Today's guest is Paul Brient, Chief Product Officer at Athenaheallth, a $17 billion EHR with more than 170,000 clinicians on its network. Paul has spent his entire career getting doctors to actually love the technology they use, from running PatientKeeper for 17 years, to now leading Athena's push to build an AI native EHR.

We start with the origins of the physician friction problem, why doctors adopted robotic surgery overnight but fought the EHR for two decades, and how Meaningful Use turned the highest paid people in the hospital into data entry clerks. From there, Paul walks through the structural misalignment in healthcare software, where the person who builds the product, pays for it, and uses it are three different people, and why Athena's practice level model works differently. We also get into payers, which Paul argues are the most misunderstood players in the system, and how Athena's Moment of Care product brings payer intelligence to the point of care in real time. And finally, the AI native EHR itself, why Paul believes the original EHR was a mistake of metaphor built around a paper chart, and why he thinks this is finally the moment doctors will actually love their software.

How Doctors Became Unit Secretaries | $18B Athenahealth Chief Product Officer Paul Brient

Cardiovascular disease remains the world's leading killer, yet cardiovascular drug development has declined dramatically when compared to other therapeutic areas.

Today, we sit down with Dr. Howard Surks, a cardiologist turned bench scientist turned big pharma leader who left Merck and Sanofi to help build Cardurion Pharmaceuticals from the ground up around a first-in-class heart failure drug. 

In the episode, Howard's discusses journey from studying blood vessel biology at Tufts to running translational medicine programs at two of the world's largest pharma companies: the real tradeoffs between big pharma and biotech, why cardiovascular trials have become so expensive that most companies walked away. We dig into what it actually takes to move a molecule from the lab into patients, and how decades of basic science research became the foundation for Cardurion's PDE9 inhibitor program. 

When Big Pharma Abandoned the Heart | $750m Carduion CSO Dr. Howard Surks

Today's guest, Rachel Werner, is a physician, health economist, and Executive Director of Penn’s Institute of Health Economics whose work explores how healthcare policy can improve care without creating harmful unintended consequences.

In this episode, we discuss why public quality report cards can push providers to avoid high-risk patients. We examine why pay-for-performance often improves the metric being rewarded without meaningfully improving patient outcomes. We also explore the debate over nursing home staffing mandates and the evidence that stronger staffing requirements could save thousands of lives each year. Finally, we discuss why rigorous research does not always translate into policy, and what it takes to build a more evidence-informed healthcare system.

Why Is Good Healthcare Policy So Hard? | UPenn LDI Director Dr. Rachel Werner

Today's guest is Mark Frank is the founder and CEO of SonderMind, one of the largest mental health platforms in the country that helps providers help patients and manage their practices.

In this episode, we unpack why the mental health care system has lacked the basic infrastructure that exists in nearly every other healthcare vertical. Mark walks through the provider side, where therapists are forced to become small business operators just to deliver care, and the patient side, where insurance directories are functionally broken and subjective screening tools like the PHQ-9 leave massive gaps in understanding. We explore how SonderMind is building an integrated system of care that captures what happens between sessions to give therapists better information and patients better outcomes. T

An Operating System for Mental Healthcare | $1B+ SonderMind CEO Mark Frank

Today we speak with Jonathan, co-founder of Paradigm Health, a startup which has raised over $350m+ to is build the infrastructure behind clinical trials in order to make them quicker and more accessible.

Jonathan walks us through his path from a UChicago neuroscience lab to dropping out of Stanford to launch CyApps, one of the earliest precision medicine companies. We dig into why US trial capacity is fundamentally broken — why oncology needs three times the current bandwidth, why studies are moving to China, and why providers (not patients) are the real recruitment bottleneck. Jonathan breaks down Paradigm's playbook across trial design, site selection, LLM-native patient matching, and real-time data collection, and how they "hacked" the cold start problem through aggressive fundraising and acquisitions like Flatiron's clinical research unit. We close on what keeps him up at night: the risk of the US losing its edge in clinical innovation, and the AI wave he believes can help us win it back.

Rewriting the Clinical Trial Paradigm | $500m Paradigm Health Co-Founder Jonathan Hirsch

Today's guest is Jason Rhodes, a partner at Atlas Venture and serial biotech entrepreneur who took Dyne Therapeutics ($2B+) and Epizyme ($5B+) through their IPOs, co-founded Disarm Therapeutics (acquired by Eli Lilly), and spent years on the leadership team at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals helping pioneer RNAi therapeutics.

