Data Clinic

Aaron Smith has started two companies and sold both. He spent nine years running Chiron Data, a software company serving disease management centers, before spending a year inside a large payer organization learning the world of biologic drugs and infusion. What he found there became FlexCare Infusion Centers — one clinic in Oklahoma City, a team of six, growing to 40 clinics across six states and around 400 people before it was acquired in 2025.

He's now building Vetriq, going after what he calls the unsexiest problem in healthcare: the paper, faxes, and PDFs arriving at every clinic that nobody has visibility into.

We covered how scaling breaks communication before it breaks operations, why hiring never got easier across 27 years of doing it, and what happens to your best people when you leave a low performer in place. Aaron doesn't hedge on any of it.

In this episode
(05:07) Nine years building software for disease management centers
(06:36) A year inside a large payer, learning infusion
(14:01) Starting FlexCare with one clinic and a team of six
(15:56) Why patients wait — or never get approved for biologics
(23:44) Payers are already running AI on prior authorization
(33:26) Six people to 400, and 40 clinics across six states
(37:25) Scaling as a communication problem
(43:31) Intelligence and grit, and why every hire is still scary
(50:13) What high performers absorb when low performers stay
(76:21) Why holding back in a hard conversation makes you the problem
(79:40) The operating system he'd recommend to any founder
(82:19) What he's building at Vetriq

About Data Clinic
Conversations with the people building and running data in healthcare, hosted by Hunter Muse of Midwest Data.

Connect with Aaron here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/1aaronmsmith/

Ever wondered why you can't get a straight answer about healthcare costs? Our guest Matt Robben has been deep in the trenches of this problem for years. As Co-founder and CTO of Serif Health, he's building the infrastructure to make healthcare pricing truly transparent.

What You'll Learn:

The Healthcare Pricing Maze

• Why that phone call asking "how much will this cost?" never gets answered
• How the Transparency and Coverage Act is changing the game (slowly)
• The shocking reality: knee surgery costs range from $1,400 to $113,000 for the same procedure

Building Data Products That Matter (And Why It's Not Just "Software with More Data")

• The fundamental mindset shift: your "inventory" is data assets, not features
• When a single backfill costs $20k and takes 4 days, every change becomes a P&L decision
• Why managing schema changes feels more like supply chain management than SaaS
• Processing petabytes of messy government-mandated pricing data (90% is unusable)
• The difference between managing data teams vs software teams - and why sprint cycles don't work

Startup Strategy in Action

• Pivoting from B2C to B2B when the market spoke clearly
• The power of extreme focus: selling CSV files for 2 years before building a UI
• How to find product-market fit by following the money, not your assumptions

AI in the Real World

• Smart applications of traditional ML for entity resolution
• Why they avoid GenAI for critical analysis (20% hallucination rate stories included)
• The difference between AI that adds value vs AI that adds buzzwords

Founding with Purpose (and Five Kids)

• How to build a sustainable company culture as a parent
• The communities that actually help vs content that just markets
• Setting boundaries as a founder while staying committed

Matt's journey from software engineering at One Medical and TruePic to founding Serif Health offers practical insights for anyone working with data products, navigating healthcare tech, or building companies that actually solve market problems.

Key Takeaway: Sometimes the best way to help consumers is to fix the market mechanics first. By making pricing data accessible to the entire healthcare ecosystem, companies like Serif Health are creating the transparency that could finally bring costs down.

Connect with Matt:

• LinkedIn: Matt Robben
• Email: [email protected]

Resources Mentioned:

• YCombinator
• On Deck Founders
• Health Tech Nerds community
• Cincinnati Health Professionals Network

Perfect for data engineers, healthcare professionals, startup founders, and anyone curious about how transparent markets can actually work.

Episode Overview: In this episode, Hunter sits down with Dr. Steve Muething, a nationally recognized leader in pediatric safety and former Chief Quality Officer at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, to explore how a small-town pediatrician became a driving force behind transforming healthcare safety culture across 150+ hospitals worldwide.

