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, and what they've learned from more than 190 million patient interactions. They also share why voice AI is harder than it looks, how they're thinking about building durable moats in the age of foundation models, and why helping patients navigate the healthcare system may be one of AI's biggest opportunities.

We cover:

• The AI role suddenly showing up at every healthcare startup
• The surprising demographic that gives AI voice agents the highest satisfaction scores
• How healthcare AI is shifting from single-purpose tools to platforms that remember patients across every interaction
• Why the biggest moat in healthcare AI may not be the model itself
• The biggest misconception investors have about moats in healthcare AI
• How to triple your team without losing the culture that made the company successful

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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 health funding numbers that just dropped, and what they reveal about where the money is really going
• A $12 billion deal that has the RCM world buzzing
• The Nature study that has clinical AI companies on edge
• A new entrant into medical imaging that nobody saw coming
• The public health crisis that sports betting built, and why healthcare isn't talking about it enough
• Early data out of Utah that could change how we think about AI in clinical settings

Links:

• IPO Watch List: https://halletecco.substack.com/p/the-digital-health-ipo-watchlist
• Ensemble Health / Thoreau deal: https://hitconsultant.net/2026/06/18/thoreau-makes-strategic-investment-in-ensemble-health/
• Nature Medicine AI study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04431-5
• Midjourney Medical: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/952011/midjourney-medical-ai-ultrasound-scan
• Doctronic pilot outcomes: https://commerce.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Doctronic-Outcomes-May-2026.pdf

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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 outperform healthcare-specific AI companies
• Why healthcare remains stuck in AI pilot projects while the technology races ahead
• The biggest obstacle to clinical AI adoption
• Why liability may be the most important (and least discussed) issue in healthcare AI
• Eric's controversial take on how AI will reshape the healthcare workforce

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Links:

• Eric's essay is available here

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Healthcare AI funding is booming, but the money is flowing to fewer companies than ever before. As investors pour capital into a small group of breakout winners, founders are navigating a fundraising environment where expectations seem to change every quarter. Based on interviews with 24 healthcare founders and a dozen healthcare investors, Halle breaks down what is actually happening in the market today, from pitch meetings and diligence processes to the growing debate over whether AI has fundamentally changed venture capital itself. 

• Why healthcare AI fundraising has become a tale of two markets
• The two questions dominating investor meetings in 2026
• The metrics VCs are looking for today
• The debate over whether investors should abandon traditional ownership targets
• Why high valuations can be both a gift and a trap for founders 

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Show notes:

• Submit questions for our Eric Larsen healthcare AI Q&A here
• Part I: AI ate digital health (and what that means for fundraising)
• Part II: Convicted or disciplined: How healthcare VCs are split on investing

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Autonomous vehicles may be the closest real-world example of AI operating in life-and-death situations at scale. Justin Norden believes healthcare has a lot to learn from how that industry approached safety, testing, adoption, and trust. 

This week, Michael and Halle sit down with the founder and CEO of Qualified Health, fresh off the company’s $125 million Series B, to discuss why healthcare organizations need to think differently about deploying AI. Justin shares how his experience at Stanford, Apple, Waymo, and in healthcare investing shaped his view that health systems need AI infrastructure, governance, and workforce buy-in, not just another point solution.

We cover:

• What healthcare can learn from Waymo’s approach to safe AI deployment
• What founders need to understand about building around Epic
• Why health systems need to treat AI as a CEO-level priority, not an innovation project
• How Qualified Health is helping systems deploy, monitor, and measure AI workflows
• Why governance, safety, and ROI matter as much as model performance
• Why clinicians are right to be skeptical about AI liability

About our guest:

Justin Norden, MD is Co-Founder and CEO of Qualified Health building the trusted platform for health system AI. Additionally, he has been an Adjunct Professor at Stanford Medicine in the Department of Biomedical Informatics Research where his research and teaching focused on AI in medicine and digital health where he founded and still teaches courses on digital health and generative AI in medicine. 

Previously, Dr. Norden was Co-Founder and CEO of Trustworthy AI, a company focused on algorithm safety and trust, which was acquired by Waymo (Google Self-Driving). He was a Partner at GSR Ventures leading investments in healthcare and AI, worked on the healthcare team at Apple, and helped start the Stanford Center for Digital Health. 

Dr. Justin Norden received an MD and MBA from Stanford University, an MPhil in Computational Biology from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in Computer Science from Carleton College.

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Show notes:

• The Data on Self-Driving Cars Is Clear. We Have to Change Course. Dr. Jonathan Slotkin op-ed in the NYT

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Healthcare is simultaneously propping up the US economy and facing one of its most uncertain moments in years.

