Do you have an Apple watch? Fitbit? Oura ring? Woop? Wearables have taken over in the past decade with claims that by constantly monitoring our heart rate, sleep, respiration, and activity, they can provide health data that can change your life. But is that really possible? Or even plausible?

Marco Benitez, former professional athlete, and the Founder and CEO of ROOK joins us on the Living Well series today to talk all things wearables. He sees tremendous potential with how the data these tools compile can be utilized across all aspects of our lives, including in our cars (!), to change our behavior. But he acknowledges there’s a catch. Many of these companies use the data collected not for YOUR benefit, but for theirs, and real change, well, there’s no magic bullet. It’s hard, takes time, and is all on you.

Raised in Mexico with an insatiable curiosity and entrepreneurial spirit, Marco Benitez built his career at the intersection of health, technology, and sports science. Starting as a Tae Kwon Do champion, Marco’s discipline and resilience guided him into biomedical engineering, then into high-stakes roles in pharmaceutical giants like Roche and Novartis. Here, he witnessed the transformative power of data in healthcare—and saw a profound opportunity to make health metrics more accessible and actionable. Determined to improve health management and bridge the gap between raw data and real impact, Marco co-founded ROOK.

The only device we’re with every day, all the time is our phones. And yet, we often travel to outpatient clinics, pay significant copays, and engage physicians once or twice a year to run tests on our bodies. What if we could do all of that with our phone?

Jason Moore, Founder and CEO of Spren, joins us on the podcast to talk about the premise behind Spren, a company that helps you turn your phone into a validated health lab. Formed out of his own challenges with gut health and gallbladder issues, Jason believes that no matter where we are on the health continuum, the process for getting closer to longevity and vitality is the same. Assess – Create a plan – Implement the plan – Reassess – Tweak the plan. It’s the microchanges, he asserts, those that are small but that consistently repeated that are most likely to get you (and him) from there…to where you want to be.

It’s always interesting when your podcast producer comes to you and says she thinks the innovations we’re featuring are sort of boring. Not exactly what you want to hear, but smart leaders take feedback like that and ask the question “Why is that?” 

On today’s episode of Creating a New Healthcare, I invite that same producer, Jess Greenwood, who has herself worked in and around healthcare for over 25 years to join the show and talk about why the work we’ve featured recently feels boring and how that might just be the answer to transforming healthcare.

Listen in on this lively discussion and the conclusions we come to about what’s really required moving forward and why boring may just be beautiful.

On average, employers are unnecessarily wasting $4,000 per employee per year on healthcare benefits and associated costs. For a mid-size company of 100 employees, that’s $400,000! EACH YEAR!

Our guest today sat on the broker side of the business and saw the waste, fraud, and abuse at every level. As he says, “It’s like working with a CPA that gets paid by the IRS.” After getting fired for being too hard on an insurance plan on behalf of his customer, Donovan had an epiphany and started Health Compass Consulting to do things the right way. Since the company’s founding in 2018, Donovan and his team have saved their customers an average of $1,856 per employee per year while often improving those employees’ healthcare options.

Donovan is a leading voice on healthcare reform and strategic employee benefits management. He is the author of the new book, ‘Fixing Healthcare: How Executives Can Save Their People, Their Business, and the Economy,’ that comes out November 12th and the Validation Institute 2025 Benefits Advisor of the Year.

A Zen practice is not something we typically associate with a Washington insider and healthcare lobbyist. But, our guest today has not only made that his personal mission, but his new book, The Zen Lobbyist, makes the argument that mindfulness might be the way we truly transform healthcare. 

Despite the division that’s pervasive in American politics today, Gary maintains that what he calls the “mindful edge” is actually the way to cultivate unity. To lead with mindfulness means recognizing that stillness is a strategy and that compassion can actually be influence. The success of Gary’s career is its own testament to the effectiveness of these techniques. 

