The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast

Is 2026 the year that changes everything in healthcare?

Steve and Halle sit down with legendary healthcare VC Annie Lamont for their annual predictions episode to dive into 2026 predictions and trends that founders and operators should pay attention to. 

We cover:

📉 Why 2025 was "the most brutal year ever" for health plans

🏥 Why providers outpaced payers in AI adoption and where the next wave of enterprise software will land

💸 Where she’s spending her time in 2026 (and what space she’s avoiding)

🔮 What she expects for IPOs and M&A in 2026

⚖️ How regulation, interoperability, and national AI policy could shape the next decade

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About our guest: 

Annie Lamont co-founded Oak HC/FT in 2014. Prior to founding Oak HC/FT, Annie spent 28 years at Oak Investment Partners, where she served as a Managing Partner and led the healthcare and fintech practices. Over the course of her career, she has invested in category-defining companies across the healthcare and financial services industries, including Aspire Health, athenahealth, CareBridge, Devoted Health, iHealthTechnologies (which became Cotiviti), NetSpend, OneMedical, and VillageMD. 

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For our first episode of 2026, Dr. Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, oncologist, bioethicist, architect of the Affordable Care Act, and author of Eat Your Ice Cream joins us to share why he believes the longevity movement is overblown and how real health comes down to simplicity. In his new book, Zeke argues that instead of chasing expensive fads and wellness trends, we should focus on six straightforward habits that make life healthier and more enjoyable. 

In this conversation with co-host Steve Kraus, he explains why complexity is one of healthcare’s biggest threats, how public frustration is reshaping policy, and why the path to better health may be far simpler than we think.

We cover:

🚫 Rejecting the wellness industrial complex

📈 Why public frustration will force major policy changes by 2032

🧩 How the ACA's success created a huge new flaw

🤖 The two biggest bottlenecks that slow down hospital AI implementation

💡 How to improve quality and empathy with specialized medical AY systems

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About our guest: 

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, is a Vice Provost and Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. An oncologist and world leader in health policy and bioethics, he was instrumental in drafting the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Dr. Emanuel regularly contributes to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and appears on BBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and other media outlets. His new book, Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life, is available on January 6. 

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Chapters:

00:00:50 Introducing Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel

00:06:04 His path to medicine

00:09:15 Working on Obamacare - successes and regrets

00:11:19 Is healthcare too big to fail?

00:14:18 The antidote to the “longevity” movement

00:17:18 How to stay mentally sharp

00:18:34 AI and job displacement

00:22:57 Critique of the “Wellness Industrial Complex”

00:25:10 Philosophy on life expectancy and quality

00:27:16 Optimism about AI in healthcare

00:30:20 Lightning round of questions

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We’re closing out the year with a candid conversation about where America is headed.

For our final episode of 2025, Halle and Steve sit down with entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang to talk plainly about the forces reshaping American life, from rising healthcare costs and gaps in coverage to AI-driven job disruption and the strain on the social safety net. 

We cover:

🏛️ Andew’s idea of “Medicare for all who want it”

🤖 How AI is already wiping out entry-level jobs, and why he thinks America is heading toward a “bad men problem”

💸 Why he ran on Universal Basic Income which he calls “capitalism where income doesn’t start at zero”

🏥 How entrenched players restrict physician supply, shape regulation, and protect revenue even when it hurts patients

📵 His new effort to cut phone addiction and why he says parents, schools, and policymakers are waking up to the damage caused by screen-first childhoods

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About our guest: 

Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur, author, philanthropist, attorney, nonprofit leader, and former U.S. presidential and New York City mayoral candidate. After a brief stint as a corporate lawyer, he worked in startups and founded an education company that became #1 in the country. He later launched Venture for America, a national nonprofit that empowered thousands of young entrepreneurs to build careers in cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore. Under his leadership, the organization became a multi-million-dollar charity, and Yang was named a Presidential Ambassador of Entrepreneurship and a Champion of Change during the Obama administration.

Motivated by the impact of automation on the American workforce, Yang ran for President in 2017. Centered on a proposed $1,000-per-month “Freedom Dividend,” his campaign raised nearly $40 million and helped mainstream conversations around Universal Basic Income. He later founded Humanity Forward, a nonprofit that has successfully advocated for billions of dollars in federal cash relief.

