The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast

We pay close attention to what we eat and drink. But how much do we really know about the air we breathe inside our own homes?This week, Halle is live from the New York Stock Exchange, sitting down with three-time founder David Vivero for the launch of Lution. After discovering extensive mold contamination in his own home, David became obsessed with understanding the connection between our indoor environments and our health, and whether we could make the invisible things around us easier to see and understand.We cover:What a “nutrition label for air” could actually tell youHow David's cancer diagnosis and the discovery of mold in his home each changed the course of his lifeWhat we know, and still don’t know, about how our homes affect our healthWhy understanding what's in your home's air has traditionally required expensive professional testingHow AI is changing what a tiny startup team can buildShow notes:Lution (use code HALLE50 for $50 off the $299 starter kit*)EPA Environmental Relative Moldiness Index (ERMI)WHO Guidelines for Indoor Air Quality: Dampness and MouldAsthma Control Before and After Changing Gas Stoves to Electric Stoves*We do not get affiliate fees from sales; however, Halle is an investor in Lution.About our guest:David Vivero is co-founder of Lution, a serial entrepreneur in home and health, and a 2022 Fortune 40 Under 40 honoree. He founded RentJuice, acquired by Zillow, and Amino Health, a consumer healthcare-data navigation company acquired by Capital Rx in 2024. Lution turns in-home sensor data and lab analysis of the dust a home's HVAC filter has already collected into one daily score for the home's air, the Lution Level.—📍 Connect with us:Heart of Healthcare websiteLinkedInYouTube See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

One of the world’s leading AI researchers has big plans for healthcare. And Thoreau just committed $500 million to bring that vision to life.This week, we are the first to sit down with Ortet founder and CEO Kyunghyun Cho to talk about the frontier AI lab for health. After helping shape some of the technologies behind modern AI and selling his last AI startup to Genentech, Kyunghyun is now taking on a much bigger challenge: building a foundation model that can learn across biological, clinical, and operational data to deliver predictably better care.We cover:Why healthcare needs its own foundation models, and the “cold start” problem he thinks it can solveWhat Ortet plans to do differently from general-purpose AI companiesWhy Ortet secured $500 million before it had even really gotten startedWhat buying AI compute and a lobster roll have in commonHow KC’s own experience with cancer shaped his vision for more predictable healthcareAbout our guest:Kyunghyun Cho is the founder and CEO of Ortet and the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics and a professor of computer science and data science at New York University. Through his AI research, he co-developed the attention mechanism and the gated recurrent unit, both foundations of modern AI technology. Prior to founding Ortet, Kyunghyun built an AI platform for lab-in-the-loop molecular design, co-founding Prescient Design and, following its acquisition, establishing Genentech’s frontier research team. He previously served as a research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) after completing his postdoctoral fellowship at University of Montreal under the supervision of Prof. Yoshua Bengio. He received MSc and PhD degrees from Aalto University under the supervision of Prof. Juha Karhunen, Dr. Tapani Raiko and Dr. Alexander Ilin. Kyunghyun received the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Engineering in 2021 and has served as a (co-)Program Chair of ICLR 2020, NeurIPS 2022 and ICML 2022, and also on the boards of ICML and ICLR.📍 Connect with us:Heart of Healthcare websiteLinkedInYouTube See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It’s time for our Monthly Digital Health Download, where we unpack the stories shaping healthcare and technology right now. This month, Steve Kraus and Michael Esquivel try to make sense of a particularly eventful few weeks, with plenty to debate about where healthcare is headed and what it means for founders, investors, clinicians, and patients.In this episode:Why a court declared that patients don’t have right to ambient AI recordingsOura postpones its IPO at the last minute, despite strong investor demand. What happened?What happens when patients start showing up to appointments armed with medical advice from AI?AI was supposed to make healthcare cheaper. So why is it driving spending up first?The FDA starts wrestling with one of healthcare AI’s hardest questions: How do you regulate medical technology that can change constantly? Chime in on the white paper here.—🙏 Are you a regular listener of the show? We'd love to hear from you. Please leave us a review!—📍 Connect with us:Heart of Healthcare websiteLinkedInYouTube See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Healthcare is full of things that are easy to measure, from costs and outcomes to utilization and, increasingly, AI. But DaVita CEO Javier Rodriguez believes one of the most important parts of healthcare is also one of the hardest to put in a spreadsheet: the human relationship between a caregiver and a patient.This week, Halle sits down with Javier to talk about what he’s learned from three decades in healthcare. They discuss why preventing kidney failure remains so difficult and what it takes to run a public healthcare company while making investments that may take years to pay off. Javier also shares why he believes healthcare has made enormous clinical progress even as frustration with the system has grown. We cover:Why Javier would be thrilled if DaVita’s dialysis business disappearedWhat’s actually stopping more patients from getting kidney transplantsWhy more dialysis care is moving from clinics into patients’ homesWhy Javier believes Wall Street undervalues the human side of healthcareThe leadership blind spot that nearly got him fired early in his careerAbout our guest:Javier J. Rodriguez has served as Chief Executive Officer of DaVita Inc. since June 2019. Joining the company in 1998, Mr. Rodriguez has held senior leadership roles of increasing responsibility, with experience across operations, payor contracting, and finance, and has helped shape the company’s transformation in the delivery of kidney care. Prior to joining DaVita, Mr. Rodriguez worked in finance at Baxter Healthcare Corporation. He has served on the board of directors of Gilead Sciences, Inc. since June 2020. Mr. Rodriguez brings deep healthcare expertise, comprehensive knowledge of our business and regulatory landscape, and a proven track record of executive leadership.—📍 Connect with us:Heart of Healthcare websiteLinkedInYouTube See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

For decades, healthcare's quality movement gave us checklists, forcing functions, and protocols to catch human error before it reached a patient. It worked, to a point. But as medical knowledge and patient complexity keep outpacing what any human system can track, a new question is emerging: can AI pick up where that movement left off?In this episode, in her first interview since stepping into the role, we talk with Dr. Azita Hamedani, the newly appointed Chief Clinical Officer at Bunkerhill Health, an AI company backed by Sequoia and Khosla Ventures. After nearly her entire career in academic medicine, Azita made the leap to a startup chasing a promise she's been thinking about since medical school.We cover:The medical school moment that first pulled her toward patient safety over bench scienceWhy she believes healthcare has hit the ceiling of what checklists and protocols alone can doThe three different types of health system leaders who all understand a different piece of the AI puzzle, and why that's a problemWhat actually happened behind the scenes on one real patient's chart, without a single human triggering itHer take on the Khosla and AMA debate over whether doctors should stay in the loopA personal story from her own cancer diagnosis, and the one question she asked her surgeon that no AI could ever answerAbout our guest:Azita G. Hamedani, MD, MPH, MBA, is the Chief Clinical Officer at Bunkerhill Health. She joined the company based on the belief that its long-horizon AI agent is the first technology capable of ensuring every patient receives optimal care. She spent 25 years in various leadership roles within large-scale academic health systems. Most recently, she served as President and CEO of UNC Faculty Physicians and Vice Dean for Clinical Affairs at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. Dr. Hamedani also spent nearly two decades at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health, where she founded the Department of Emergency Medicine and chaired it for over a decade, while also leading system initiatives related to quality and innovation. She completed her emergency medicine training at Mass General Brigham, and completed a fellowship in hospital administration at Massachusetts General Hospital. She holds degrees from Yale University and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. —📍 Connect with us:Heart of Healthcare websiteLinkedInYouTube See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.