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 you
• How David's cancer diagnosis and the discovery of mold in his home each changed the course of his life
• What we know, and still don’t know, about how our homes affect our health
• Why understanding what's in your home's air has traditionally required expensive professional testing
• How AI is changing what a tiny startup team can build

Show 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 Mould
• Asthma 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.

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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 solve
• What Ortet plans to do differently from general-purpose AI companies
• Why Ortet secured $500 million before it had even really gotten started
• What buying AI compute and a lobster roll have in common
• How KC’s own experience with cancer shaped his vision for more predictable healthcare

About 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.

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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 recordings
• Oura 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.

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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 disappeared
• What’s actually stopping more patients from getting kidney transplants
• Why more dialysis care is moving from clinics into patients’ homes
• Why Javier believes Wall Street undervalues the human side of healthcare
• The leadership blind spot that nearly got him fired early in his career

About 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.

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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 science
• Why she believes healthcare has hit the ceiling of what checklists and protocols alone can do
• The three different types of health system leaders who all understand a different piece of the AI puzzle, and why that's a problem
• What actually happened behind the scenes on one real patient's chart, without a single human triggering it
• Her take on the Khosla and AMA debate over whether doctors should stay in the loop
• A personal story from her own cancer diagnosis, and the one question she asked her surgeon that no AI could ever answer

About 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.  

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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 Anthropic heads toward what's shaping up to be one of the most anticipated IPOs in years.

We cover:

• What Anthropic is doing in healthcare
• Why HIPAA is struggling to keep up with AI agents 
• Where she thinks AI will change care first (it’s not where you'd expect!)
• The two very different bars regulators are weighing AI against, and why the choice matters more than most people realize
• The one piece of advice from her father that still shapes how she builds teams, and what she tells doctors nervous about a career in medicine now

About our guest:

Sarah currently works on healthcare and life sciences projects at Anthropic. She is particularly passionate about research that explores how to make Claude safer and less confidently wrong. Prior to Anthropic, she was at Google X, an innovation hub at Alphabet, where she learned to lead teams of smart engineers building ML- and LLM-based products. Seeing the earliest version of Google’s Med-PaLM summarize a patient chart made her excited about healthcare technology all over again. Prior to Google, she was a CMIO in the VA system and a start-up founder. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Sarah did her internal medicine residency at MGH and completed an MBA at Wharton. She still practices part-time in Urgent Care at Stanford, where she is an Assistant Professor.

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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 middlemen consume much of the rest. He explains how community-owned health plans are rebuilding employer healthcare around primary care, transparency, and better incentives—and how the savings can flow back to workers and their communities.

We cover:

• Why rising healthcare costs ultimately come out of workers’ pay
• How community-owned health plans cut out costly middlemen
• Why better primary care can lower costs while improving outcomes
• How employers can rebuild health benefits from the ground up
• Why Dave believes open-source healthcare could challenge entrenched incumbents 

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About our guest:

Dave Chase is the founder of Health Rosetta and creator of the community-owned health plan (COHP) model, a movement that has helped thousands of employers covering more than 5 million Americans build health plans that deliver better care at 20 to 50% lower cost. In 2024 he launched Nautilus Health Institute, seeded with $4 million in Health Rosetta intellectual property, to publish open-source standards and contracting templates that reset market norms for employers, clinicians, and communities. Dave’s work has reached over 1 million people through bestselling books, including “CEO’s Guide to Restoring the American Dream” and his newest, “Relocalizing Health: Taking Back Healthcare. Rebuilding Communities,” along with TED talks and TV and film appearances. He received the World Health Care Congress’ Lifetime Achievement Award for Health Benefits Innovation. Before Health Rosetta, Dave led Microsoft’s $30 billion healthcare ecosystem and co-founded Avado, later acquired by WebMD/Medscape.

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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 regulatory reviews - but do we want that?
• Meta's massive settlement over harming children
• The surprising reason AI might be making healthcare more expensive instead of less
• A new study on the biggest lever we're not pulling to bend the healthcare cost curve
• Two lawsuits rattling a popular wearable and a celebrity-backed mental health startup
• What a widely used drug class reveals about bias in hiring, and the uncomfortable questions that raises

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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 faced and what ultimately unlocked real growth and led to their billion+ acquisition by New Mountain Capital.

