PointHealthTech Podcast Matthew Dale, Steven Cutbirth

For the finale of season two, we sat down with Dr. Chris Larson and Dr. April Calderon of Euphora Health, a direct primary care practice in Austin, TX. After witnessing the deleterious effects of modern medical practice on relatives and loved ones, they decided to launch Euphora Health to practice medicine in an alternative fashion. Together, this direct primary care power couple is looking first and foremost to improve the lives of their patients, and secondly, to change the healthcare system for the better. Our host, Steven Cutbirth, discussed many topics with Dr. Larson and Dr. Calderon, including the benefits of direct primary care for both patients and physicians, who has the most pull to change the healthcare system in the U.S., and more.

We were joined by Kathleen Carberry, Assistant Professor at the Dell Medical School and Outcomes Program Officer at the Value Institute for Health and Care. She has been a registered nurse for 20 years and was the founder and director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Outcomes & Impact Service that was dedicated to helping patients, families, and clinicians make better healthcare decisions using outcomes information.

Our hosts for this episode, Steven Cutbirth (who is also Kathleen’’s former student!) and Stephanie Pawlowski, discuss why measuring healthcare outcomes is so hard, the importance of value-based care, and why she is committed to improving the support system for caregivers.

Our host, Steven Cutbirth, sat down with Dr. Michael Richards, a healthcare economist and Associate Professor at Baylor University, who has published significant research on rising healthcare costs. They discuss the effects of consolidation on healthcare costs, healthcare insurance models, supply-side dimensions of the healthcare sector, and healthcare provider responses to public policies and evolving market environments.

This episode features Payal Agrawal Divakaran, a partner at .406 Ventures, who co-leads Digital Health investing activity. Prior to joining .406, Payal was at Harvard Business School, where she co-founded a company called SpotRocket in the job recruiting software space.

Steven, Mark, and Payal had a great discussion on her thesis for digital health investing, financial incentives for patients and payers, her role as a trailblazing female engineer and health investor, and much more.

Our hosts this episode, Steven Cutbirth and Doug Bain, sat down with Carl Schuessler, co-founder and managing principal of Mitigate Partners. Carl has more than 30 years of experience in benefits consulting and financial services, and even pioneered the fiduciary approach to benefits advisory services. So obviously, we walked away from this episode with a lot of new knowledge and hope you will too! We discussed how to achieve best-in-class benefits without spending a fortune, how better benefits can lead to improved clinical and financial outcomes for health plans and their members, price transparency, direct primary care, and so much more.

In this episode, we discuss how complacency led to expensive healthcare and why transparency is the way out. AnnMargaret McCraw, CEO at Midlands Orthopaedics & Neurosurgery, joins us to share her experience as an ASC leader in price transparency and an innovator in bundled pricing. Our hosts discuss several topics with AnnMargaret, including how the U.S. got to where it is with high healthcare costs and how surgery bundles work for patients, TPAs, and health plans.