Dr. Robert Pearl has recently published a 3rd book entitled ‘ChatGPT MD’. His ‘co-author’, as he calls it, was ChatGPT itself. With this book, Robbie brings his unique perspectives as a practicing surgeon, an accomplished CEO, an author of numerous publications and books, a Stanford Graduate Business School and Medical School Professor, and one of …

If you’ve ever wondered, ‘But what can I do? – please listen to this episode. Dr. Stella Safo, a Harvard-educated, Ghanaian-American physician, provides us all with her wisdom, experience and courageous efforts in addressing that question. In this interview we’ll cover: Some shocking and saddening stats on healthcare inequities & disparities in the…

So, it turns out that how we frame failure is far more important than how we manage success, in determining our motivation and our ability to sustain healthful and positive behavior change. Our guest today, Dr. Kyra Bobinet, is a long-standing expert, clinician and entrepreneur in the field of behavior change. Her company, Fresh Tri, applies a uniq…

Friends, The very first question I asked our guest today, Neal Khosla, was, “If AI is the solution, what’s the problem?” His response was disarmingly true. We don’t have enough Primary Care providers and they don’t have enough time. When I asked Neal to define AI, he didn’t go into the usual tech jargon. Instead, he described the specific needs pat…

Friends, I think you’ll all understand this. Every once in a while an issue comes along which has such importance and urgency that you’re compelled to do something about it. In this case, I had a phone call with our expert guest a week ago, and ten minutes into the discussion, I stopped him and said ‘we have to do this podcast interview immediately…

Friends, The digital/data revolution in healthcare is upon us, and amongst other things, it’s recreating public health, population health and health equity. One of the groups at the forefront of this movement is the ‘Data Humanity Lab’ at Finthrive. In this episode, we’ll hear directly from one of the emerging leaders in the field, Brian Urban – th…

Friends, There are over 160 million Americans who get their health benefits through their employers. Nearly 40% of all healthcare expenditures in the U.S. is paid for by self-insured employers. For decades, these benefits have been mismanaged – contributing to unsustainable costs and suboptimal health outcomes; and leading to a prolonged wage stagn…

Friends, The number one question I get asked after my presentations and seminars is, “But Zeev, what can I do?” Making positive humanistic change in healthcare seems daunting, if not impossible. The system is incredibly entrenched. And yet, in this interview we’re going to hear examples of leaders who have used the principle of ‘love’ to create pos…

Friends, This episode is a must-listen, not only for healthcare leaders, but for CEO’s, CFO’s and CHRO’s of every self-insured employer in the US. One of the most crippling problems in American healthcare is the cost of care through self-insured employers – which is how approximately 40% of all healthcare is paid for in the US. As our guest puts it…

Friends, What most of us are unaware of is that the health of the American public is worsening in relation to other developed nations – despite having, by far, the costliest and arguably most sophisticated healthcare system in the world. Our life span is decreasing. Inequities in care and disparities in health outcomes are worsening. The Washington…

Watch out folks! A new day in Creating a New Healthcare is coming… Creating a New Healthcare has an updated look and an updated focus. Over the past six months, I’ve been speaking with healthcare audiences across the country about my recently published book, ‘Beyond the Walls’, which is about getting beyond our limiting legacy thinking. There are 3…

Friends, This interview should be required listening for every chief experience officer, every marketing officer, every chief medical officer and every chief executive officer in American healthcare. Why? Because – when benchmarked against other public and private healthcare systems the VA outperforms on patient experience and consumer trust metric…

Friends, This is a remarkable journey – of a physician who has gone from burnout to creating positive ‘ripples of change’ in our healthcare system. He went from being a casualty of our healthcare system to being a courageous leader. In listening to Dr. Otten’s story, I was moved from anger to elation, and I suspect you will be as well. What’s profo…

Friends, This dialogue is a Master Class in Care Transformation – likely owing to our guest’s unique background, which includes preventive medicine, public health, and clinical informatics. It should be required listening for all healthcare executives and managers – both clinical and administrative – as well process/quality improvement professional…

Friends, This is Part 2 of an interview that is one of the most startling I’ve posted over the past 8 years. The revelation here is that the pulse oximeters we’ve been using for decades, to measure oxygen in the blood, are not always accurate in people of color. They may overestimate the amount of oxygen in the blood and miss low oxygen levels – po…

Friends, Primary care for seniors is different from care for younger patients. Yet, very few providers across the country have a different and distinct strategy to care for their aging senior patients. In this interview, we’ll be introduced to an organization that has made taking care of seniors a priority. The fundamental problems with attempting …

