The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast

Most careers don’t follow a straight line. But few require starting over in full view of the public. This week, Halle sits down with Lance Armstrong to discuss how he rebuilt his life and career after multiple turning points, including surviving advanced cancer, and how those experiences shaped his perspective on health, performance, and reinvention. Now, through his venture firm Next Ventures, he backs companies focused on what they call “whole person health” — spanning prevention, wellness, diagnostics, longevity, and healthcare outside the traditional system. We cover:Why he chose to become a VC, and what he likes (and dislikes) about the jobHow his experience as a patient shapes how he evaluates companiesWhy preventive care is growing outside the traditional healthcare systemWhat he looks for in founders building across the care continuumWhat it takes to rebuild trust and start over About our guest: Lance Armstrong is a former professional cyclist, entrepreneur, and investor. After surviving advanced testicular cancer, he founded Livestrong, helping raise more than $500 million to support cancer patients and survivors worldwide. In 2019, he co-founded Next Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on health, wellness, and consumer brands, with investments including Oura, Cofertility, Pair Team, and SteadyMD. Prior to Next Ventures, he was an active angel investor in companies such as Uber, DocuSign, and Athletic Brewing. —  🙏 Do you like this podcast? An easy and free way to help keep the show going is to leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. —  📍 Connect with us: Heart of Healthcare website LinkedIn YouTube  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI in healthcare may be entering a new chapter, one where the biggest question is no longer whether the technology works, but who is willing to deploy it, measure it, and take responsibility for the risk. This week, Steve sits down again with Eric Larsen to revisit his predictions from last year’s Webby-winning episode on generative AI in healthcare. Eric argues that the first wave of AI has been inflationary, reinforcing the old payer-provider payment model, but that the next wave could be deflationary as automation moves into revenue cycle, administrative work, clinical reasoning, and drug development. They discuss why incumbents still have a narrow window to co-develop the future, why clinical AI may move faster outside the US, and why liability may become the deciding factor in who wins. We cover:Why healthcare is still the sector most exposed to AI-driven changeHow AI has reinforced fee-for-service dynamics so far, and why that may soon reverseWhat makes some healthcare work more automatable than othersWhy liability may determine how fast clinical AI gets adoptedWhich health systems, payers, and life sciences companies are moving fastestWhat will change across providers, payers, and pharma over the next year—  👉Submit your questions! We’re doing a followup episode with Eric. Submit your listener questions here: https://forms.gle/Bu335DkpHAUvygiBA —  About our guest: Eric Jon Larsen is President of TowerBrook Advisors and a member of the healthcare leadership team at TowerBrook Capital Partners, a $30 billion AUM investment firm based in New York and London. TowerBrook invests across private equity, structured minority, and growth opportunities, with a strong focus on healthcare, partnering with health systems, payers, and other strategics. Notably, TowerBrook is the first mainstream private equity firm to achieve B Corp certification, reflecting its commitment to responsible business practices. Eric is a nationally recognized healthcare strategist with a global advisory portfolio spanning CEOs and boards of leading healthcare organizations. He spent 25 years at The Advisory Board Company—five of those as President—advancing best practices in healthcare delivery worldwide. Following the firm's 2017 acquisition by Optum (UnitedHealth Group), Eric co-led strategic partnerships and market development efforts at UnitedHealth. He is also a Venture Partner at Thrive Capital and SignalFire, and serves on several digital health boards, including Somatus and Contessa Health. —  🙏 Do you like this podcast? An easy and free way to help keep the show going is to leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. —  📍 Connect with us: Heart of Healthcare website LinkedIn YouTube  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Medicaid reimbursements are shrinking, providers are pulling back, and vulnerable populations are losing access to care. Akido Labs is betting that AI can expand care capacity fast enough to reverse that trend. This week, Halle sits down with Prashant Samant, co-founder and CEO of Akido Labs, to discuss what it actually takes to scale care with AI. They explore why Akido built a full-stack healthcare company, how its AI operates inside real clinical workflows, and why the hardest patients are