The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast

Speaking up at Theranos meant risking your career, your relationships, and your safety. Tyler Shultz did it anyway.

With the release of You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, we’re re-releasing our November 2025 conversation with the whistleblower who helped expose Theranos. Tyler has since criticized the film for leaving out important context and challenged Holme...

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 wh...

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: b...

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 ...

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 discus...

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 Hamed...

Sarah Russell picked up a phrase at her new job at Anthropic: a "non-regrettable primitive." It's how she describes the kind of infrastructure she thinks Anthropic should be building in healthcare, and it says a lot about how one of the most closely watched companies in health AI is positioning itself. 

In this episode, Steve talks with Sarah Russell, MD healthcare and life sciences lead at Anthropic. This conversation comes as...

Healthcare costs are taking an ever-larger bite out of American workers’ compensation. This Labor Day, we’re revisiting a conversation with Health Rosetta CEO Dave Chase about why healthcare has become so expensive and what employers can do about it.

Dave argues that healthcare itself isn’t the problem: clinicians receive only a fraction of every dollar spent, while price gouging, administrative bloat, and middleme...

It's our monthly Digital Health Download, and September's stories all circle the same tension: technology keeps promising to fix healthcare's problems, but just as often it moves them somewhere else, or creates new ones entirely. This week, Halle unpacks a news-heavy month, weighing who actually benefits as markets, algorithms, and AI get closer to our health decisions.

We cover:

• Americans can now bet on clinical trials and FDA r...

We don't talk enough about how hard it actually is to build a healthcare startup. Behind SmarterDx's story, now one of the biggest health AI exits to date, were 18 months without a single customer, a pivot that seemed to make no product sense, and two co-founders who went back to working as hospitalists just to get by.

In this episode, Steve gets the real story from Dr. Michael Gao and Dr. Joshua Geleris about the challenges they fa...

It's back-to-school szn, and while some kids are stressing over earlier wake-ups, this year's incoming medical students have a bigger question to answer: how do you train for a career that could still have you practicing medicine in the 2070s, when the tools of medicine are changing so rapidly?

For our back-to-school episode, we sat down with Stanford University School of Medicine Dean Dr. Lloyd Minor to talk about how AI is already...

We're on summer break and replaying one of our favorite episodes. This episode originally aired on September 22, 2025.

A wearable can collect endless data, but it only matters if people trust it enough to change their behavior.

In this replay, Oura CEO Tom Hale joins Steve and Michael to explain how the company combines clinical-grade accuracy with a consumer-friendly product. They discuss why the ring’s form factor makes overn...

This month is about the gap between what a system offers and what people actually get from it: drugs that work better with support nobody's paying for, AI that's already answering more medical questions than most doctors ever will, and a labor market where staying healthy can mean staying stuck. Halle and Michael break down the stories reshaping digital health in August.

We cover:

• Why GLP-1 funding is shifting from prescribing pl...

Every day, roughly 100 Americans die in crashes caused by human drivers. Yet when a self-driving car hesitates at an intersection or makes the news for an unusual mistake, public trust can evaporate.

In this special episode, Dr. Jonathan Slotkin reads his latest Noema essay exploring why we demand perfection from machines while accepting human error as inevitable. Drawing on lessons from medicine, psychology, and autonomous vehicles...

Healthcare companies are built to improve patients' lives. So why do so many prioritize shareholders over the people they're meant to serve?

This week, Halle sits down with Eric Ries, author of Incorruptible, to unpack the rise of shareholder primacy, what it is, and why he believes it's at the root of many of society’s biggest challenges. They discuss the surprising history of corporate governance, the lessons behind Novo Nor...

Over the last decade, the number of drug candidates entering development has doubled, yet the number of successful drug approvals remains flat at ~50 per year.

This week, we sit down with Formation Bio founder and CEO Ben Liu. His company has raised more than $600 million to build what he hopes will become the first new enduring pharmaceutical company in decades, powered by AI. Ben explains why he believes clinical development, not ...

They built a $1.2 billion healthcare AI company in under three years, but they say the hardest part of healthcare AI isn't the AI.

This week, Halle sits down with Assort Health co-founders and co-CEOs Jeffery Liu and Jon Wang, whose company reached a $1.2 billion valuation in under three years. They discuss why building great healthcare AI takes far more than good models, how they scaled from 15 employees to nearly 250 in a year, an...

July marks five years of The Heart of Healthcare, and we're grateful for every listener who's tuned in. If you've enjoyed the show, please show your love by leaving us a review!

This month, Steve and Halle take stock of an industry where capital is concentrating, incumbents are making big bets, AI is moving from promise to early proof points, and a public health crisis is quietly building in the background.

We cover:

• The digital h...

Back by popular demand, 3x Heart of Healthcare guest Eric Larsen joins Steve to answer listener questions on healthcare's AI revolution. Drawing on the ideas behind his latest essay, Healthcare's Oppenheimer Moment, Eric argues that healthcare may be approaching a once-in-a-generation inflection point, and discusses what leaders need to understand before it's too late.

We cover:

• Whether foundation models will eventually outperfor...