The Tech Glow Up - Fabulous conversations with innovative minds.

There's a philosophical difference between making a film and creating an experience. Paul Raphaël discovered that difference when he put the Oculus Rift on for the first time in 2013. He realized immediately that everything he'd been taught about cinema—framing, pacing, narrative structure—had to get rethought from the ground up. Twelve years later, he's still figuring out what immersive storytelling actually is.

At Felix and Paul Studios, they've designed cameras that didn't exist, built experiences where 160+ people free roam through a virtual ISS together, and just launched Interstellar Arc at Area 15 in Las Vegas—a full hour inside a purpose-built spaceport. But the technical accomplishments aren't what's interesting about Paul. What's interesting is his obsession: story serves feeling, not the other way around. Everything else gets sacrificed to that principle.

Episode Highlights:

• He spent years exploring immersion through projection mapping and 3D installations before VR showed up, and that foundation changed how he approached building for the medium.
• When he cracked how to shoot 360 stereoscopic 3D, he realized VR wasn't just a new platform—it was a fundamentally different medium that required rethinking everything about how to tell stories.
• Interstellar Arc abandons the three-act structure entirely, instead placing you in one hour of real-time experience waking up 260 years in the future approaching a new world.
• Paul protects creative freedom over financial opportunities, which means his team takes bigger risks and stays obsessed with exploring the medium instead of chasing quick wins.
• Tech companies keep building headsets not because they're stubborn, but because they understand immersive is inevitable—and it's going to take decades to build it right.

Paul approaches immersive storytelling like a medium that demands invention, not adaptation. His 12-year journey reveals why most VR experiences fall short: they're films pretending to be immersive, not experiences built from the ground up for the space around you.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube to hear how Paul navigates the tension between artistic obsession and survival, and why he believes VR filmmakers have to completely unlearn cinema.

About Paul Raphaël

Paul Raphaël is an Emmy® Award-winning filmmaker and creative technologist renowned for his pioneering work in immersive storytelling. Blending artistic vision with cutting-edge innovation, he continually redefines the boundaries of narrative experience to evoke a profound sense of presence and emotional connection.

As co-founder and Head of Innovation at Felix & Paul Studios, Paul spearheaded the development of proprietary camera systems that enabled Strangers with Patrick Watson. 

In 2025, Felix & Paul Studios unveiled Interstellar Arc at AREA15 in Las Vegas—its most ambitious project to date. 

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Caitlin Lacey was supposed to teach Shakespeare to high school sophomores. Instead, she started at Facebook in 2010 answering ad review tickets; a move that turned into a decade shaping how billions of people connect online. 

Now as Director of Global Product Marketing at Cisco, Webex, she oversees the WebEx collaboration suite and the hardware business that powers conference rooms, airports, and enterprise spaces around the world.

Her career has been defined by one principle: get out of the group chat and into the real world. Whether she was dogfooding early Facebook features or launching immersive collaboration tools at Cisco, Caitlin approaches technology through the lens of human connection and storytelling. S

Episode Highlights:

• Curiosity took her from answering ad review tickets to leading global product strategy, shaped by dogfooding products with her own family and learning how humans actually want to connect.
• Cisco Spatial Meetings lets design teams and city planners collaborate in real time within Apple Vision Pro, manipulating 3D models together and laying the foundation for when immersive collaboration becomes standard.
• Getting global alignment across teams in different time zones is the hardest part of her job, and she'd use a magic wand to get everyone in one room for 30 minutes to align on the market story.
• A CMO threw her on stage to demo a product two months after she started at Cisco, and that bet on her potential changed her trajectory and shaped how she now looks for sparks in her team.
• AI isn't going anywhere, but the humanity behind it is taking center stage, which means English degrees are about to become more valuable than they were five years ago.

The best stories start from a place of curiosity. Caitlin learned this at Facebook, proved it at Meta with emerging tech, and now applies it every day at Cisco as she defines the future of workplace collaboration. 

Her path shows that the most valuable skill in tech isn't technical knowledge—it's the ability to understand what people need and tell them why it matters.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube to hear how Caitlin built her career by asking the right questions and believing in her team's potential.

About Caitlin Lacey

Caitlin is a product marketing leader with 15+ years of experience shaping go-to-market strategy across emerging technology, hardware, and collaboration software. 

She leads marketing for Cisco’s Employee Experience portfolio, spanning devices and software that power hybrid work. 

