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.

Steven Cutbirth and Josie Livengood sat down with Chris Habig, CEO and co-founder of Freedom Healthworks, a company that has vowed to put doctors and patients in charge of everyday healthcare.

In this conversation, Chris explains how Direct Primary Care (DPC) works (and Freedom Healthworks unique model of DPC), how the economic system in status quo American healthcare constrains even the very best physicians, and why it’s so important to have patient advocates and a good doctor-patient relationship.

In today’s episode we talk with Deb Gordon, author of “The Health Care Consumer’s Manifesto.” Deb is a former health plan executive, an Aspen Institute Health Innovators Fellow, and a former Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. In this episode, we discussed Deb’s travels to Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore to explore the role of consumers in high-performing health systems, and how those learnings can make healthcare consumerism a reality in America.

Steven Cutbirth sat down with Taylor Rogers, a benefits expert and co-founder of Cairn Advisors, a partnership that guides employers through alternative health and welfare program design. Taylor helps businesses know and understand where their healthcare benefit money is going. From there, he helps them fix it the right way.

In the conversation, they discuss what it looks like to design a health plan, what Taylor’s time pitching for the SF Giants in pro baseball taught him and how he applies it to help businesses improve their healthcare benefits.

In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Elizabeth Teisberg, co-creator of the concept of value-based health care delivery and executive director of the Value Institute for Health and Care at the University of Texas, and his former professor! She discusses how she and Dr. Michael E. Porter developed the concept of value-based care, why she believes it’s the ideal solution for improving outcomes and lowering costs, the misconceptions around value-based care, and much more.

Dr. Teisberg also shares why she started the joint Masters of Science in Healthcare Transformation program at the Dell Medical School and McCombs School of Business and who should consider applying for the Master's program.