HealthTech Remedy

Curology founder Dr. David Lortscher explains why physician-founded health companies outperform and how doctors can build or join high-impact startups.

Episode Resources:

• Learn more about Curology
• “Why Doctors Win” by Dr. David Lortscher
• Connect with Dr. David Lortscher

Investors often say they won't back physician founders. Dr. David Lortscher, dermatologist, founder of Curology, and author of Why Doctors Win: The Doctors' Guide to Creating or Joining a High-Impact Startup, found the data says otherwise. Physicians founded just 17 percent of healthcare startups, yet they founded 51 percent of the most valuable healthcare companies, including Intuitive Surgical and Gilead. In this episode, Trevor Royce and Tim Showalter sit down with David to talk about what doctors bring to the table and what they still have to learn.

David takes us back to 2012, when his patients in rural New Mexico were driving two hours each way for appointments that didn't need to be in person. Rather than digitize the office visit, he rebuilt the whole care model. That meant full-time dermatologists, hundreds of keyboard shortcuts to make consults fast without losing quality, and a $20 monthly subscription that covered both care and medication. It also meant months in his kitchen teaching himself to compound acne creams that people would actually want on their faces. That work eventually became a 50,000 square foot compounding pharmacy in Pittsburgh. David is also candid about his biggest early mistake as CEO, which was underinvesting in marketing, and why doctors need to stop acting like the expert in the room once they join a startup.

The conversation then turns to the book's core framework: a great company needs a transformational product and a clear path to winning the market. David shows how that played out at Abridge, which launched a patient-facing app before building its AI scribe, and at Viz.ai, which won by building stroke detection into the clinical workflow and cut time to treatment dramatically. He also walks through a supplement idea he loved but ultimately walked away from, and shares practical ways physicians can find their way into startups, from incubators and MBAs to blogging, building apps, or taking a year to work inside a great company.

LinusBio CEO Dr. Manish Arora explains how robots and lasers turn a few strands of hair into a 30-day record of lead, arsenic, and other toxic exposures.

Episode Resources:

• Learn more about LinusBio
• Learn more about traced.life

A blood test tells you what's in your body today. But what about last Tuesday, or the week a wildfire rolled through your neighborhood? In this episode of HealthTech Remedy, radiation oncologists Dr. Trevor Royce and Dr. Tim Showalter sit down with Dr. Manish Arora, founder and CEO of LinusBio, to explore the exposome: the full record of environmental exposures we collect over a lifetime. Manish explains why medicine has leaned so heavily on genomics while largely ignoring the environment, and how a single strand of hair can fill that gap.

The idea started with a tree stump. As a PhD student, Manish noticed a damaged growth ring and wondered whether human tissue kept a similar record. It turns out hair does, logging a new layer roughly every hour. To read it, his team built robots that straighten the hair and slice it open lengthwise, then use lasers to analyze the inner core while leaving surface contamination behind. From one centimeter of hair, LinusBio can take up to 1,000 measurements across 10,000 molecular signatures. Manish shares what that data has already revealed, from a young athlete's recurring arsenic exposure at a community center to the spike in toxic metals among people affected by the Palisades fire.

The conversation also covers Traced, LinusBio's new $299 at-home test that maps 30 days of exposure across 15 elements, with plans to expand to more than 100. Manish explains why the rhythm of a biomarker like cholesterol may matter as much as its level, how the company uses AI and ideas borrowed from music theory to make sense of millions of data points, and why he wants a hair test to become as routine as a blood draw.

IgniteData CEO Zach Taft explains how the Archer platform moves clinical trial data straight from the EHR to sponsors, cutting queries by 90% and delays by weeks.

Episode Resources:

• Learn more about IgniteData

Anyone who has worked on a sponsored clinical trial knows the pain of the swivel chair: pull up the electronic health record in one window, open the sponsor's data capture system in another, and retype numbers that were already documented during the patient visit. It is slow, expensive, and error prone, and it is one of the reasons trials cost so much and take so long. On this episode of HealthTech Remedy, Drs. Trevor Royce and Tim Showalter dig into why this problem has persisted for decades and why sponsors and sites have been so reluctant to fix it.