Yang is also an author, CNN commentator, and podcast host. He is the son of Taiwanese immigrants, and holds degrees from Brown University and Columbia Law School.

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Chapters:

00:2:22 Andrew’s Vision for American Healthcare

00:7:27 Healthcare and the 2026 Election

00:9:59 AI’s Impact on Employment and Society

00:22:35 Universal Basic Income 

00:29:14 Regulatory Capture in Healthcare

00:31:37 Noble Mobile

00:33:57 Children and Phone Addictions

00:43:19 Closing Advice for Healthcare Innovators

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Pre-order Halle's new book, Massively Better Healthcare.

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Many clinicians quietly wonder if there's a “next chapter” beyond the hospital walls, and an increasing number are stepping into health tech roles that didn’t exist a decade ago.

Dr. Reena Pande has lived that shift firsthand: from cardiologist at a top academic center, to early employee and CMO at AbleTo, to now leading clinician executive search at Oxeon. She joins us to unpack what it really takes for clinicians to succeed in startups, why these roles matter more than ever, and how AI is reshaping both medical training and leadership.

We cover:

🩺 What true self-assessment looks like

🚀 What clinicians often misunderstand about joining a Series A startup

🐈 The “indoor cat vs. outdoor cat” model for modern clinical leadership

📉 How to evaluate risk when moving from academic medicine into early-stage companies

📊 Why clinician leaders are central to sales, product, and operations in virtual care

🤖 How AI is reshaping medical expertise and what future clinicians must be trained for

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About our guest: 

Dr. Reena Pande is a Partner and leads Oxeon’s Clinician Executive search and leadership practice. She is a physician, entrepreneur, and healthcare executive whose career has focused on building innovative solutions to ensure access to evidence-based, and technology-enabled care. For nearly a decade, Dr. Pande served as Chief Medical Officer at AbleTo, a virtual behavioral health provider. During her tenure, she served as a passionate external voice for bridging the gaps between physical and mental health, and also led clinical product, data science, healthcare economics, and outcomes research teams. Dr. Pande saw the organization through numerous fundraising rounds and eventual acquisition by Optum/UnitedHealth Group.

Prior to her time at AbleTo, Dr. Pande was an academic cardiologist and clinical researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA and was on the faculty at Harvard Medical School. She earned her undergraduate degree in Biology from Harvard University, her M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and a Masters degree in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. She completed her internship, residency training, and Cardiology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

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📚Want more? Read The Clinician’s Guide to Breaking Into Digital Health

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Women founders, access a lifetime of community-backed growth with Entreprenerustia: https://refer.entreprenista.com/founder 

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Hemant Taneja believes you can sneeze and reach a billion dollars in healthcare revenue, but that most of that revenue tells you nothing about whether the system is actually getting better.

This week, Halle sits down with the CEO of General Catalyst and author of The Transformation Principles to discuss what happens when you stop treating revenue as the primary KPI and start asking harder questions about impact, incentives, and system change. They get into his “health assurance” thesis, what it means for a VC firm to buy a hospital, why “profit-only” capitalism has run its course, and how AI and new payment models could finally bend the cost curve instead of just inflating it.

We cover:

🏥 How Hemant began investing in healthcare and his “health assurance” thesis

📉 Why profit‑only capitalism has run its course and what should replace it

💳 The “work tax” in healthcare payments and how AI could free up resources for prevention

🤖 Whether AI in healthcare is a bubble or a durable transformation

🏥 Why General Catalyst bought a hospital and how they plan to use it

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About our guest: 

Hemant Taneja is the CEO of General Catalyst, and a founder, investor, and author of four books, including The Transformation Principles. His worldview centers on strengthening global resilience through applied AI and partnerships that modernize critical systems. Hemant is an early investor in the leading technology companies of our time including Anduril, Anthropic, Applied Intuition, GitLab (NASDAQ: GTLB), Grammarly, Gusto, Ro, Samsara (NYSE: IOT), Snap (NYSE: SNAP), and Stripe. He is also deeply involved in transforming the US healthcare system, having founded companies like Commure, Hippocratic, Transcarent, Livongo (Sold to Teladoc for $18.5B) and General Catalyst's Health Assurance Transformation Company (HATCo) which helps health systems transform themselves with AI. A global expert on industry transformation, he has led General Catalyst's foray into transforming healthcare, energy, and workforce systems globally. He holds five degrees from MIT.