This month, Halle and Steve unpack the growing contradictions shaping digital health right now: healthcare jobs are driving nearly half of US job growth while provider bankruptcies surge, AI is flooding into healthcare faster than regulators can keep up, and Washington continues to send mixed signals on the future of healthcare policy and innovation.

We cover:

• Why healthcare jobs are now carrying the US labor market and what Medicaid cuts could mean for the economy
• The surprising comeback of wearables and how companies like Whoop, Oura, and Google are building massive subscription businesses
• CMS’s new ACCESS model and the debate over whether AI-driven care can actually lower costs without sacrificing quality
• The lawsuit against Character.AI and what it reveals about the growing demand for AI mental health tools
• Why investors are pouring billions into AI drug discovery despite huge unanswered questions about clinical development
• Marty Makary’s resignation from the FDA and what ongoing instability means for biotech, pharma, and healthcare innovation

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Show notes:

• Forget Tech and Hollywood. California Is Powered by Healthcare Jobs. (WSJ)
• Oura Debuts Ring 5, Ahead of Potential IPO (WWD)
• Whoop Raises $575 Million at $10.1 Billion Valuation (Whoop)
• Fitbit Ditches the Screen With Its New $99 Whoop Rival (PC Mag)
• Why big digital health players are missing from Medicare’s chronic care experiment (STAT)
• Character.AI Lawsuit (PA.gov)
• Marty Makary out as FDA chief (Axios)

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Most careers don’t follow a straight line. But few require starting over in full view of the public.

This week, Halle sits down with Lance Armstrong to discuss how he rebuilt his life and career after multiple turning points, including surviving advanced cancer, and how those experiences shaped his perspective on health, performance, and reinvention. Now, through his venture firm Next Ventures, he backs companies focused on what they call “whole person health” — spanning prevention, wellness, diagnostics, longevity, and healthcare outside the traditional system.

We cover:

• Why he chose to become a VC, and what he likes (and dislikes) about the job
• How his experience as a patient shapes how he evaluates companies
• Why preventive care is growing outside the traditional healthcare system
• What he looks for in founders building across the care continuum
• What it takes to rebuild trust and start over

About our guest:

Lance Armstrong is a former professional cyclist, entrepreneur, and investor. After surviving advanced testicular cancer, he founded Livestrong, helping raise more than $500 million to support cancer patients and survivors worldwide. In 2019, he co-founded Next Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on health, wellness, and consumer brands, with investments including Oura, Cofertility, Pair Team, and SteadyMD. Prior to Next Ventures, he was an active angel investor in companies such as Uber, DocuSign, and Athletic Brewing.

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AI in healthcare may be entering a new chapter, one where the biggest question is no longer whether the technology works, but who is willing to deploy it, measure it, and take responsibility for the risk.

This week, Steve sits down again with Eric Larsen to revisit his predictions from last year’s Webby-winning episode on generative AI in healthcare. Eric argues that the first wave of AI has been inflationary, reinforcing the old payer-provider payment model, but that the next wave could be deflationary as automation moves into revenue cycle, administrative work, clinical reasoning, and drug development. They discuss why incumbents still have a narrow window to co-develop the future, why clinical AI may move faster outside the US, and why liability may become the deciding factor in who wins.

We cover:

• Why healthcare is still the sector most exposed to AI-driven change
• How AI has reinforced fee-for-service dynamics so far, and why that may soon reverse
• What makes some healthcare work more automatable than others
• Why liability may determine how fast clinical AI gets adopted
• Which health systems, payers, and life sciences companies are moving fastest
• What will change across providers, payers, and pharma over the next year

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👉Submit your questions!

We’re doing a followup episode with Eric. Submit your listener questions here: https://forms.gle/Bu335DkpHAUvygiBA

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About our guest:

Eric Jon Larsen is President of TowerBrook Advisors and a member of the healthcare leadership team at TowerBrook Capital Partners, a $30 billion AUM investment firm based in New York and London. TowerBrook invests across private equity, structured minority, and growth opportunities, with a strong focus on healthcare, partnering with health systems, payers, and other strategics. Notably, TowerBrook is the first mainstream private equity firm to achieve B Corp certification, reflecting its commitment to responsible business practices.

Eric is a nationally recognized healthcare strategist with a global advisory portfolio spanning CEOs and boards of leading healthcare organizations. He spent 25 years at The Advisory Board Company—five of those as President—advancing best practices in healthcare delivery worldwide. Following the firm's 2017 acquisition by Optum (UnitedHealth Group), Eric co-led strategic partnerships and market development efforts at UnitedHealth. He is also a Venture Partner at Thrive Capital and SignalFire, and serves on several digital health boards, including Somatus and Contessa Health.

