The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast
🏆 #1 podcast in the Top 100 Health Tech All-time charts Join us every Monday for conversations with the biggest names in digital health. Hosted by digital health veterans Halle Tecco, Michael Esquivel, and Steve Kraus. Learn more and submit your ideas for the show at the Heart of Healthcare website.
Episodes
We’re closing out the year with a candid conversation about where America is headed.
For our final episode of 2025, Halle and Steve sit down with entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang to talk plainly about the forces reshaping American life, from rising healthcare costs and gaps in coverage to AI-driven job disruption and the strain on the social safety net.
We cover:
🏛️ Andew’s idea of “Medicare f...
Many clinicians quietly wonder if there's a “next chapter” beyond the hospital walls, and an increasing number are stepping into health tech roles that didn’t exist a decade ago.
Dr. Reena Pande has lived that shift firsthand: from cardiologist at a top academic center, to early employee and CMO at AbleTo, to now leading clinician executive search at Oxeon. She joins us to unpack what it really takes for clinicians to succe...
Hemant Taneja believes you can sneeze and reach a billion dollars in healthcare revenue, but that most of that revenue tells you nothing about whether the system is actually getting better.
This week, Halle sits down with the CEO of General Catalyst and author of The Transformation Principles to discuss what happens when you stop treating revenue as the primary KPI and start asking harder questions about impact, incentives,...
The Haves & Have-Nots Of 2025 | Threshold Ventures Co-founder Emily Melton
This week for our 2025 recap, we’re joined by VC Emily Melton, co-founder of Threshold Ventures. Melton highlights her reflection of 2025, which splits the market into "haves and have-nots" with nothing in between, noting the concentration of venture dollars on "high flyers" and the indifference shown to established companies with respectable...
The first trillion-dollar healthcare company, a $298M longevity round, and a telehealth CEO headed for federal sentencing. Last month had range.
Today on the show, Halle and Michael sort through the biggest December stories shaping the year ahead, from runaway longevity funding to a telehealth scandal headed for federal sentencing.
We cover:
🧬 Two hot funding rounds in longevity, including Function Health’s $298M B-round and...
As millions of Americans hit the road to visit family for Thanksgiving, many will pass through, or return to, rural communities. Nearly 60 million Americans live in these areas, yet many struggle to access even basic healthcare as rural hospitals close at record rates.
Dr. Jennifer Schneider, co-founder and CEO of Homeward Health, is tackling this crisis head-on by reimagining how care is delivered to Medicare Advantage mem...
On the heels of raising $210 million at a $6 billion valuation, OpenEvidence is the fastest-growing physician app in history, now reaching over 40% of U.S. physicians and powering 17 million monthly clinical queries.
In this conversation, co-founder and CTO Zack Ziegler shares how his background in early large language models led him to build an AI that helps clinicians make better decisions at the point of care, without re...
A billion-dollar startup. A promise to change healthcare forever. And behind the scenes… a massive lie.
Tyler Shultz was just starting his career when he joined Theranos, only to discover that the company’s breakthrough blood tests didn’t actually work. Speaking up meant risking everything—his career, his family relationships, and his personal safety—but it also helped expose one of the biggest frauds in Silicon Valley hist...
Does it feel like we packed in a decade of progress this year in digital health? We think so.
Today, Halle and Steve break down the biggest digital health stories of the moment, from funding trends to AI rivalries and new rules shaping the future of care.
We cover:
💸 What non-AI healthcare startups should do in today’s AI-obsessed investor market
🧠 Is there room for more than one winner in clinical decision support too...
Over 3 million clinicians around the world depend on UpToDate to guide patient care, and now the gold standard in clinical decision support is integrating generative AI. But in a world where AI models often hallucinate, how do you build something that doctors can actually trust?
In this episode, Halle talks with Dr. Holly Urban, VP of Business Development and Strategy at Wolters Kluwer Health, about UpToDate Expert AI, a ne...
Most people spend over 30 hours a year dealing with customer service—on hold, repeating account numbers, and navigating endless phone trees. But what if AI could fix that without losing the human touch?
Clay Bavor, co-founder of Sierra (now valued at $10B) and former VP at Google, joins us to explore how AI agents are reshaping how companies interact with customers and what that means for the most complex service industry i...
This milestone 200th(!!!) episode of The Heart of Healthcare Podcast features none other than Dr. Tom X. Lee, the serial physician-founder behind Epocrates (acquired for $293M), One Medical (acquired by Amazon for $3.9B), and now Galileo, a tech-enabled medical group aiming to rewire care delivery from the ground up.
We cover:
🧠 Why most doctors aren’t wired for management (and what traits he thinks translate to startup su...
Happy Q4 Heart of Healthcare Listeners! We’re back with your monthly Digital Health Download, where we discuss the biggest industry headlines of the month.
We cover:
💊 Pharm tariffs, D2C drug ads, and TrumpRx?
📉 The ACA tax credit standoff and how it could double premiums for millions
🛒 UnitedHealthcare’s new storefront and what it signals about point solution fatigue
📈 The GLP-1 gold rush: Remedy’s ...
Cancer drugs cost more than ever, yet survival benefits are often modest—and in some cases, patients can’t even access the care that already exists.
After losing his father, Steve Jobs, to pancreatic cancer, Reed Jobs committed himself to making this the last generation that loses parents to the disease.
Reed now leads Yosemite, a venture fund spun out of Emerson Collective in 2023, alongside Investor Matt Bettonville....
Some founders win support because of their product, others because of their story. In healthcare, where trust is everything, the ability to tell a compelling and authentic narrative can make or break a company.
On this episode, Halle talks with longtime friend and colleague Christina Farr—reporter turned investor and now author of The Storyteller’s Advantage. Chrissy has spent thousands of hours hearing startup pitches, adv...
Thanks to improved accuracy and new form factors, wearables have evolved from novelty step counters to tools that can predict illness, nudge healthier behaviors, and even influence alcohol consumption. But can they really bridge the gap between consumer wellness and enterprise healthcare?
In this episode, ŌURA CEO Tom Hale discusses the lessons his team has learned from developing one of the most widely used health-tracking...
AI companies are hitting growth milestones in record time—some reaching $100 million in revenue in just two years. But while this pace feels familiar in tech, healthcare has always been slower to adopt new tools. That may finally be changing.
Kent Bennett and Sofia Guerra of Bessemer Venture Partners join Steve Kraus to unpack findings from Bessemer’s State of AI 2025 report and what they mean for healthcare. From “supernov...
Healthcare’s “back-to-school” season delivered no shortage of big headlines! From Epic’s big leap into AI to a looming insurance “blood bath,” Steve and Michael break down the stories that shaped digital health this month.
We cover:
🖥 Epic’s 200 new AI “colleagues” and what it means for the battle between systems of record vs. systems of action
💼 Why healthcare CEOs are cashing record paychecks despite shaky stock performan...
Healthcare costs keep climbing, and yet patients and employers often feel powerless to change the system. What if outsiders—those not steeped in the traditions of healthcare—are actually the ones best positioned to fix it?
This special episode is a reshare from The Benefits Playbook podcast, where Halle joins Collective Health CEO Ali Diab. Together, they unpack what it takes to make health benefits simpler, more transparen...
Hospitals are under immense pressure: burned-out clinicians, outdated systems, and rising costs have made delivering care harder than ever.
Tanay Tandon, founder and CEO of Commure, shares how his team is rethinking hospital infrastructure by combining AI, forward-deployed engineering, and a provider-first mindset. Backed by over $750M in funding, Commure is using strategic M&A and next-gen tools like ambient AI t...
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