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🙏Thank you to our show sponsor, LookDeep. LookDeep pioneers AI that can see, hear, and respond with care to help hospitals be Ever Present for Every Patient. Learn more at lookdeep.ai/aimee. 

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The Haves & Have-Nots Of 2025 | Threshold Ventures Co-founder Emily Melton

This week for our 2025 recap, we’re joined by VC Emily Melton, co-founder of Threshold Ventures. Melton highlights her reflection of 2025, which splits the market into "haves and have-nots" with nothing in between, noting the concentration of venture dollars on "high flyers" and the indifference shown to established companies with respectable revenue.

We cover:

💸 The widening gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” in health tech

📉 The rise of recaps, down rounds, and investor “bargain-basement shopping”

🏥 Why healthcare’s 5.6-trillion-dollar cost structure can’t be fixed without technology

🧾 How policy incentives and private equity are reshaping M&A activity

💬 What founders need to prove to raise capital in today’s market

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About our guest: 

Emily is a co-founder of Threshold. She is looking for entrepreneurs who are genuinely excited about being agents of change and have an almost irrational drive to make things better. Her portfolio includes BetterUp, Brightline, Daero, Elation Health, Imagen, Livongo (NASDAQ: LVGO), Mendaera, ODAIA, Redfin (NASDAQ: RDFN), Tia, Transcarent, Verge Genomics, Videa, Vital, Viz, and Wellframe (acquired by HealthEdge).  Emily served as the chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) board of directors for the 2022-23 term. She is also an active founding member of All Raise, a non-profit dedicated to improving access for women and others to start and invest in companies.    A Stanford grad with a BA in political philosophy with honors and an MBA, Emily is drawn to disruptive ideas and technologies that have the potential to radically change consumer, enterprise, and healthcare markets.

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The first trillion-dollar healthcare company, a $298M longevity round, and a telehealth CEO headed for federal sentencing. Last month had range.

Today on the show, Halle and Michael sort through the biggest December stories shaping the year ahead, from runaway longevity funding to a telehealth scandal headed for federal sentencing.

We cover:

🧬 Two hot funding rounds in longevity, including Function Health’s $298M B-round and Blueprint’s all-angel, no-VC $60M raise

💊 How Eli Lilly became the first trillion-dollar healthcare company

🏥 CVS’s $5.7B Oak Street Health write-down (and why most acquisitions fail)

🎓 Nursing, OT, PT, and PA being removed from the list of “professional” degrees by the Department of Education

🤖 OpenAI’s growing interest in consumer health tools

⚖️ The telehealth company whose founders were just convicted in one of the largest stimulant-fraud cases to date

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Show notes:

• Eli Lilly becomes first trillion-dollar healthcare company (Reuters)
• CVS takes $5.7B goodwill impairment on Oak Street Health (Forbes)
• Department of Education’s revised “professional degree” list (Newsweek)
• NYT: Patients turning to AI for support (Dagens.com)
• DOJ conviction of Done Global executives (DOJ)

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As millions of Americans hit the road to visit family for Thanksgiving, many will pass through, or return to, rural communities. Nearly 60 million Americans live in these areas, yet many struggle to access even basic healthcare as rural hospitals close at record rates.

Dr. Jennifer Schneider, co-founder and CEO of Homeward Health, is tackling this crisis head-on by reimagining how care is delivered to Medicare Advantage members in rural America. Drawing on her experiences as a physician, a patient with Type 1 diabetes, and the former president of Livongo, Jenny shares why rural healthcare is both a massive challenge and an untapped opportunity.