For more than three decades, Gary has worked at the intersection of policy, payer, and provider strategy, helping shape national reforms at VillageMD, Care Centrix, and PwC, while advising top policy leaders and decision-makers on bipartisan solutions for value-based care.

Despite the almost universal agreement that the United States healthcare system needs to move to value-based care, forward progress on that movement has all but stalled. Why? A big driver…no surprise…are the contracts.

Brian Overstreet, the Co-Founder of Arbital Health, has built an impressive AI-powered platform that combines both an unprecedented depth of data with actuarial expertise to provide transparency in value-based care contracts, helping providers and now, payers, see where they’ve gone awry in real-time so they can course correct quickly and effectively.

Brian is a serial entrepreneur with two exits in his twenty-year experience who has launched a number of successful SaaS companies in the healthcare market. He is the Co-Founder, President, and CEO of Arbital Health which was just launched in 2023 but has already undergone two rounds of funding totalling ~$46 M in investment.

Opioid overdose is the #1 killer of 18-45 year olds in America. The crisis is not over, and we are still prescribing these addictive substances for pain management at an alarming rate with little support or anything else in the arsenal to offer.  Until now…

Cammie Wolf Rice, the Founder and CEO of the CWC Alliance, has pioneered a new role on the hospital healthcare team, a LifeCare Specialist. These individuals come from a variety of backgrounds, but all undergo specific training to be able to provide patients with opioid education, mental & social wellness support, and effective pain management strategies. 

After losing her 32 year old son, Christopher, to opioid misuse, Cammie channeled her grief into action, founding CWC Alliance in 2018 and publishing her story, The Flight: My Opioid Journey, in 2022. This approach has since been adopted in eight hospitals across the country, was selected as the subject of a Harvard Business School case study, and was named the top recommendation by Georgia’s 2024 House Study Committee on Alternatives to Opioids.

Is there a LifeCare Specialist at your hospital or healthcare system? 

Guest: Steve Brown, Founder and CEO, CureWise

Can ChatGPT cure cancer? If you listen to the news, you would think it’s close. But ChatGPT, just like any data repository, is just one source of information. What if patients could harness the power of many of the AI engines all at once to help them ask better questions, know about the latest treatments, and become a more active player in their treatment journey? 

Steve Brown, Founder and CEO of CureWise, ran into this exact challenge when after years of seeking answers, he was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. He started to explore what the AI models could tell him about his disease, the available treatments out there, and what he could be doing in his own life to minimize the effects. He found that the answers varied from model to model, but what they did do is help him become a more effective patient. He asked better questions, knew about treatments he could name to his physicians, and was able to work more collaboratively with them to find a treatment plan that would work for him, specifically. His own experience is the basis for CureWise, which is currently in beta release but will be available to the public soon.

In addition to his role at CureWise, Steve also serves as the Founder and CEO of the independent film/media company Ignite Channel Inc., Chief AI Officer of Peter Diamandis’ Abundance360 and PHD Ventures and partner/Board member of AI platform SignalPop LLC. Steve is an award winning documentary film maker and directed and produced SPARK: A Burning Man Story.

Guest: Neal Shah, Co-Founder, Counterforce Health

Have you ever had a medical claim denied for a procedure or service that should have been covered by your insurance? You are not alone. Yet, 99% of people choose not to appeal that denial because of the laborious, manual process required.

After going through this dehumanizing experience with his wife, Neal Shah decided to bring the power of automation to the good guys. Counterforce Health is a service that helps clients leverage the speed and efficiency of AI to prepare their denial letter in literally minutes. Find out more at www.counterforcehealth.org. 

Neal started his career as a hedge fund manager and pivoted to healthcare after the deeply personal experience of caring for his wife during her illness. He is the Founder and CEO of CareYaya Health Technologies, a social enterprise and applied research lab advancing health equity for aging populations and is also the Founder and Chairman of Counterforce Health. He serves as Principal Investigator on multiple federally-funded innovation grants and has recently authored the book, Insured to Death: How Health Insurance Screws Over Americans – And How We Take it Back.