Known for building high-performing teams and crafting narratives that drive adoption, she brings a sharp focus on business impact and human connection.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Innovation is just a creative response to a challenge. For Amy Hedrick, CEO of Cleanbox Technology, that challenge was the "ick factor" of sharing virtual reality headsets. She saw the future of learning, but she also saw that nobody would adopt it if it meant putting on a sweaty device used by a stranger.

Amy Hedrick is the founder and CEO of CleanBox Technology. Her journey started at Mobile World Congress in 2015 when she put on an Oculus Rift. With a background working with the Smithsonian Institution and its 158 million objects, she immediately saw how immersive tech could transform education and history. But she also identified the massive barrier to entry: hygiene. She founded CleanBox to solve it using rapid UVC LED disinfection. Today, the company holds over 50 global patents and operates in 15 different verticals.

Highlights include:

• Comprehensive XR Hardware Management Guide launched with 10 industry partners. It solves the unsexy but critical backend infrastructure problems for enterprise adoption.
• Helped publish two new hygiene standards with ASTM for the industry. Standards enable trust and scale.
• Founder resilience: you need a mix of "ignorance is bliss" and "knowledge is power." If you knew how hard it was going to be, you might not start. That ignorance protects the vision when you hit a brick wall.
• Using AI clones: "Amy AI" on the website answers technical and strategy questions so she can focus on 2026 planning.
• Innovation isn't a straight line. She pivoted from a think-tank background to running a hardware company with global supply chain complexities because that's where the opportunity led.

Amy's approach to selling hardware is simple: never sell the mayonnaise, sell the sandwich. Nobody wants to buy a jar of mayo to sit in the fridge; they want the result. Similarly, nobody wakes up wanting to buy a UV disinfection box. 

They want risk-free XR programs for their enterprise. CleanBox is building the infrastructure that lets VR scale.

Watch The Tech Glow Up on YouTube - https://youtu.be/PGS8PyGiZmk

About Amy Hedrick

Amy Hedrick is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Cleanbox Technology, a pioneering sustainable disinfection company built to solve real-world problems through innovative solutions.  

Amy’s leadership has expanded Cleanbox Technology’s reach around the world, establishing the brand as a leader in its field.

Hedrick is a thought leader in the applications of immersive technology as industry disruptors, bringing innovation and new market opportunities and the development of a comprehensive Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for hardware management, setting new benchmarks for excellence in XR enterprise and healthcare adoption.

Ms. Hedrick has been in both the immersive tech and UV product development spaces for close to a decade, supporting innovation in UVC applications, speaking frequently on UVC for surface decontamination.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Death by a thousand clicks. That is the problem facing clinicians who spend hours navigating scattered tools for documentation, billing, guidelines, and decision-making. One doctor-turned-founder accidentally built 50 apps trying to solve it before realizing he was an entrepreneur.

PJ Park is co-founder, chairman, and chief product AI officer at Avo MD. He came to the United States from Korea about ten years ago and joined a residency program barely able to speak English. On his first day, a senior asked him to call a dying patient's family. He missed everything. 

That experience drove him to start building software on his own to make his "imperfect doctor" perfect. He built app after app during residency until he had created 50 different tools. His friends finally told him he should start a company. He had to Google what that even meant.

Avo MD is an AI clinical copilot platform for clinicians. Unlike scattered point solutions that each solve one narrow problem, Avo MD builds shared components that work like Lego blocks across workflows. The platform handles admission, discharge, rounding, and charting by combining patient data, hospital guidelines, and evidence-based protocols. AI makes recommendations, then doctors discuss and decide. The goal is a meaningful doctor-AI relationship rather than just more clicks.

Highlights from PJ Park at Avo MD:

• Built 50 apps during residency before friends told him to start a company. He had to Google what a startup was. His only goal was making his imperfect doctor perfect.
• Partners with content and IP companies like MCG for evidence-based guidelines. Turnaround time is 10 days versus six months to a year for larger companies. AI consumes proprietary guidelines to make better outcomes.
• His new iron triangle for healthcare: patients get better, doctors go home early, hospitals make more money.

His insight about the industry is that AI scribes are the first AI solution clinicians actually love because they were not built by administrators forcing compliance. But scribes only cover patient encounters. Most clinical care involves connecting dots between guidelines, protocols, documentation, and billing without any recording to transcribe. That is where Avo MD focuses.

Healthcare gets better when AI takes care of the technical checklists and lets humans do the thinking.

Live from HLTH 2025 - Watch on YouTube.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Wearables track thousands of data points daily, but most becomes noise instead of signal. Clinical notes document critical patient information, yet we cannot extract meaning at scale. Two founders solving how we turn data into trusted care.