the best place to test whether this model works. We cover:Why he chose to build a full-stack care modelHow AI changes who can deliver care, and whereWhy most healthcare AI tools fail once they hit real clinical workflowsWhy the doctor shortage cannot be solved by training more doctorsHow the bottleneck in healthcare AI is absorption, not innovation About our guest: Prashant S. Samant is CEO and co-founder of Akido, a healthcare technology company that builds clinical AI and operates a multi-state medical network serving hundreds of thousands of patients. He co-founded Akido in 2015 through USC’s Digital Health Lab. In 2023, he and his co-founders received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year–Greater Los Angeles Award. Samant is also a co-founder and board member of Grid110, a nonprofit accelerator supporting early-stage entrepreneurs. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis. —  Show Notes:Akido’s recently-published white paper on street medicine—  🙏 Do you like this podcast? An easy and free way to help keep the show going is to leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. —  📍 Connect with us: Heart of Healthcare website LinkedIn YouTube  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI is everywhere in healthcare, and May's big question is whether it's actually delivering. The money is flowing, the promises are bold, but some cracks are starting to show. Steve and Michael break down the month's biggest stories. We cover:Digital health hitting its strongest funding quarter since the pandemic peak, and why deal concentration tells the real storyHow Medvi built a billion-dollar GLP-1 company on fake doctor profiles, fake reviews, and a drug with zero bioavailabilityWhy AI in prior authorization and billing may be inflating healthcare costs rather than cutting themThe peptide craze: what the science says, what regulators have banned, and why Michael is actually taking oneHow AI could collapse today's narrow medical specialties into a "generalist specialist" modelNew research showing Epic's out-of-the-box AI models fall short on real-world clinical benchmarks— Show notes: Rock Health Q1 2026 Funding Report NYT Profile of Medvi + Futurism Investigation Peterson Health Technology Institute: Administrative AI Report STAT News / Undark: BPC-157 and the Peptide Craze Health Affairs Scholar: Kocher & Wachter on the Generalist-Specialist Model Springer Nature / Journal of General Internal Medicine: Epic AI Model Meta-Analysis —  🙏 Do you like this podcast? An easy and free way to help keep the show going is to leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. —  📍 Connect with us: Heart of Healthcare website LinkedIn YouTube  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Forty million people use ChatGPT for health-related questions every day, making it one of the most widely used tools for health information in the world. So what is their team doing to maximize impact and minimize harm? For one, they've brought in hundreds of physicians globally to continuously review outputs and shape how the models respond across different scenarios, literacy levels, and edge cases. Second, they've hired my Rock Health co-founder, Nate Gross, MD, as their VP of Health. In this full-circle episode, I sit down with Nate, who also co-founded Doximity (DOCS) and knows a thing or two about building in digital health. We discuss the astonishing speed of AI progress, how models are trained for safety and accuracy, and what this technological evolution means for every part of the healthcare system. Key topics:How ChatGPT is becoming a 24/7 front door for health questions, and whether it is replacing Dr. Google or starting to compete with the healthcare system itselfHow OpenAI is trying to reduce hallucinations, avoid sycophantic behavior, and build guardrails for sensitive use cases like mental healthOpenAI’s goals to “raise the floor, sweep the floor, and raise the ceiling” with new product launches like ChatGPT for Clinicians and GPT-RosalindHow Nate thinks about the AI race and what winning in healthcare actually requiresWhere startups should focus their efforts now that specialized products are launching for clinicians and life sciencesThe single hardest problem in healthcare that AI, according to Nate, probably won't fix anytime soon—  About our guest: Dr. Nate Gross is the VP of Health at OpenAI. He previously co-founded Doximity and Rock Health. He graduated from the Emory University School of Medicine with an MD, Harvard Business School with an MBA, and Claremont McKenna College with a BA in Government. He serves as affiliated faculty for the Clinical Informatics Fellowship at Stanford. —  Show notes:ChatGPT for CliniciansChatGPT for Health (for patients)OpenAI for HealthcareGPT-Rosalind—  🏆 Thank you for your votes! We're excited to share that the Heart of Healthcare is a Webby Award Winner for 2026! —  📍 Connect with us: Heart of Healthcare website LinkedIn YouTube  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.