Friends, This interview is one of the most startling I’ve posted to date. In this episode, we discover that pulse oximeters – which measure blood oxygen levels – are not always accurate in people of color. Mounting evidence suggests that they’re far less accurate in people of color than in white people. They can overestimate the amount of oxygen sa…

Friends, As we’ve described and discussed before in this podcast, Primary Care in the US is on life-support and the prognosis does not look good. The implications for all of us is dire – as we look at what is nothing less than the demise of primary preventive care in our country. Our guest today has devoted his career to trying to revive and save p…

Friends, In this episode we’re going to discuss the opportunity we have, collectively, to live longer and healthier lives – and the underlying transition that’s required in the healthcare industry to make that a reality over the next few years. The specific topics at hand include: (1) The economic imperative for why the American healthcare industry…

Friends, I’ve had the great privilege of interviewing and interacting with Glen Tullman a number of times over the past few years. The last time we spoke in a formal interview was episode #121, which was posted on Sept 22, 2021. That episode was entitled, “A master class in building a healthcare consumer experience company”. And it was exactly that…

Friends, The central role that Medicare, and CMS, play in our healthcare system can not be overstated. There are approximately 64 million Americans in the Medicare program, with annual payments of $1 Trillion, comprising over 20% of the healthcare spend in our country. In addition to its size and scope, CMS, through the Medicare program, is leading…

Friends, There is no question that digital health is a critical part of the future of healthcare delivery. It is what I term ‘the great enabler’. And in this interview we have the opportunity to speak with a physician leader who is at the tip of that spear: Dr. Eve Cunningham, a physician executive in virtual care & digital health at Providence, on…

Friends, In my upcoming book, Beyond The Walls, I spend an entire chapter discussing how platforms have revolutionized other industries and how they’re about to do the same in healthcare. Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing and learning from the experts who have been working with platforms for years. Geoffrey Parke…

Friends, This week’s interview is nothing less than awesome, and it’s awesome for three reasons. First, Dr. Rishi Sikka is a brilliant and accomplished physician executive with an incredibly diverse professional background. He brings that diversity of thought and vision into his work and into our dialogue. Second, we’re going to discuss some key ne…

[In order to provide accessible content, here is a full transcript of this interview] Friends, The topic this week is caregiving and caregivers – an issue that is so much larger, so much more devastating, and so much more in need of reform than most of us are aware. There are over 50 million family caregivers in the US, and they suffer financially,…

Friends, This is a super interesting and fast paced dialogue about a topic that is poorly understood by most, including healthcare executives and policy experts. The topic is employee health plans. Our guest today, Dave Chase is a remarkable healthcare entrepreneur with decades of experience who has been one of the most brilliant thinkers and activ…

Friends, I began this interview in a fairly calm state of mind, but I was shaken by the end. Throughout our dialogue, I could not help repeating the word ‘startling’ as our two expert guests shared stats on the state of primary care in their home state of Massachusetts and across the country. For example, were you aware that only about 5% of the to…

Friends, The day after we recorded this interview, I picked up the May 2nd 2023 issue of JAMA and discovered that one of the leading research studies was about the rising trend in mental health-related ED visits among youth. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2804326 The stats were shocking and of serious concern. Between 2011 a…

Friends, This was the most challenging interview I’ve conducted and posted, in the nearly 6 years that I’ve been hosting the ‘Creating a New Healthcare’ podcast. I spent weeks listening to the audio file – trying to figure out how to understand it, what to do with it, and how to present it to you. In the end, I believe it’s important to share it an…

Friends, The topic of this episode is about an emerging healthcare marketplace transformation, which is the introduction of platforms into healthcare. What surprised me about this movement is how many years it’s been developing. For example, last July I attended the 2022 MIT Platform Strategy Summit. Turns out it was their 10th annual symposium on …

Folks, We recorded this interview in February – the dead of winter – and I have to admit that I needed some sunshine and positivity. Steve Sell supplied it with his enthusiasm, his can-do spirit and the fantastic advancements that agilon is making in allowing providers to practice primary care medicine with more time, more resources and more suppor…

Friends, Let’s start with a statistic. I suspect that many of you consider rural healthcare a somewhat esoteric or niche market. Let’s correct that misconception right up front. There are over 60 million Americans who live in rural settings and they tend to be older and have more medical conditions than the general population. Just for comparison’s…

Friends, I have to tell you that each time I have the opportunity to speak with Dr. Patrick Conway, it’s a treat. He is an erudite and accomplished healthcare executive – having served as the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina and previous to that as the deputy administrator for innovation and quality at the Center for Medicare and Med…

