Claims Denied: A Hospitalogy Podcast
Join one man’s quest to learn everything there is to know about the business of healthcare. Blake Madden and friends cut through the fluff to talk shop with influential healthcare leaders across innovation, strategy, finance, policy, and more. Learn about disruptive health tech startups, hear war stories, stay up to date on emerging health system transformation strategies, and listen in to scalding hot takes on pressing topics and the future of the industry. New episodes drop Mondays. Subscribe to get the latest!
Episodes
Blake sits down with Dr. Ramon Lizardo, ER doc turned three-time operator turned investor, and former CEO of Tele911. This one goes places Blake didn't plan for.
Ramon shares his impressive journey: Getting into medical school on a single borrowed application he found in his backpack a month later. He left a $300K+ clinical job for $40K base and a $25K bonus, with debt. Then he built a company that turned Baltimore, Fort Worth, a...
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September 8, 2026 • 75 mins
We're doing something special with this latest episode of Claims Denied. Blake packed up and drove out to Plano, TX on a 100 degree August morning to record this one live on site, and the location is half the story: Matic's team works out of a suite inside Catalyst Health Group's headquarters. That's not a real estate footnote. That's the business model.
Blake sits down with Calvin Carter, CEO and co-founder of Matic (https://mati...
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September 1, 2026 • 54 mins
Blake sits down with Ahmed Marmoush, CEO and co-founder of Handl Health, fresh off their Series A funding, and this one covers the full arc of where employer-sponsored insurance is heading.
Ahmed's path is unlike any guest we've seen on Claims Denied: From a clinical pharmacist in New Zealand's single-payer system, to a consultant alongside the country's former Director General of Health, to an $800 bill for a routine physical in ...
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Blake sits down with Nick Stefanizzi, CEO of Northwell Direct (https://northwelldirect.northwell.edu/) — the man running the most ambitious direct-to-employer play in the country.
Since going live in 2022, his team has built a platform serving 70+ employers and unions, 300K members, and $2.5B in medical spend, with 97% retention. Then they landed 32BJ: 20% validated savings, $46M in year one, live as of April.
Blake and Nic...
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This episode hits the affordability crisis head-on, as Blake sits down with Ali Diab, CEO and co-founder of Collective Health (https://collectivehealth.com/).
Ali started the company after his own hospital claim got denied, and has spent the decade since building what he calls the “Stripe” of healthcare benefits — for employers today, and potentially insurers and health systems tomorrow.
In this episode, Ali ma...
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For this week's episode, Hospitalogy's Blake Madden puts two people on opposite ends of the same handshake into one virtual room: Travis Messina, CEO of Regent Surgical, and Niyum Gandhi, CFO of Mass General Brigham (MGB), who runs one of the most-watched integrated systems in the country.
Nominally, this episode is about ASCs. Really, it's about what a system does when it could build anything itself — and chooses to partner...
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July 28, 2026 • 61 mins
Featuring: Elliott Rapaport (Founder of Birches Health) and Dr. Doug Nemecek (Senior advisor with Birches Health and former Cigna/Evernorth CMO)
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This episode with two experts in the mental health space (Elliott Rapaport, Founder of Birches Health, and Dr. Doug Nemecek, a senior advisor with Birches Health and former Cigna/Evernorth CMO for behavioral health) was one of the more eye-opening conversations Hospitalogy’s Bl...
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July 21, 2026 • 52 mins
Hospitalogy's Blake Madden sits down with Yair Saperstein, MD MPH — co-founder and CEO of AvoMD — fresh off the company's Series A close in Q1.
Yair makes the case that the real prize in clinical AI isn't the AI scribe, it's the operating system living inside the EHR itself, and why he thinks most of primary care ultimately gets replaced by AI voice chatbots, at-home labs, and wearables.
Blake also pushes Yair on the...
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Featuring: Emily Rash (COO) and Dr. Neil Gheewala (CMO of Value-Based Care), US Heart and Vascular
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Is 3-6 weeks really how long patients should have to wait to see a cardiologist?
That's the national average — and it's the exact inefficiency Emily Rash (COO) and Dr. Neil Gheewala (CMO of Value-Based Care) at US Heart and Vascular are betting they can fix. Blake Madden sat down with them for a refreshingly candid conver...