Their guest is Zach Taft, CEO of IgniteData, whose Archer platform pulls data directly from the EHR and other source systems and streams it into a sponsor's EDC with full provenance intact. Zach traces his path from founding one of the first medical scribing companies to leading digital ventures at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where he helped incubate IgniteData and bring Archer to general availability. He explains why what looks like a simple one to one integration is really a many to many problem, and how taking small bites of structured data at a few partner sites eventually grew into a platform used by most NCI designated comprehensive cancer centers and several top pharmas across four continents.

The conversation also covers what it takes to get a health system to say yes, why CRCs are starting to prioritize Archer studies over manual ones, and where AI genuinely helps versus where it creates false hope. Zach is candid about the limits of black box models in research grade data, why nobody actually wants 100 percent of the data, and why the EDC is not disappearing any time soon. He closes with a look at where clinical research could be in ten years, from real time safety signals to recruiting patients at the moment of diagnosis, and a warning that the industry is at a crossroads between a vendor agnostic future and a fragmented one.

epocrates president David Minkin on turning 25 years of clinician trust into an AI-powered clinical intelligence platform without disrupting the workflow.

Episode Resources:

• Overview of epocrates AI Assist and Clinical Decision Support
• Official epocrates Product Page and athenahealth Integration
• Analysis of epocrates’ Role in Reducing Clinician Cognitive Load
• Video Discussion on Ethical Guardrails for AI at the Point of Care

For a generation of physicians, epocrates was the first medical app they ever downloaded. It lived on Palm Pilots before smartphones existed, replaced the dog-eared Physician's Desk Reference, and became the reflexive check for a dose or an interaction between patients. Twenty-five years and a million daily users later, it is still there. In this episode, Trevor Royce and Tim Showalter dig into what happens when one of the most deeply embedded tools in medicine decides it wants to be something bigger than a lookup app.

They are joined by David Minkin, president and general manager of epocrates, who came to the role from digital media rather than clinical practice. Minkin describes the work as a reinvention problem rather than a repair job, and he is blunt about the constraint that shapes every decision: trust is not an aspiration, it is a hard limit. That principle explains why AI Assist carries no sponsor influence, why the product refuses to diagnose or prescribe, and why 75 clinicians in an alpha lab generated more than 5,000 pieces of feedback before the feature went wide. The conversation covers the shift from information to intelligence, why pull-based engagement beats another alert firing in a busy clinic, and the metrics Minkin actually watches, including how many seconds it takes a clinician to get an answer.

Trevor and Tim also unpack the strategic picture around the company, from the athenahealth acquisition and where a reference tool sits next to an EHR, to what a 25-year curated content library is worth in a market full of AI-first entrants scraping the open web. Minkin closes with pointed advice for health tech founders, arguing that the real opportunity is not autonomous diagnosis but the far less glamorous work of cutting cognitive load for clinicians who are already exhausted from chasing down information that should be instant.

Hospitals can't reliably get their own protocols to the bedside. Dr. Ido Zamberg of C8 Health on the 17-year evidence gap and fixing clinical knowledge chaos.

Episode Resources:

• Official Website for C8 Health

Every clinician knows the feeling: you need a protocol, and you have no idea where it lives. Maybe it's a PDF on a shared drive. Maybe it's an intranet page nobody's updated since 2019. Maybe it's a printout taped to a bulletin board with a phone number for a coordinator who left last year. Medicine is the most knowledge-intensive profession there is, and yet hospitals — good at care delivery, billing, regulatory compliance, and training residents — are not built to be knowledge organizations. The EMR doesn't solve it either. It's excellent at patient-level data and transactions, and largely silent on institutional know-how.

This week, we dig into C8 Health, an AI-powered best practices implementation platform tackling exactly that gap, and talk with co-founder and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ido Zamberg. Zamberg's path is unusual: a senior developer at HP, Mercury Interactive, and Autodesk — where his specialty was optimizing access to information across large enterprises — who became an anesthesiologist and medical educator. He traces the idea back to a specific moment on geriatric rounds, watching colleagues each build their own ad hoc checklists for the same admission, all slightly differently, all because the hospital's actual protocols were impossible to find. The tool he built for his own department spread across five hospitals.