In this episode, Jason breaks down over three decades of biotech evolution. We trace how pharma went from fully vertically integrated to increasingly dependent on biotech for its pipeline, and why that inversion reshaped the entire industry. Jason introduces what he calls the paradox of plenty, as the barriers to building biotech companies come down and innovation pours in from China, AI, and maturing capital markets, the flood of competition makes it harder than ever to be first or best in class. We get into how Atlas navigates that by building companies from scratch, spending $2 million to test whether the science even replicates before pouring in real capital. It's a wide-ranging conversation on where biotech has been, where it's going, and why the biology is always immutable.

Pharma's Paradox of Plenty in Biotech | Atlas Venture Partner Jason Rhodes

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Atul Gupta, a professor at the Wharton School, about the role of free markets in healthcare, along with the broader tradeoffs between quality and efficiency.

We start by discussing how information asymmetry, third-party payment, and limited competition make it difficult for the “invisible hand” to function in healthcare. Dr. Gupta then walks through his research on hospital readmission penalties, showing how financial incentives can improve care while also creating room for hospitals to game the metrics. We also explore the trade-offs behind hospital privatization and consolidation, including how efforts to make hospitals more efficient or profitable can affect prices, staffing, safety-net access, and patient outcomes. Finally, we examine private equity’s role in healthcare and what better regulation, transparency, and quality-linked incentives could look like in the future.

Why Free Markets Break in Healthcare | Wharton Professor Dr. Atul Gupta

Today's guest is Dr. Richard Carmona, the 17th Surgeon General of the United States, a trauma surgeon, public health leader, former hospital executive, and decorated Army Special Forces medic.

In this episode, we explore how Dr. Carmona’s early life, military service, and medical career shaped his understanding of healthcare as far more than what happens inside a hospital. He discusses building Arizona’s regional trauma system, turning around a public hospital, and why prevention, health literacy, and trust are central to improving outcomes. We also dive into the politicization of public health, from tobacco and vaccines to the growing confusion around scientific institutions today. Dr. Carmona explains why the Surgeon General’s role should be nonpartisan, grounded in science, and focused on helping the public make better health decisions. At its core, this conversation is about what happens when science, politics, and trust collide, and what it will take to rebuild confidence in American healthcare.

The Collapse of Trust in Public Health | U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona

Today’s guest is Dr. Meredith Rosenthal, the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where her work focuses on the behavioral economics and incentives behind value-based care.

In this episode, we discuss why healthcare is filled with tradeoffs, from how doctors are paid to how hospitals are held accountable for quality and outcomes. Dr. Rosenthal breaks down the difference between fee-for-service and value-based payment, and why designing better incentives is much harder than simply rewarding “better care.” We also explore the behavioral economics behind healthcare decision-making, including how payment models can affect providers, patients, equity, and access. Finally, we talk about the future of value-based care, the limits of measuring quality, and whether payment reform can help address America’s healthcare affordability crisis.

The Tradeoffs Behind Value-Based Care | Harvard Professor Dr. Meredith Rosenthal

Today’s guest is Wardah Inam, Founder & CEO of Overjet, who began her career with a PhD at MIT and is bringing that research into healthcare to rethink how dental diagnostics are done.

In this episode, we explore why diagnostics in dentistry have historically been inconsistent and how variation across providers impacts both trust and outcomes. We discuss how turning X-rays into measurable data can shift care from subjective interpretation to more standardized decision-making. We also dive into the operational side of healthcare—how documentation, insurance, and administrative workflows shape what care actually gets delivered. Finally, we look ahead at a future where diagnostics are continuous, transparent, and integrated into broader health, rather than something patients only encounter when something goes wrong.

The Diagnostic Gap in Dentistry | $550m Overjet CEO Dr. Wardah Iman

Discover where healthcare is headed with The Healthcare Theory. Through recurring mini-series, we unpack everything from health policy to life sciences and digital health. Tune in every week for insig

The Healthcare Theory Podcast · Zencastr

The Healthcare Theory Podcast

Discover where healthcare is headed with The Healthcare Theory. Through recurring mini-series, we unpack everything from health policy to life sciences and digital health. Tune in every week for insightful conversations with founders, researchers, and industry experts that are shaping the future of healthcare.