Friends, It’s always enlightening and inspiring to hear from Dr. Robert Pearl, our guest this episode. He tackles critical issues in healthcare head on and with unabashed honesty and unfiltered integrity. The topics you’ll be hearing about this episode include what Dr. Pearl refers to as “the middleman mentality”, which he argues is “killing Americ…

Friends, In this episode, we have the unique opportunity of being introduced to two critical components in the future of healthcare delivery: platforms and flywheels. We also have the great fortune of being introduced to one of the national leaders in digital healthcare, Sara Vaezy. Our guest will share why and how platforms and flywheels are neces…

Friends, The problem of inequity in women’s health is a hugely disturbing one, particularly in American healthcare. For example – the disparity in maternal-fetal mortality & outcomes among Black women compared to White women in our country is an egregious example of a long-standing unsolved inequity. To put it plainly, it’s a shocking disparity and…

Friends, Our dialogue this episode centers on one of the most transformative and divergent clinical care models that I have come across. People throw around phrases like relationship-centered, patient-centered, preventive, personalized, and social determinants of health. In the model we’re discussing in this episode, you’ll see all of that actually…

Friends, This is one of a series of interviews I conducted to better understand the role of platforms in healthcare delivery. Our guest today, Dr. Roy Schoenberg, is one of the most significant contributors and most accomplished entrepreneurs in the domain of telehealth & virtual healthcare. He and his colleagues are also pioneers in one of the mos…

Friends, Many of us think of Uber as simply a much more convenient and comfortable alternative to taxi cabs, or as another great app on our smartphones. Underlying that reality is a deeper understanding that Uber is actually one of the most sophisticated business & technology platforms to date. Through the use of data, analytics and digital connect…

Friends, Whether you’re 25 years old or 75 years old, when you walk into primary care providers’ offices in most places across the country, the care you’ll receive is pretty much the same. The people in the office are the same; the services are the same; the protocols are the same; the time slots you get are the same. Does that make sense to you? T…

This is a singularly unusual and unprecedented episode. Aug 17th 2022, which is the day of the posting of this episode, is the 5th anniversary of the ‘Creating a New Healthcare’ podcast. I’m taking this opportunity to spend a few minutes reflecting on the journey – and to share those reflections with you. As always, I am interested in your thoughts…

Friends, There is a quiet, maybe not so quiet, revolution happening in healthcare delivery. The transposition of healthcare out of the legacy bricks & mortar sites and into the home. Payers such as Humana and Optum, as well as retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy Health and Walgreens are spending tens of billions of dollars acquiring companies and ca…

Friends, The first interview we conducted with Ben Kligler (see episode #130) was an introduction to a game-changing humanistic inflection in healthcare delivery called ‘Whole Health’. If you haven’t listened to it yet, you must. What the VA is deploying on a national scale may be the largest and most significant positive transformation occurring i…

Friends, I’ve listened to this podcast multiple times, in preparation for this write-up. Each time I listen, I learn something new and continue to be blown away by what the visionary folks at Laguna Health are doing and building. The bottom line here is that our healthcare system is not designed to identify and address the contextual [life] barrier…

Friends, Our topic today is nothing less than a new standard of care for a vulnerable segment of the population that has been subjected to highly fragmented, uncoordinated and grossly inadequate medical care. For those of us who have experience with older parents as well as for physicians and other providers of care – you understand how challenging…

Friends, Our topic today is an overview of some of the most serious and consequential challenges facing our healthcare system and our public health, as shared with us by one of the most erudite, accomplished and ethically driven leaders of our era, Dr. Don Berwick. As always, our focus will not be on what’s wrong with American healthcare, but rathe…

Friends, The topic today is one that is near and dear to my heart, and what I spend a fair share of my time working on. We’ll be focusing on the challenges that seniors face in navigating our complex healthcare system. This is a critically relevant issue for all of us in healthcare – now and for the next few decades. The population of Americans ove…

Friends, The focus of this interview is on recognizing and addressing one of the most ubiquitous barriers to healthcare. I’ve heard it labeled as “the last mile of care”. What we’re talking about is where the rubber really meets the road in delivering on the triple aim of healthcare outcomes, costs & experience. Medical encounters, diagnoses, refer…

Friends, We open up this podcast talking about a yearning on the part of people for a different type of dialogue, interaction & relationship in the delivery of healthcare. In all of the interviews I’ve conducted over the past 5 years – underneath all of the discussions about value-based payment, reframed clinical and business models, advanced analy…

Friends, Our guest today, Dr. Roy Schoenberg, is one of the most significant contributors and accomplished entrepreneurs in the domain of telehealth & virtual healthcare. In this episode, he’ll share some unique perspectives he’s gleaned from over 25 years as a trailblazer in telehealth. He’ll also discuss a transformational initiative that he and …