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This episode covers something Claims Denied hasn't touched before: the world's first passive gut health monitoring device.
Blake sits down with Scott Hickle, co-founder of Throne Science, for a deep dive into the tech behind hands-free gut health, hydration, and urinary health monitoring — and yes, that means talking about poop for an hour. It turns out to be one of the most fascinating conversations on the pod yet, covering...
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In this latest episode of Claims Denied, Blake sits down with Tim Elliott, CEO of Navvis, for one of the most clear-eyed conversations he's had on where value-based models are actually headed.
Tim doesn't deal in buzzwords or wishful thinking. He deals in what's actually working, what operators are getting wrong, and where the puck is going — whether you're ready for it or not.
Here were some gems from the discussion which ...
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Blake Madden sits down with two of the people most responsible for re-wiring the employer side of healthcare right now: Dan Mendelson, CEO of Morgan Health — JPMorgan Chase's $280M healthcare investment arm — and John Zutter, CEO of Lantern, a specialty care navigation platform now covering 12 million member lives.
The conversation covers serious ground:
How Lantern cracked the code on surgeons of excellence at a c...
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In this latest episode of Claims Denied, Blake Madden sits down with Navin Nagiah, co-founder and CEO of Daffodil Health.
Navin spent nearly two years inside Multiplan trying to modernize their repricing model from the inside — went to the board three times, couldn't get alignment, and left to build the AI-native version himself.
Blake and Navin get into the No Surprises Act arbitration imbalance (88% provider win rate), wh...
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Hospitalogy's Blake Madden sits down with Jason Ross, EVP of Medical Groups at Privia Health, a guy who has worked basically every seat at the healthcare table. Jason is currently running the largest portion of Privia's single-TIN medical group footprint across a publicly traded enabler.
Coming out of Privia's Q1 print, Blake and Jason leaned into on the stuff Wall Street keeps missing.
The MA down-cycle and whether VBC is act...
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You may think the insurance industry is dull, but not this conversation!
For this episode, I sat down with Jared Kaplan, CEO and founder of Indigo Technologies, to talk about why medical malpractice insurance is one of the last bastions of healthcare that hasn't been touched by modern technology.
We also discussed how Indigo is using 1,500+ predictive attributes to blow up the 15-page application and individualize physician...
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May 19, 2026 • 55 mins
In this episode, Blake Madden sits down with Scott Becker, founder of Becker's Healthcare, practicing healthcare lawyer at McGuireWoods, and one of the longest-running names in healthcare media, for a wide-ranging conversation that ended up being as much about building businesses as it was about healthcare itself.
This was Blake's first time meeting Scott, and yeah, they are nominally competitors. But Scott immediately reframes it...
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May 12, 2026 • 66 mins
In this latest episode of Claims Denied, Hospitalogy's Blake Madden pulls in two co-hosts — Teira Gunlock, CEO of First Stop Health, and Dr. Eric Bricker, Chief Medical Officer of AHealthcareZ — and the crew battle it out!
Three topics. No script. Just healthcare's messiest debates.
Listen as Tiera, Eric, and Blake get deep into AI regulation and whether EMRs need to be forced open. They jump into ICHRA vs. captives...
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Blake sits down with Steve Mackin, CEO of Mercy — one of the top 15 health systems in the country with 55+ hospitals across Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kansas — to talk about how Mercy is quietly building one of the most interesting care model playbooks in the industry.
Steve and Blake get into everything: why Mercy deliberately conceded on price to win on care model, how they cut CHF ED admissions in half, a 1,3...
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In this episode, Hospitalogy's Blake Madden talks with two operators who actually walk the walk in oncology: Ben Freeberg, founder of Oncology Ventures (recently announced Fund II) and Dan Nardi, CEO of Reimagine Care.
They deep-dive on why 1,000 of the 1,700 Americans who die of cancer every day don't have to, why 97% of the cancer journey happens outside the clinic (and almost nobody is building for it), and how Remy, Reim...
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What does it actually look like to run clinical strategy inside a vertically integrated giant when payor-provider trust is at a historic low?
Blake Madden sits down with Dr. Ali Khan, Chief Medical Officer for Aetna Medicare, to get the answer to this question and more.
Dr. Khan has been employee 34 at Iora Health, a hospitalist/UM and CM medical director at CareMore, a division leader who scaled Oak Street Health from 23 t...
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