We cover:

• Why their first product idea failed and what customer objections actually taught them to build instead
• The counterintuitive workflow that made contingency pricing possible
• How AI translation of clinical notes into billing codes now outperforms the average human, and what that means for coders and nurses
• Why "moat" is the wrong metaphor and what a flywheel looks like instead
• What they'd do differently in the acquisition process

About our guests:

Michael Gao, MD, the CEO and co-founder of SmarterDx. Prior to founding SmarterDx, Dr. Gao was the Medical Director for Transformation at NewYork-Presbyterian, where he led applied AI development, implementation, and strategy for the health system. Dr. Gao holds faculty positions at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Gao completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian.. He received his M.D. from the University of Michigan and a B.S from the University of California Los Angeles.

Josh Geleris, MD, is the Head of Product and co-founder of SmarterDx. Prior to SmarterDx, he was Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University, where he was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense for clinical informatics and data science, and led implementation of Epic for providers. Dr. Geleris completed his MD at the Technion-Israeli Institute of Technology and his Internal Medicine internship and residency at NewYork-Presbyterian. 

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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 reshaping what future doctors learn and how they're taught, as well as what's still not working in American healthcare.

We cover:

• What medical students are actually being taught about AI, and where Stanford still draws the line
• Why Stanford's tumor boards no longer start with humans
• The surprising way Dr. Minor thinks AI could level the playing field in healthcare access
• Why the same AI tools helping patients feel more informed are also making them more anxious
• The counterintuitive reason new medical technology gets more expensive before it gets cheaper
• What's still standing in the way of a vision for precision medicine that's been decades in the making

About our guest:

Lloyd B. Minor, MD, is a scientist, surgeon, and academic leader. He is the Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine and Vice President for Medical Affairs at Stanford University. Dr. Minor also is a professor of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery and a professor of Bioengineering and of Neurobiology, by courtesy, at Stanford University.

As dean, Dr. Minor has had an integral role in setting strategy for the clinical enterprise of Stanford Medicine, an academic medical center that includes the Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Health Care, and Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. With his leadership, Stanford Medicine leads the biomedical revolution in Precision Health. His book, “Discovering Precision Health,” describes this shift to more preventive, personalized health care and highlights how biomedical advances are dramatically improving our ability to treat and cure complex diseases. In 2021, Dr. Minor articulated and began realizing a bold vision to transform the future of life sciences at Stanford University and beyond – a multi-decade journey enabled by Precision Health.

In August 2023, Dr. Minor was appointed Vice President for Medical Affairs to lead all matters related to health and medicine at Stanford University.

Before Stanford, Dr. Minor was provost and senior vice president for academic affairs of Johns Hopkins University. Prior to this appointment in 2009, Dr. Minor served as the Andelot Professor and director (chair) of the Department of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and otolaryngologist-in-chief of The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

With more than 160 published articles and chapters, Dr. Minor is an expert in balance and inner ear disorders perhaps best known for discovering superior canal dehiscence syndrome, a debilitating disorder characterized by sound- or pressure-induced dizziness. He subsequently developed a surgical procedure that corrects the problem and alleviates symptoms.

In 2012, Dr. Minor was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

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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 overnight tracking so powerful, how Oura turns physiological signals into useful guidance, and why the company is being pulled faster than expected into traditional healthcare.

We cover:

• Why sleep data can reveal changes in the body before symptoms appear
• How Oura designed a health product that supports users without judging or nagging them
• Why accuracy is the foundation for trust, predictions, and behavior change
• How Oura navigates the boundary between wellness products and regulated medical devices
• The company’s expansion into Medicare Advantage, women’s health, metabolic health, and clinical care

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About our guest:

Tom Hale is the Chief Executive Officer at ŌURA and a member of its board. As the CEO he sets the company’s business strategy and vision to make health a daily practice for members all over the world. He has over 30 years of experience across the technology and consumer product industry.

Before joining ŌURA, Hale was president of Momentive where he drove B2B strategy and led product growth. During his time there he was instrumental in taking the company public in 2018, leading the team in key acquisitions, and driving the evolution and rebranding of the company into a multiple SAAS business. Previously, he held leadership roles at HomeAway and Linden Lab as the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively, and held executive roles at Macromedia and Adobe.

Hale has a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University and sits on the boards of Cars.com, RocketReach, and NoiseAware.

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