At the Civic Health Forum, StartUp Health Managing Director Logan Plaster sat down with three founders building access-first solutions in health innovation: Elina Onitskansky of Ilant Health, Rafael Lopez of Diagnostikare, and Terry Huang, PhD, MPH, of Firefly Innovations.

The conversation moves from patient stories to business models to a closing lightning round of hot takes, covering:

This episode is part of StartUp Health's Civic Health Forum series, co-hosted with Fedcap and Digital Health Hub Foundation. Note: Audio quality may vary due to live recording.

StartUp Health community members had a seat in the room for this conversation. Join today to attend virtual and in-person events like this live, bring your own thoughts to the stage, and get access to full recordings of sessions if you miss them.
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General Catalyst manages more than $40B across AI, global resilience, and health assurance – and its boldest healthcare move yet was buying Summa Health outright. On this StartUp Health NOW podcast episode, Holly Maloney, who leads GC's health assurance investing practice, tells Unity Stoakes why partnership beats building around incumbents, how AI is finally reaching the point of care, and what she's listening for from founders at the seed stage.

This audio follows the conversation between Maloney and Stoakes. The live audience questions that followed – from founders in the room asking about the consumer AI race, continuous care, and how to get in front of GC – are part of what only StartUp Health members get access to, along with the chance to ask their own.

Join StartUp Health to get invited to conversations like this one before they happen.
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Public health has an image problem. It rarely shows up until something goes wrong, which makes it one of the hardest things to fund and one of the easiest to underinvest in. This episode gets specific about what that underinvestment actually costs, and what becomes possible when AI closes the gap instead.

Host Jay Varma, MD (SVP and CMO of The Fedcap Group), sat down with Susan Monarez, PhD (former Director, CDC; founding leader, ARPA-H), Girish Nadkarni, MD, MPH (Chief AI Officer, Mount Sinai Health System), and Nirav Shah, MD (Stanford University; founder, Civic Stratum), for a conversation recorded live at Civic Health Forum.

Highlights include:

This episode is part of StartUp Health's Civic Health Forum series, co-hosted with Fedcap and Digital Health Hub Foundation. Note: Audio quality may vary due to live recording.

StartUp Health community members had a seat in the room for this conversation. Join the community to attend virtual and in-person events like this live, bring your own questions to the stage, and get access to full recordings of sessions if you miss them.
🚀 Join today: startuphealth.com

Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, MD, PhD, has a front-row seat to the tension at the heart of health innovation. As Editor in Chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network, she oversees 13 journals that sit at the intersection of clinical medicine, public health, and emerging technology. In this episode, recorded live at the Civic Health Forum, she joins Unity Stoakes for a wide-ranging conversation about why AI enthusiasm without evidence is a problem, what a closed-door JAMA Summit on obesity revealed about the limits of the prevention paradigm, and why trust, not technology, is the real variable to watch. Her call to action: stop siloing, start building, and measure progress by whether health actually improves across the population, not just at the top.

This episode is part of StartUp Health's Civic Health Forum series, co-hosted with Fedcap and Digital Health Hub Foundation.

✅ Note: Audio quality may vary due to live recording. StartUp Health members attend our virtual and in-person interactive expert sessions in real time and can access full recordings through our member app. Learn more at startuphealth.com

What does a family caregiver actually need – and what does that mean for the founders building solutions for them?

In this expert conversation, Katie Brandt, director of caregiver support services at Massachusetts General Hospital's Frontal Temporal Disorders Unit, joins the StartUp Health community to share what 18 years of personal caregiving experience and clinical work with hundreds of families has taught her.

Katie runs the largest FTD caregiver support group in the country. She is a trainer for the Alzheimer's Association, a speaker at national conferences, and a fundraiser for the MGH FTD Unit. She is also a daughter, a widow, and a mother who has navigated every layer of the caregiving system from the inside.

She covers the financial toll that caregiving extracts – disproportionately from women, and nearly double for young onset families. She explains why verbal caregiver reports in clinical settings fail, and how documentation changes outcomes. She discusses where AI is genuinely helping caregivers and where the technology-first assumption breaks down. And she describes what it would actually take to build a caregiving system that works at scale.

For anyone building in the Alzheimer's, dementia, and caregiving space, this conversation is essential.

Note: This podcast has been edited down from a full hour session that contained additional founder questions, stories, and advice. StartUp Health members attend these expert sessions live and can access full recordings through the membership portal. Learn more at startuphealth.com.

What does it take to keep a community hospital's doors open? According to StartUp Health community member Josh DeTillio, CEO of Access TeleCare, the answer often comes down to one thing: access to specialists.

In this podcast episode, DeTillio joins StartUp Health co-founder Unity Stoakes to trace his own journey from hospital COO to telemedicine believer, and to explain why the virtual hospital model he's championing isn't a workaround – it's a better system.