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Medicaid reimbursements are shrinking, providers are pulling back, and vulnerable populations are losing access to care. Akido Labs is betting that AI can expand care capacity fast enough to reverse that trend.

This week, Halle sits down with Prashant Samant, co-founder and CEO of Akido Labs, to discuss what it actually takes to scale care with AI. They explore why Akido built a full-stack healthcare company, how its AI operates inside real clinical workflows, and why the hardest patients are the best place to test whether this model works.

We cover:

• Why he chose to build a full-stack care model
• How AI changes who can deliver care, and where
• Why most healthcare AI tools fail once they hit real clinical workflows
• Why the doctor shortage cannot be solved by training more doctors
• How the bottleneck in healthcare AI is absorption, not innovation

About our guest:

Prashant S. Samant is CEO and co-founder of Akido, a healthcare technology company that builds clinical AI and operates a multi-state medical network serving hundreds of thousands of patients. He co-founded Akido in 2015 through USC’s Digital Health Lab. In 2023, he and his co-founders received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year–Greater Los Angeles Award. Samant is also a co-founder and board member of Grid110, a nonprofit accelerator supporting early-stage entrepreneurs. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis.

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Show Notes:

• Akido’s recently-published white paper on street medicine

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AI is everywhere in healthcare, and May's big question is whether it's actually delivering. The money is flowing, the promises are bold, but some cracks are starting to show.

Steve and Michael break down the month's biggest stories.

We cover:

• Digital health hitting its strongest funding quarter since the pandemic peak, and why deal concentration tells the real story
• How Medvi built a billion-dollar GLP-1 company on fake doctor profiles, fake reviews, and a drug with zero bioavailability
• Why AI in prior authorization and billing may be inflating healthcare costs rather than cutting them
• The peptide craze: what the science says, what regulators have banned, and why Michael is actually taking one
• How AI could collapse today's narrow medical specialties into a "generalist specialist" model
• New research showing Epic's out-of-the-box AI models fall short on real-world clinical benchmarks

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Show notes:

Rock Health Q1 2026 Funding Report

NYT Profile of Medvi + Futurism Investigation

Peterson Health Technology Institute: Administrative AI Report

STAT News / Undark: BPC-157 and the Peptide Craze

Health Affairs Scholar: Kocher & Wachter on the Generalist-Specialist Model

Springer Nature / Journal of General Internal Medicine: Epic AI Model Meta-Analysis

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Forty million people use ChatGPT for health-related questions every day, making it one of the most widely used tools for health information in the world. So what is their team doing to maximize impact and minimize harm? For one, they've brought in hundreds of physicians globally to continuously review outputs and shape how the models respond across different scenarios, literacy levels, and edge cases. Second, they've hired my Rock Health co-founder, Nate Gross, MD, as their VP of Health.

In this full-circle episode, I sit down with Nate, who also co-founded Doximity (DOCS) and knows a thing or two about building in digital health. We discuss the astonishing speed of AI progress, how models are trained for safety and accuracy, and what this technological evolution means for every part of the healthcare system.

Key topics:

• How ChatGPT is becoming a 24/7 front door for health questions, and whether it is replacing Dr. Google or starting to compete with the healthcare system itself
• How OpenAI is trying to reduce hallucinations, avoid sycophantic behavior, and build guardrails for sensitive use cases like mental health
• OpenAI’s goals to “raise the floor, sweep the floor, and raise the ceiling” with new product launches like ChatGPT for Clinicians and GPT-Rosalind
• How Nate thinks about the AI race and what winning in healthcare actually requires
• Where startups should focus their efforts now that specialized products are launching for clinicians and life sciences
• The single hardest problem in healthcare that AI, according to Nate, probably won't fix anytime soon

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About our guest:

Dr. Nate Gross is the VP of Health at OpenAI. He previously co-founded Doximity and Rock Health. He graduated from the Emory University School of Medicine with an MD, Harvard Business School with an MBA, and Claremont McKenna College with a BA in Government. He serves as affiliated faculty for the Clinical Informatics Fellowship at Stanford.

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Show notes:

• ChatGPT for Clinicians
• ChatGPT for Health (for patients)
• OpenAI for Healthcare
• GPT-Rosalind

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🏆 Thank you for your votes! We're excited to share that the Heart of Healthcare is a Webby Award Winner for 2026!

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