Oren Nissim is the co-founder and CEO of Brook Health. He has type two diabetes himself, which drove him to build remote care for people with chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, CHF, and COPD. 

The company works as part of the health system, extending primary care into the home. His mission is simple: people living with multiple chronic conditions at home need agency. The tools are cheap and covered by insurance. Brook collects thousands of data points daily from every patient. AI compares against baselines and identifies anomalies. 

But here is what matters: a care team analyzes AI-flagged anomalies first, then brings medical decision recommendations to providers instead of raw data summaries.

Tim O'Connell, MD is a practicing radiologist and CEO of emtelligent, a nine-year-old medical language AI company. The company does large-scale data extraction from clinical notes and AI-assisted chart review. 

He started the company in 2016 during the deep learning boom, years before the 2022 LLM explosion. His differentiator is that emtelligent does not use large language models as its core. The company builds custom language models optimized for cost, speed, and accuracy at massive scale. 

His vision for healthcare is better data extraction from unstructured notes so we can use the critical information clinicians spend so much time documenting.

Highlights from Oren Nissim at Brook Health:

• His glow up is about use cases, not widgets. The industry is being forced to prove ROI rather than just adding more time and cost.
• The company uses AI to flag anomalies, then care teams validate and present medical decisions to providers. This creates guardrails so providers can trust what they see.
• His spicy take: watch Medicare Advantage closely over the next few months as some players walk away and others walk in.

Highlights from Tim O'Connell at emtelligent:

• His six-month glow up is moving pilots to implementations. After years of experimentation, 2025 is the year of execution.
• When extracting data, the software shows exactly where terms came from in source documents. This builds trust and allows human reviewers to verify accuracy.
• His industry glow up is better healthcare analytics. We need to extract meaning from the documentation clinicians spend so much time creating.

Healthcare gets better when we turn overwhelming data into trusted insights that providers can act on.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

From testing hundreds of cancer drugs in 10 days to unlocking healthcare stories through audio—conversations with two innovators solving how we personalize treatment and tell those stories live from HLTH 2025.

Jim Foote is the founder of First Ascent Biomedical. He built the company after losing his 17-year-old son to cancer. First Ascent takes a biopsy, enriches cancer cells rapidly, and then tests hundreds of FDA-approved drugs to determine which work against your specific biology. 

The results were published in Nature Medicine. The stakes are high: one in three cancer patients will die in 2025. Cancer is the number one killer of men under 50, number two for women, and number one for children by disease type. Foote believes we have the tools and technology, but doctors need better decision-making infrastructure to use them effectively.

Dan Kendall is the founder of Mission Based Media. He has been in health innovation since before digital health was called digital health. He has been listening to podcasts since 2005. In 2016, he could not find a healthcare podcast that worked, so he built one. 

He now runs Health Podcast Network and Health Unmuted, which he describes as "WebMD for your ears." His insight is that audio unlocks content from its glass jail cell. People consume podcasts in cars, kitchens, and on dog walks. These are places where meaningful connection happens without competing for attention with thousands of other things.

Highlights from Jim Foote at First Ascent Biomedical:

• Combined with genomics, doctors receive a ranked drug list in 10 days with 85% correlation between lab results and body response. Nature Medicine showed 83% patient benefit rate versus standard care.
• Pictures of cancer patients line the lab walls because "every biopsy is somebody's loved one."
• His vision is to scale locally so biopsies are taken, analyzed, and treated in the same community. This closes the financial toxicity gap affecting 95% of pediatric cancer families.

Highlights from Dan Kendall at Mission Based Media:

• Built the first digital health podcast in 2016 when none existed. He has been a podcast listener since 2005 with his first 80-gigabyte iPod.
• His philosophy is that audio unleashes mechanical waves that physically stimulate thought, creating connection when people are ready rather than competing for attention.
• His mission is to amplify voices through audio-forward storytelling that meets audiences where they are rather than demanding they come to you.

Healthcare innovation personalizes treatment and meets people exactly where they are.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

From a bootstrap founder using spreadsheets to track her own cancer treatment to a data infrastructure veteran start-up leader uncovering $10-15 billion in hidden healthcare value—this episode of The Tech Glow Up features conversations with two entrepreneurial CEO’s solving what happens when you center patient empowerment and unlock trapped data live from HLTH 2025.