The conversation gets into where generative AI genuinely fits here — a retrieval-grounded assistant answering from vetted institutional content, with citations down to the paragraph, rather than a general-purpose chatbot improvising clinical advice. Zamberg also makes a pointed argument about quality improvement: that hospitals spend heavily on extracting quality data, then lock it in dashboards that individual providers never see, and pair it with one-time interventions that decay almost immediately. With new evidence taking an average of 17 years to reach practice, ERAS compliance hovering near 50% nationally, and more than 70% of quality interventions failing to sustain, the case that this is fundamentally a distribution problem is a hard one to argue with.

apree health CMO Dr. Marla McLaughlin on merging Castlight navigation with Vera advanced primary care – and why prevention pays off by year three.

Episode Resources:

• Official Website for apree health
• apree health’s Expansion of Clinical Advocacy Services

What if fixing employer healthcare isn't about adding another point solution, but about connecting the ones you already have?

This week, Trevor and Tim break down apree health – the company born from Castlight Health's digital navigation and Vera Whole Health's advanced primary care – and ask whether it's a benefits platform or a true closed-loop care model. Then they're joined by Paul for a conversation with apree health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Marla McLaughlin.

Dr. McLaughlin shares her path from fee-for-service community medicine to leading care at the intersection of national virtual care and local, relationship-based primary care. Along the way: why the "apparently healthy" employee is the population everyone overlooks, why prevention doesn't show savings until year three or four, how AI scribes are giving physicians back the art of medicine, and where the human still has to step in when the algorithm reaches its limit. A candid look at benefits complexity, value-based care, and what the next generation of primary care could actually deliver.

Discover the future of longevity medicine with Cenegenics. Learn how advanced diagnostics, hormone optimization, and coaching can maximize your healthspan.

Episode Resources:

• Cenegenics
• JAMA Study on VO2 Max and Long-Term Survival
• Medicine 3.0 and Healthspan Optimization by Peter Attia
• Understanding Lp(a) and Advanced Cardiovascular Risk Markers
• Medicare Guidelines for Preventive and Wellness Services

Long before the current wave of biohacking and longevity startups, Cenegenics was quietly pioneering the performance health movement. In this episode of HealthTech Remedy, we sit down with Rudy Inaba, VP of Performance Health at Cenegenics, to unpack the science of health optimization and proactive aging. You’ll learn how to transition from reactive, episodic care to a proactive medical framework that maximizes physical, cognitive, and metabolic healthspan. 

We explore how Cenegenics uses a concierge medicine model to deliver high-touch, longitudinal care driven by comprehensive biomarker tracking, epigenetics, and advanced diagnostics. Rudy breaks down the nuance of modern hormone optimization, detailing why managing cortisol and lifestyle habits is often more critical than jumping straight to testosterone therapy. He also shares why improving your VO2 max is the ultimate biological retirement plan and how continuous behavioral coaching bridges the gap between complex data and actual health outcomes. Discover which specific metrics are essential for measuring the epigenetic "software" running on your genetic "hardware" so you can start building a more resilient body today.

If you are ready to start treating your healthspan as your most valuable asset, hit subscribe to HealthTech Remedy and leave us a review!

CEO Alok Tayi shares how Vibe Bio uses AI in drug development to automate due diligence, solve the biotech funding cliff, and accelerate rare disease cures.

Episode Resources:

• Official Website for Vibe Bio
• Nature Article on the "Valley of Death" in Drug Development
• "Chasing My Cure" by David Fajgenbaum

While most AI biotech startups focus on discovering new molecules, the industry's real bottleneck is deciding which existing therapies actually secure the capital to reach patients. In this episode of HealthTech Remedy, we sit down with Dr. Alok Tayi, founder and CEO of Vibe Bio, to explore how artificial intelligence is completely transforming the multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical due diligence process. Tune in to discover how data-driven investing is rescuing promising treatments from the "funding cliff" and rewriting the economics of drug development. 