They dig into the realities of physician shortages, the financial fragility facing hundreds of community hospitals, and how Access TeleCare's eight-specialty platform is helping facilities across all 50 states retain patients and stay viable. Plus: a look at the measured AI strategy the company is building as consult volume continues to grow.

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Members of our Health Moonshot Communities are leading startups with breakthrough technology-driven solutions for the world’s biggest health challenges. Exposure in StartUp Health Media to our global audience of investors and partners – including our podcast, newsletters, journal, and YouTube channel – is available to StartUp Health Members. If you’re mission-driven, collaborative, and ready to contribute as much as you gain, you might be the perfect fit.
👉 Learn more and join today.

From menopause pioneer to commercial leader at one of digital health's most watched companies, Jill Angelo joins Unity Stoakes for a wide-ranging conversation on women's health innovation, outcomes validation, and the discipline of focus – with live questions from the StartUp Health community.

Jill Angelo has sat at nearly every seat at the table in health innovation – enterprise executive at Microsoft, founder of Gennev (one of the first menopause-focused digital health companies and a StartUp Health community member), and now VP of Women's Health and Commercial Partnerships at Oura, where she is building the women's health business from the ground up.

This episode distills a one-hour StartUp Health Fireside Chat into 20 focused minutes. StartUp Health co-founder Unity Stoakes sits down with Jill for a wide-ranging conversation on what has shifted in women's health investment and partnerships, why clinical outcomes validation remains the most important work any health company can do regardless of size, and how Oura is approaching detection and behavior change as its two biggest product frontiers. Jill also shares the hard-won founder lesson she wishes she had learned earlier – and is still applying today.

The conversation includes a couple of the many live questions from StartUp Health community members working in longevity, post-discharge care, and behavior change.

Members attend these StartUp Health Fireside Chats live, ask their own questions directly, and have access to full recordings of past sessions. Learn more and join the community at startuphealth.com.

What does it mean to build technology that serves human life rather than consuming it?

In this episode, Esther Dyson, investor, thinker, and StartUp Health Impact Board member, joins co-founder Unity Stoakes and members of the StartUp Health community for a candid fireside conversation on her forthcoming book, Term Limits: Human Time and AI Scale. From the risk of "information diabetes" to the right ratio of AI to human in care delivery, Dyson challenges founders and investors to ask harder questions about what they're actually building, and for whom. She also makes the case for single-payer healthcare as public infrastructure, the value of dignity and agency in underserved communities, and why wisdom, not intelligence, is the variable that matters most in the age of AI.

Listen in for a for a wide-ranging conversation on what we lose when we optimize everything, and what we have to gain by embracing limits.

✅ Don’t miss the opportunity to learn from the best! Join the StartUp Health community to be part of live events like this: https://www.startuphealth.com/

For decades, the noninvasive continuous glucose monitor has been the holy grail of diabetes technology. SynchNeuro believes the signal has been there all along -- hiding in the brain's electrical activity, readable from a small adhesive patch worn behind the ear.

In this episode, StartUp Health co-founder Unity Stoakes talks with StartUp Health community member Casey Halpern, MD, Founder & Chairman of SynchNeuro, about the neuroscience behind the platform, the working prototype now in internal testing, and a clinical study launching in weeks. They cover the daily glucose stability score -- a sleep-powered metabolic forecast that updates in real time throughout the day -- the partnership with January AI, and a commercial launch target of late 2027 to early 2028. Dr. Halpern also shares his vision for what it looks like when 50 million Americans with prediabetes finally have the tools to get ahead of the problem.

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Are you ready to tell YOUR story? Members of our Health Moonshot Communities are leading startups with breakthrough technology-driven solutions for the world’s biggest health challenges. Exposure in StartUp Health Media to our global audience of investors and partners – including our podcast, newsletters, journal, and YouTube channel – is a benefit of our Health Moonshot Membership. If you’re mission-driven, collaborative, and ready to contribute as much as you gain, you might be the perfect fit.
» Learn more and join today.

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What does the senior CMS official focused on payment and delivery innovation actually want health tech founders to understand? In this episode, we listen in on highlights from a recent fireside chat as StartUp Health co-founder Unity Stoakes talks with Abe Sutton, Deputy Administrator at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), about the strategic and practical realities of building a company in the Medicare space right now.

Abe covers how CMS's new technology-focused payment models, including ACCESS and Geo AHEAD, are creating opportunities that did not previously exist for health tech innovators. He shares the founder-specific advice he wished he had when he was on the other side of the government-innovator divide: read the regulations, understand the intent behind the payment structures you are building on, and think twice before framing your CMS pitch as a small pilot.

This conversation includes direct questions from StartUp Health community members representing companies across diagnostics, caregiving, digital therapeutics, rural health, and AI-powered clinical tools -- a small sample of the live Q&A from the original fireside chat. Getting a seat in that room, and direct access to the people shaping the future of healthcare, is one of the things StartUp Health community membership is built for. Learn more at startuphealth.com.