Jennifer Johnson, CEO and founder of JennJ Health and Fitness, has spent 15 years in healthcare operations, strategy, and oncology data analytics. Then she was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer at 38—a diagnosis that disproportionately affects Black women who are 40% more likely to die from the disease. Advocates for herself, found her own lump, pushed for screening—and survived. 

That diagnosis became her founding insight. She built Fitness Can on a spreadsheet during treatment, combining her data analytics expertise with her lived experience. The app helps breast cancer patients and HRT users track fitness, medications, and appointments with full transparency and agency. 

Brent Dover, CEO of Carta Healthcare, has spent 35 years solving healthcare data problems. He discovered his superpowers early: finding a founder with a great idea at the moment it's taking shape, then scaling it. He's built four companies by knowing exactly where he adds value—the five-to-fifty stage where innovation meets infrastructure. 

His insight: zero-to-five is the bet-it-all visionary; five-to-fifty is the infrastructure builder; fifty-to-five-hundred is the strategist. He's the five-to-fifty guy. Now at Carta, Dover is tackling healthcare's biggest hidden data problem: hospitals spend $10-15 billion annually paying humans to manually abstract data from unstructured clinical notes into quality registries. 

Highlights from Jennifer Johnson at JennJ Health and Fitness:

• 15 years in healthcare operations, strategy, oncology data analytics; diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer at 38; 40% more likely to die due to being a Black woman
• Created Fitness Can on spreadsheet during treatment; secured UCSF grant to launch free; now available in Apple Store
• Spicy take: Women's health is on the rise—clinical trials, studies, innovation, solutions finally moving from afterthought to center stage

Highlights from Brent Dover at Carta Healthcare:

• 35 years in healthcare data companies; discovered his five-to-fifty scaling superpowers; fourth company he's building from inception
• Solving $10-15 billion problem: hospitals paying humans to abstract unstructured clinical data into quality registry forms
• Strategy: AI co-piloted by clinicians validates output, transforming manual tax into structured data for analytics, process improvement, and better patient care

The result: healthcare innovation that centers patient voice and unlocks the data that's been trapped, waiting to improve care.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

More of Nathan C's conversations with 2 healthcare leaders solving what happens when medical devices talk to each other, and what happens when patients have real choice.

Bilal Muhsin, EVP Connected Care at BD, is building infrastructure that moves healthcare beyond disconnected devices. With expertise from his first company where he scaled embedded device providers into solution platforms, Muhsin now oversees pharmacy automation, infusion dispensing, and patient monitoring—all communicating within a unified ecosystem.

BD's new Incada platform does what healthcare infrastructure hasn't done yet: connects products so clinicians see the whole patient picture, not fragmented alarms. His philosophy centers on trust and safety, using physiological models to guide AI rather than black-box algorithms, validating everything before patient contact, and learning offline before reintroducing improvements.

Lathe Bigler, head of FDB Vela, the E-prescribing Network at First DataBank,, tackles the last-mile problem: once doctors prescribe, patients need to actually get their medications. For 15 years, Bigler has been a patient advocate focused on transparency and choice. Vela connects EHR systems to pharmacies through a neutral network, giving patients real agency—they don't just tell doctors "send it to the pharmacy by my house"; they can see pricing, check drug availability, compare options, and choose where to pick up their prescription. 

FDB's database has protected patient safety for years through drug-drug and drug-allergy interaction screening, but Vela extends that mission to the entire patient journey. 

Highlights from Bilal Muhsin at BD:

• Leads BD's Connected Care segment spanning pharmacy automation, drug dispensing, infusion, and patient monitoring—now unified through new Incada platform
• Philosophy: AI guides within physiological models, not black-box algorithms; validate before patient contact; learn offline, reintroduce improvements only after full validation
• Origin: NICU nurse showed him a premature baby monitored by BD sensor, saying "What you do saves these babies' lives"—redirected his entire career toward outcomes-focused healthcare infrastructure

Highlights from Lathe Bigler at FDB Vela:

• Runs First DataBank's e-prescribing network (Vela) connecting EHRs to pharmacies, enabling patient transparency and choice around pricing, drug availability, and pharmacy location
• Patient advocate for 15 years; focused on transparency, choice, and consumer agency in healthcare; using AI to detect fraud, waste, abuse, and anomalies in prescription patterns
• Spicy take: 720+ healthcare data breaches in 2024; advocating for redundant networks as patient safety infrastructure so one breach doesn't shut down the entire prescription system

The result: healthcare infrastructure that works because it listens to data, validates everything, keeps humans in control, and gives patients real agency in their own care.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

From translating medical jargon into human language to using AI to keep healthcare human—conversations with two founders solving opposite sides of the same problem live from HLTH 2025.

