passion for preventive medicine. In 2024, he founded Sperity Health, which offers personalized longevity coaching to help its members improve their diet, exercise, and sleep with expert MD guidance. Sperity Health’s mission is to lower its member’s risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and dementia by up to 50% based on data and science.

With the recent explosion of GLP-1 drugs, the war on obesity seems to have taken a new and potent turn, but many are concerned about the recidivism, the side effects, and our reenergized obsession with being thin. Our guest today, Dr. Laure DeMattia, is a board certified family medicine physician and obesity specialist. For her, obesity is personal, as she has struggled her entire life with this chronic condition. In this episode, Dr. DeMattia breaks down for us how GLP-1 drugs work to hyperdrive weight loss, why that loss is rarely sustainable without long term use of the drugs, and her own philosophy outside of medication that helps her patients feel seen, heard, and safe. It’s both an educational conversation and a behind-the-curtains look at the obesity epidemic from someone on the front lines.  Dr. Laure DeMattia helps women stop blaming themselves for their physiology and find lasting health for over 20 years. Her dual perspective as both a doctor and a patient makes her uniquely compassionate, challenging the myth that willpower is the solution. Author of the book, The 4 Food Cues, Dr. DeMattia hosts her own YouTube channel, Navigating Obesity with Dr. D, where she offers a compassionate, realistic viewpoint about weight and weight loss.

How many grams of protein do you need to be healthy? What about fiber? Supplements? It feels like we’re changing our diets daily to adhere to constantly shifting recommendations and none of it is really working to optimize our health. Christopher Gardner, Professor of Medicine in Nutrition Science at Stanford University, and featured advisor on the Netflix show, “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment”, joins us today to talk about how the industry is stacked against us and why the solution to our diet woes is as simple as beans, peas, and lentils. For more than 30 years Christopher Gardner, PhD, has studied what to consume and to avoid for optimal health, and how best to motivate individuals to achieve healthy dietary behaviors. He recently completed a two-year term serving on the US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and is the past chair of the American Heart Association’s Nutrition Committee. He has conducted and published dozens of human nutrition intervention trials, including trials of Mediterranean, Ketogenic, Vegan, Low-Fat and Low-Carb diets and their effects on cardiometabolic health. Some of his current interests include Stealth Nutrition, Unapologetic Deliciousness and Institutional Food Settings. He is currently working on personalized nutrition explorations with several colleagues, with particular focus on the gut microbiome.

As a society, and as an industrial complex, we’ve made health complicated…and expensive. But, epidemiology suggests that what we need to do to achieve and maintain personal health is really quite simple. Dr. Tom Frieden returns to the show to talk about the second half of his book, The Formula for Your Health. Through extensive research and review of hundreds of epidemiological studies, he distills the findings down to six basic things we need to be doing in order to be healthy. Dr. Frieden acknowledges that there is nuance, but he also affirms that history is clear. There are other societies in the world that were and are far healthier than the US population, and NOT because they had wearables, packaged food, home massagers, or Pelotons.  Dr. Frieden is author of the book, The Formula for Better Health: How to Save Millions of Lives—Including Your Own. He is also the founder and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, a global health organization that accelerates action against the world’s deadliest health threats. Resolve to Save Lives has worked with governments and other partners in more than 60 countries to save millions of lives. Dr. Frieden previously served as director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and New York City Health Commissioner, where he led efforts that increased life expectancy by 3 years and helped end major health crises including the largest US outbreak of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic, and responses to H1N1, Zika, and other threats.

Do you have an Apple watch? Fitbit? Oura ring? Woop? Wearables have taken over in the past decade with claims that by constantly monitoring our heart rate, sleep, respiration, and activity, they can provide health data that can change your life. But is that really possible? Or even plausible? Marco Benitez, former professional athlete, and the Founder and CEO of ROOK joins us on the Living Well series today to talk all things wearables. He sees tremendous potential with how the data these tools compile can be utilized across all aspects of our lives, including in our cars (!), to change our behavior. But he acknowledges there’s a catch. Many of these companies use the data collected not for YOUR benefit, but for theirs, and real change, well, there’s no magic bullet. It’s hard, takes time, and is all on you. Raised in Mexico with an insatiable curiosity and entrepreneurial spirit, Marco Benitez built his career at the intersection of health, technology, and sports science. Starting as a Tae Kwon Do champion, Marco’s discipline and resilience guided him into biomedical engineering, then into high-stakes roles in pharmaceutical giants like Roche and Novartis. Here, he witnessed the transformative power of data in healthcare—and saw a profound opportunity to make health metrics more accessible and actionable. Determined to improve health management and bridge the gap between raw data and real impact, Marco co-founded ROOK.

Last week, we talked about the six key drivers of personal health with Dr. Tom Frieden. But how does that factor into our conversation about the value (or not) of wearables and supplements? This week, Dr. Zeev Neuwirth and Producer, Jess Greenwood, are back to unpack that for you. We discuss the role wearables do and potentially could play in helping each one of us achieve and maintain better health. We talk about how important it is to understand that the six drivers of personal health may be simple, but they’re not necessarily easy and why that means individuals are not to blame.  Most importantly, we offer an invitation. To those who are creating, supporting, or changing their own environments to support better health for themselves or their community. We want to hear from you! Please get in touch so we can share your story on the podcast.