Driven by a personal mission after his daughter’s rare disease diagnosis, Dr. Tayi explains how traditional biopharma funding models systematically overlook high-need communities in favor of massive, crowded markets. We unpack how Vibe Bio’s proprietary AI platform, VibeOne, processes preclinical data and trial designs to automate deep due diligence, stripping away human bias while aiming to double clinical success rates from 10% to 20%. The conversation also tackles the evolving landscape of tech bio, the delicate balance between machine computation and human strategic judgment, and why geopolitical competition is forcing a much-needed evolution in regulatory agility. Will AI finally democratize biotech funding, or is the most critical element of drug development still fundamentally human?

If you want to stay ahead of the curve on the latest innovations shaping the future of care, make sure to subscribe and leave a review for Health Tech Remedy!

Can AI reverse metabolic disease? Discover how Twin Health uses digital twins to safely reduce GLP-1 reliance and personalize care in this podcast episode.

Episode Resources:

• Twin Health
• NEJM Catalyst Study on AI-Enabled Diabetes Remission
• Genome Medicine Article on Digital Twins in Personalized Medicine
• ADA Consensus Report on Defining Type 2 Diabetes Remission
• JAMA Study on Weight Regain After GLP-1 Discontinuation
• Cleveland Clinic Newsroom Summary of Twin Health Research

What if you could predict exactly how your body would react to a specific meal before taking a single bite? In this episode of HealthTech Remedy, we sit down with Dr. Lisa Shah to explore how Twin Health is using digital twin technology to actually reverse - rather than just manage - chronic metabolic diseases. Tune in to discover how continuous data monitoring and predictive AI are moving healthcare beyond generic lifestyle advice to highly personalized, precision medicine.

The conversation dives deep into the bold thesis that conditions like type 2 diabetes, obesity, and fatty liver disease are all downstream manifestations of a single, reversible metabolic dysfunction. Dr. Shah shares striking results from a recent randomized control trial, revealing how mapping an individual's unique metabolism can lead to a 71% diabetes reversal rate while dramatically reducing medication reliance. We also debate the practical challenges of continuous monitoring and unpack a timely framework for using digital platforms as a sustainable "off-ramp" for patients transitioning away from GLP-1 medications without rebound weight gain. Why might an AI coach actually be more effective (and less judgmental) than a human doctor when it comes to daily behavioral changes? 

If you’re enjoying these deep dives into the future of care delivery, be sure to subscribe to HealthTech Remedy and leave a five-star review!

Discover how Cedar uses AI to fix broken healthcare billing, automate revenue cycle management, and improve the patient financial experience.

Episode Resources:

• Cedar
• KFF Medicaid Enrollment and Unwinding Tracker
• Kora AI Agentic Voice Assistant for Patient Billing
• KFF 2024 Employer Health Benefits Survey
• Analysis of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" and Medicaid Impacts
• National Cancer Institute Resource on Financial Toxicity

Are we truly healing patients if we fix their health but ruin their credit? In this episode of HealthTech Remedy, we sit down with Seth Cohen, President of Cedar, to tackle the most universally dreaded part of the healthcare journey: the medical bill. You’ll discover how shifting revenue cycle management to prioritize the patient financial experience can alleviate financial toxicity while simultaneously boosting a health system's bottom line. 

As millions of Americans face the Medicaid coverage cliff and the continuous rise of high-deductible health plans, the out-of-pocket burden on patients has never been heavier. Seth breaks down how Cedar uses agentic AI to disrupt traditional billing, transforming static, confusing statements into personalized financial navigation. By leveraging large language models and virtual agents, the platform proactively connects patients with hidden resources like dormant HSAs and pharmacy co-pay assistance before a bill even drops. Tune in to find out how this targeted technology is preventing catastrophic medical debt, including a powerful patient story that proves exactly why this empathetic framework changes lives. 

If you want to stay ahead of the curve in health technology and reimbursement innovation, be sure to subscribe to HealthTech Remedy and leave us a review!