Aaron Patzer, CEO of Vital.io, is the founder of Mint.com and former head of product at Intuit. Seven years ago, he started Vital with his brother-in-law Dr. Justin Schrager to guide 7 million patients through urgent care, emergency room, and hospital journeys by translating medical language into terms patients actually understand. His "doctor-to-patient translator" converts medical jargon like "cerebral infarction of the left hemisphere" into "stroke" and transforms lab results into human terms based on each patient's reading level, language, and education. 

Growing to 15 million expected by end of 2026, Vital meets people exactly where they are—available in Spanish, Armenian, Somali, and Haitian Creole—with 80% adoption at children's hospitals and 65% average use in emergency departments.

Michael Oleksiw, founder of Pleio, spent a decade in fashion and tech before his wife's pancreatic cancer diagnosis at age 33 redirected his mission to healthcare. Pleio uses AI not to replace humans, but to inform them—analyzing patient conversations retrospectively to identify emotional peaks and valleys, fear, stigma, and loneliness that prevent medication adherence. 

With humans always in the loop, Pleio's approach focuses on behavioral change triggers and removing barriers that get in the way of patients actually following through with their care. His "tech glow up" is about finding where technology crosses with humanity, keeping the person at the center.

Highlights from Aaron Patzer at Vital.io:

• Founded Mint.com (25M users), sold for $175M; former head of product for Intuit; now growing Vital to guide 7 million patients through hospital experiences
• Built a "doctor-to-patient translator" that adapts medical language to each patient's reading level, education, and language preference in Spanish, Armenian, Somali, Haitian Creole and more
• Achieved 65% average use in emergency departments, 80% use at children's hospitals, and expects 15M patients by end of 2026—about 10% of all US hospital visits

Highlights from Michael Oleksiw at Pleio:

• Wife's pancreatic cancer diagnosis at 33 (3% five-year survival rate at the time) inspired shift from fashion innovation to healthcare; she's thriving 18 years later
• Uses AI retrospectively to analyze patient conversations, identifying emotional barriers like fear, stigma, and loneliness that prevent medication adherence—always with humans in the loop
• Building behavioral models to empower healthcare professionals to work at the clinical level they thrive on, removing the burden of translating complex information while patients stay centered and supported

The result: healthcare communication doesn't just need better tech—it needs tech that remembers why it exists—to keep the person at the center.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Thanks for tuning in to these conversations with two founders changing the future of healthcare live from HLTH 2025.

Zachary Ziegler, co-founder of OpenEvidence, built a platform that reached 40% of practicing clinicians in just two years by centering a simple principle: every answer includes citations to peer-reviewed research. With access to 40 million papers updated daily with 10,000-20,000 new studies, doctors can verify every claim instantly. Growing 30-40% month-over-month and adding 60,000-70,000 clinicians monthly, Ziegler challenges conventional wisdom—EHRs are already a top burnout driver, forced integration isn't the answer, and physicians prefer autonomy over mandates.

Dr. Aditi Joshi, founder of Ardexia, tackles a different crisis: healthcare organizations waste $87 billion annually on contracted technology doctors never use. A former emergency medicine physician who experienced burnout twice, she moved into telemedicine and discovered the core insight—most builders don't understand how physicians actually work. You can't mandate adoption. You can only solve real problems. She's building Ardexia with validation first, burnout prevention as a foundational business strategy, and clinician expertise leading product decisions from day one.

Highlights from Zachary Ziegler at OpenEvidence:

• Started with a Harvard PhD studying language models before ChatGPT; built "ChatGPT for doctors" with complete citation trails to peer-reviewed research
• Reached 40% of practicing clinicians with daily active usage; adding 60,000-70,000 new clinician users monthly (30-40% month-over-month growth)
• Philosophy: "Trust, but verify"—every answer sources from original papers so doctors can verify claims against peer-reviewed research

Highlights from Dr. Aditi Joshi at Ardexia:

• Former emergency medicine physician who discovered during telemedicine work that technology adoption is a people problem, not just a technical problem
• Identified the $87 billion annual cost of unused healthcare technology—five-year contracts continuing whether clinicians ever use the tools
• Building Ardexia with burnout prevention as a foundational business strategy; validation-first approach to understanding specific pain points before scaling

The result: healthcare's AI transformation doesn't happen in the lab—it happens when builders center the people actually using the tools.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.