Topics we cover:

• From rural practice to global impact: How small-town medicine shaped a systems thinking approach to pediatric safety
• Why Cincinnati Children's transformed from a "good regional hospital" to a world leader by focusing on continuous improvement, not rankings
• The cultural shift from "safe to speak up" to "uncomfortable NOT speaking up" - lessons from aviation applied to operating rooms
• How the SPS (Solutions for Patient Safety) network broke the healthcare competition paradigm with "we will no longer compete on safety"
• Why sharing data to learn beats benchmarking for ranking: the "all teach, all learn" philosophy in action
• The 30,000 children who avoided severe harm through collaborative safety efforts across hospitals
• AI's potential to create "cockpit-like" electronic health records that prevent normal human error from causing patient harm
• Practical wisdom on finding joy in healthcare work and avoiding burnout through purposeful leadership
• Why healthcare complexity rivals aircraft carriers but can learn from high-reliability industries

Perfect for: Healthcare quality leaders, patient safety professionals, hospital executives, medical students and residents concerned about burnout, and anyone interested in how collaborative networks can transform entire industries.

Dr. Muething shares his unique journey from serving 5,000 people in rural Indiana to helping shape safety practices that protect millions of children globally, plus insights on building cultures where teams feel compelled to speak up and how AI might finally deliver on healthcare's promise of error-proof systems.

Guest Bio: Dr. Steve Muething is Clinical Director of the Advisory Network at Cincinnati Children's Hospital and a former Chief Quality Officer who helped build the SPS network spanning 150+ hospitals across North America. A pediatrician who started his career in rural Indiana, he now leads Cincinnati Children's efforts to share their improvement expertise globally while maintaining his commitment to making a difference for kids everywhere.

In this episode, Hunter sits down with Dr. Yubin Park, healthcare AI pioneer and founder of Mimi Labs and Falcon Health, to explore the future of value-based care and how 30TB of public health data can unlock new opportunities.

Topics we cover:

• Why value-based care is like switching from "hourly contractors" to "project-based payments"
• How capitated payment models are evolving beyond traditional HMO approaches
• The reality check on LLMs in healthcare: why they're "smart, cheap interns" that need oversight
• Why healthcare data changes faster than people think (regulations, codes, payment rules)
• How AI can bridge the gap between fragmented government datasets and policy decisions
• Practical applications of public health data for both established companies and startups
• The surprising optimism case for America's "messy" healthcare system vs. monolithic approaches
• Van Gogh's philosophy applied to healthcare: why small details build great outcomes

Perfect for: Healthcare data leaders, value-based care professionals, health tech entrepreneurs, and anyone working with public health datasets or building AI solutions in healthcare.

Dr. Park shares his unique perspective as someone who's experienced healthcare systems in Korea, Japan, and the US, plus insights on building data teams, operationalizing public datasets, and why America's fragmented healthcare system might actually be a feature, not a bug.

Guest Bio: Dr. Yubin Park is a healthcare AI pioneer who built and sold multiple startups, served as Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Astrana Health, and now leads Mimi Labs and Falcon Health. He was recently named to Pearl Health's list of top 50 value-based care thinkers and teaches as an adjunct professor at Emory University.

In this episode, Hunter sits down with Payal Patnaik, former AI/ML Product Lead at One Medical, to cut through the AI hype and discuss what actually works when implementing LLM products in healthcare.

Topics we cover:

• Why most "AI strategies" fail and how to start with the right problems instead of shiny objects
• The three-pillar AI maturity model (Usage, UX, Platform) and where your organization fits
• How to build clinician buy-in for AI tools without triggering replacement fears
• Practical evaluation frameworks for ensuring LLM accuracy and safety
• The 15 essential questions every value-based care data team should answer
• Real lessons from launching 6 LLM services at One Medical within one year

Perfect for: Healthcare data leaders, product managers, executives exploring AI implementation, and anyone building tech solutions for clinical workflows.

Payal shares her journey from journalism and biomedical engineering to leading AI product development, plus insights on responsible AI use, the importance of breaking down complex reasoning tasks, and why LLMs are becoming the great equalizer in healthcare innovation.

Guest Bio: Payal Patnaik led AI/ML product management at One Medical (Amazon Health Services) and previously built data product organizations at Iora Health. She teaches "LLMs in Healthcare 101" and moonlights as a singer-songwriter in the Boston area.