“Healthcare, in my opinion, is the ultimate team sport.” I love this quote from today’s guest. And it reminds me that patient experience is not just about the patient; it starts with every member of that patient’s care team. If they do not feel respected, trusted, and valued, it will absolutely impact the experience of their patients. Brian Carlson, VP of Patient Experience of Vanderbilt Health, knows that trickle down effect all too well. And, as a result, he’s been building the patient experience at that organization from the inside out.  The outcome? Year-over-year improvement in patient experience scores. Over 80% participation in voluntary patient experience training.  Three times over having the organization vote “YES!” to continue this type of training.  Experience matters, and Brian has the data to prove it.  Brian Carlson leads enterprise strategy for patient experience, workforce culture, and digital engagement across the 40,000-person Vanderbilt Health system. Brian’s work focuses on the intersection of culture, operations, and technology, including AI-enabled approaches to experience management and patient engagement at scale. He has led major initiatives in patient access, digital health adoption, and workforce culture transformation.

Can design be a determinant of health? We often think about the quality of the clinical care patients receive in our hospitals, the outcome metrics that determine funding and quality and safety rankings, the readmission rates that tell us how well we’re helping people get healthy and stay that way. But one thing we overlook is the quality, accessibility, and care in the buildings those same patients visit, the parking lots, the cafeterias, the sights, the sounds, the space as a whole.  Our guest today is an architect who looks at existing and possible solutions through a unique lens: Who was this designed for? Abbie Clary is CannonDesign’s Executive Director of Health for All where she leads strategy at the intersection of design, health equity and systems change. She has spent nearly 30 years impacting the healthcare system most directly across over $5 Billion in healthcare projects, including work with Memorial Sloan Kettering, University of Chicago Medicine, MD Anderson, Fred Hutch, Kaiser Permanente Shirely Ryan AbilityLab and more. Her perspective that “design is bigger than buildings” is changing healthcare by creating opportunities for health in and around the spaces we as people inhabit in our daily lives. By building in those opportunities on the front end, Abbie believes there will be greater access, better outcomes, and an overall shift in health and wellness for all.

Ambulatory Surgical Centers (ASCs) have been around in concept for the past fifty years, but their recent explosion has caught the attention of healthcare systems and, frankly, patients. Why? Today’s guest, Adnan Qureshi, is a Managing Director with the Mergers and Acquisitions practice at Kaufman Hall. He provides strategic advisory services for healthcare providers and investors around the merger or acquisition of ASCs. The benefit he’s seen in partnership with his clients perhaps explains the answer to this question. The “DNA”, as Adnan puts it, of the ASC is rooted in independent physicians who, as an extension of their practice, saw the benefit of doing lower acuity surgeries in an outpatient setting. As pain management and technology improved over time, the use case also evolved to the point where there are now few specialty areas where uncomplicated surgeries cannot be performed in an ASC. Without the overhead and operating costs of a hospital, ASCs allow for far more transparent pricing, lower costs, greater efficiency, and often better outcomes, all driving towards higher patient satisfaction. And that’s a win we should all be paying attention to. Adnan Qureshi has over fifteen years of healthcare transaction experience. Prior to joining Kaufman Hall, he was a Director of Development at SCA Health, a subsidiary of Optum/UnitedHealth Group. In that role, Mr. Qureshi led market entry strategy across several geographies, and sourced, structured, and executed ambulatory surgery center acquisitions.

We’ve been talking a lot about healthspan and longevity in our recent episodes, but how do we get there? What changes would it take in the way we practice medicine to move towards a system that helps maintain wellness instead of a system that diagnoses and manages disease? This is the fundamental challenge that our guest today and her company, Radence, are tackling. Dr. Julie Chen is the Chief Medical Officer at Radence. An integrative internal medicine physician, she and her colleagues at Radence are working to develop a data-backed model of healthcare that identifies the precursors to problems, allowing for proactive intervention and, in many cases, prevention.  As Dr. Chen says, it will take awhile to amass the data needed to show that spending these resources when a person is well ultimately results in greater health, lower spend, and better longevity, but we have to start somewhere. Dr. Chen is not just a practicing physician, but an accomplished researcher as well. Her research, at the FDA, NIH, National Cancer Institute, USC, and Mount Sinai, has shaped scientific advancement in precision medicine. As a fellowship-trained integrative internal medicine physician, she developed numerous corporate wellness programs in Silicon Valley focusing on whole-systems approach to healthcare and previously served as Chief Medical Officer at companies such as Human Longevity and Vitagene.

Dr. Daphne Bascom earned a DPhil/PhD in physiological sciences at the University of Oxford, a medical degree at the University of Pittsburgh, and completed fellowship training in microvascular and reconstructive surgery of the head and neck at Oregon Health Sciences University. She has more than two decades of executive leadership across health systems, health technology, and community health. Most recently, she served as Vice President of Population Health at Saint Luke’s Health System in Kansas City. So, how and why did she leave all of that to pursue lifestyle medicine, a “vegetable-forward” way of life, and a completely different kind of care? As we’ve heard from many of our guests, for Dr. Bascom, it was personal. Between witnessing her mother’s long and arduous struggle with COPD and helping her father navigate the healthcare system, she recognized that despite her many years of training, her work as a surgeon, and her leadership, she still wasn’t doing the work that got her into medicine in the first place. She wanted to help people be healthy. Period.  That deep calling led her to become the Chief Operating Officer of The Vegan Gym, a global digital health platform dedicated to plant-based performance, healthspan, and longevity. She now hosts the Thrive on Plants podcast and is the Founder of The Longevity Lab. As a lifelong believer in equity and inclusion, Dr. Bascom works hard to ensure that this information is accessible to all people, and much of the education she puts together on these topics is available for free on her YouTube channel, @TheVeganGym.