We cover:

🏥 Why rural Americans face dramatically higher mortality rates

💡 How Homeward is combining technology and on-the-ground care to serve overlooked communities

📉 What value-based care looks like outside major metro areas

🤝 Lessons from Castlight, Livongo, and building bilingual (tech + healthcare) teams

🔥 How Jenny’s personal experience with chronic illness shapes her leadership and vision

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About our guest: 

Dr. Jennifer Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of Homeward, where she is leading the transformation of rural healthcare through AI-enabled, value-based care delivery. A physician and technologist, Jennifer’s work is shaped by her experience growing up in a small town with type 1 diabetes—fueling her belief that geography should never determine access to care.

Previously, Jennifer was President and Chief Medical Officer at Livongo, where she helped scale the company through its IPO and led its $18.5B merger with Teladoc Health—the largest digital health transaction to date. She has also held executive roles at Castlight Health and began her career as a practicing internal medicine physician and health services researcher.

Jennifer serves on the boards of Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Maven Clinic, and has been named one of Modern Healthcare’s “100 Most Influential People in Healthcare.” She holds degrees from Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and the College of the Holy Cross.

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On the heels of raising $210 million at a $6 billion valuation, OpenEvidence is the fastest-growing physician app in history, now reaching over 40% of U.S. physicians and powering 17 million monthly clinical queries.

In this conversation, co-founder and CTO Zack Ziegler shares how his background in early large language models led him to build an AI that helps clinicians make better decisions at the point of care, without replacing their judgment.

We cover:

🧠 The strategies Open Evidence used to reach 40% of U.S. clinicians in a short time

💡 The unexpected reason they chose to go direct to doctors instead of via their employers

💰 How they make money

⚙️ What “Deep Consult” means for the future of clinical decision-making

🏥 Whether tools like this could ever—or should ever—be available to patients

About our guest: 

Zachary Ziegler is the cofounder and CTO of OpenEvidence, the leading medical information platform. Designed from the ground up for medical professionals, OpenEvidence organizes and expands the world's medical knowledge to make it more useful, open, accessible, and understandable. Launched out of the Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate, OpenEvidence has become the most rapidly adopted tool by physicians in history, now used by over 40% of US physicians in over 15,000 care centers across the United States. Before founding OpenEvidence, Ziegler was a PhD student at Harvard University, where he worked with Professor Sasha Rush and was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell University, where he received the Barry Goldwater Scholarship.

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🙏Thank you to our show sponsor, LookDeep. LookDeep pioneers AI that can see, hear, and respond with care to help hospitals be Ever Present for Every Patient. Learn more at lookdeep.ai/aimee.

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A billion-dollar startup. A promise to change healthcare forever. And behind the scenes… a massive lie.

Tyler Shultz was just starting his career when he joined Theranos, only to discover that the company’s breakthrough blood tests didn’t actually work. Speaking up meant risking everything—his career, his family relationships, and his personal safety—but it also helped expose one of the biggest frauds in Silicon Valley history.

In this conversation, Tyler shares what it was really like inside Theranos, how he found the courage to blow the whistle, and what leaders today can learn about building ethical cultures that last.

We cover:

⚖️ What it was like working inside Theranos

💬 The one question he suggests job seekers ask potential employers

💡 What ethical leadership looks like when the pressure is on

🤨 His thoughts on Elizabeth Holmes’ new “blood testing” company

💰 Why rewarding whistleblowers might actually protect investors and patients

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About our guest: 

Tyler Shultz is a scientist at heart, a founder by nature, a whistleblower by accident, a speaker by day, a venture partner by night, and a dad 24/7. His professional life began by exposing unethical practices at Theranos, a revelation that led to the collapse of the $9 billion company and the criminal convictions of its CEO and COO. Since then, he has co-founded two diagnostics companies: a deep tech spinout from Stanford’s Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology and a direct-to-consumer diagnostics and telehealth company. Beyond building companies, Tyler advises startups and venture funds, helping them navigate the technical, commercial, and ethical challenges of scaling groundbreaking ideas. As a speaker, he shares his experiences with audiences worldwide, addressing lawyers, founders, executives, employees, students, investors, board members, regulators, and compliance experts. He explores themes of truth, courage, and integrity, demonstrating how ethical decision-making can be a competitive advantage.

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