Why Healthcare Needs Its Own Foundation Models | Ortet Founder & CEO Kyunghyun Cho
One of the world’s leading AI researchers has big plans for healthcare. And Thoreau just committed $500 million to bring that vision to life.
This week, we are the first to sit down with Ortet founder and CEO Kyunghyun Cho to talk about the frontier AI lab for health. After helping shape some of the technologies behind modern AI and selling his last AI startup to Genentech, Kyunghyun is now taking on a much bigger challenge: building a foundation model that can learn across biological, clinical, and operational data to deliver predictably better care.
We cover:
Why healthcare needs its own foundation models, and the “cold start” problem he thinks it can solve
What Ortet plans to do differently from general-purpose AI companies
Why Ortet secured $500 million before it had even really gotten started
What buying AI compute and a lobster roll have in common
How KC’s own experience with cancer shaped his vision for more predictable healthcare
Can AI Finish What The Quality Revolution Started? | Bunkerhill Health CCO Dr. Azita Hamedani
For decades, healthcare's quality movement gave us checklists, forcing functions, and protocols to catch human error before it reached a patient. It worked, to a point. But as medical knowledge and patient complexity keep outpacing what any human system can track, a new question is emerging: can AI pick up where that movement left off?
In this episode, in her first interview since stepping into the role, we talk with Dr. Azita Hamedani, the newly appointed Chief Clinical Officer at Bunkerhill Health, an AI company backed by Sequoia and Khosla Ventures. After nearly her entire career in academic medicine, Azita made the leap to a startup chasing a promise she's been thinking about since medical school.
Anthropic’s Bet on the Future of Healthcare | Sarah Russell, MD
Sarah Russell picked up a phrase at her new job at Anthropic: a "non-regrettable primitive." It's how she describes the kind of infrastructure she thinks Anthropic should be building in healthcare, and it says a lot about how one of the most closely watched companies in health AI is positioning itself.
In this episode, Steve talks with Sarah Russell, healthcare and life sciences lead at Anthropic. This conversation comes as Anthropic heads toward what's shaping up to be one of the most anticipated IPOs in years.
From Early Struggle to Billion+ Exit | SmarterDx Founders Michael Gao & Joshua Geleris
We don't talk enough about how hard it actually is to build a healthcare startup. Behind SmarterDx's story, now one of the biggest health AI exits to date, were 18 months without a single customer, a pivot that seemed to make no product sense, and two co-founders who went back to working as hospitalists just to get by.
In this episode, Steve gets the real story from Dr. Michael Gao and Dr. Joshua Geleris about the challenges they faced and what ultimately unlocked real growth and led to their billion+ acquisition by New Mountain Capital.
Building A Healthcare Unicorn In Three Years | Assort Health Founders Jeff Liu and Jon Wang
They built a $1.2 billion healthcare AI company in under three years, but they say the hardest part of healthcare AI isn't the AI.
This week, Halle sits down with Assort Health co-founders and co-CEOs Jeffery Liu and Jon Wang, whose company reached a $1.2 billion valuation in under three years. They discuss why building great healthcare AI takes far more than good models, how they scaled from 15 employees to nearly 250 in a year, and what they've learned from more than 190 million patient interactions. They also share why voice AI is harder than it looks, how they're thinking about building durable moats in the age of foundation models, and why helping patients navigate the healthcare system may be one of AI's biggest opportunities.
Healthcare’s Oppenheimer Moment | Eric Larsen
Back by popular demand, 3x Heart of Healthcare guest Eric Larsen joins Steve to answer listener questions on healthcare's AI revolution. Drawing on the ideas behind his latest essay, Healthcare's Oppenheimer Moment, Eric argues that healthcare may be approaching a once-in-a-generation inflection point, and discusses what leaders need to understand before it's too late.
What Healthcare Can Learn From Waymo | Qualified Health CEO Dr. Justin Norden
Autonomous vehicles may be the closest real-world example of AI operating in life-and-death situations at scale. Justin Norden believes healthcare has a lot to learn from how that industry approached safety, testing, adoption, and trust.
This week, Michael and Halle sit down with the founder and CEO of Qualified Health, fresh off the company’s $125 million Series B, to discuss why healthcare organizations need to think differently about deploying AI. Justin shares how his experience at Stanford, Apple, Waymo, and in healthcare investing shaped his view that health systems need AI infrastructure, governance, and workforce buy-in, not just another point solution.
How AI Will Finally Make Healthcare Deflationary
AI in healthcare may be entering a new chapter, one where the biggest question is no longer whether the technology works, but who is willing to deploy it, measure it, and take responsibility for the risk.
This week, Steve sits down again with Eric Larsen to revisit his predictions from last year’s Webby-winning episode on generative AI in healthcare. Eric argues that the first wave of AI has been inflationary, reinforcing the old payer-provider payment model, but that the next wave could be deflationary as automation moves into revenue cycle, administrative work, clinical reasoning, and drug development. They discuss why incumbents still have a narrow window to co-develop the future, why clinical AI may move faster outside the US, and why liability may become the deciding factor in who wins.
What It Takes To Scale Care With AI | Akido Labs CEO Prashant Samant
Medicaid reimbursements are shrinking, providers are pulling back, and vulnerable populations are losing access to care. Akido Labs is betting that AI can expand care capacity fast enough to reverse that trend.
This week, Halle sits down with Prashant Samant, co-founder and CEO of Akido Labs, to discuss what it actually takes to scale care with AI. They explore why Akido built a full-stack healthcare company, how its AI operates inside real clinical workflows, and why the hardest patients are the best place to test whether this model works.
Is ChatGPT Now The World's Largest Health App? | OpenAI VP of Health, Nate Gross
Forty million people use ChatGPT for health-related questions every day, making it one of the most widely used tools for health information in the world. So what is their team doing to maximize impact and minimize harm?
In this full circle episode, Halle Tecco sits down with her Rock Health co-founder Nate Gross, who also co-founded Doximity (DOCS) and is now VP of Health at OpenAI. They discuss the astonishing speed of AI progress, how models are trained for safety and accuracy, and what this technological evolution means for every part of the healthcare system.
Precision Medicine Is (Almost) Here | Tempus AI CEO Eric Lefkosky
When Eric Lefkofsky’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, it exposed how little technology and data were shaping cancer care, pushing the serial entrepreneur to build a different model.
Lefkofsky is the founder and CEO of Tempus, now a $10B publicy traded health tech company, and previously founded Groupon. At Tempus, he’s building a tech-first company applying multimodal data and AI to make diagnostics smarter and treatment decisions more tailored, starting in oncology and expanding across disease areas.
Is Healthcare the Ultimate Test for AI? | Ankit Jain
This week, Steve sits down with Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Infinitus Systems, to talk about why voice-based AI has become one of the most rapidly adopted tools in healthcare operations, what’s actually working in the field, and where the hype still outpaces reality. Ankit shares six years of lessons from building AI agents that handle 35-minute medical calls end to end, plus his predictions on what 2026 and 2027 will really look like as enterprises attempt to build their own agents.
Soul-Driven Healthcare Investing | General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja
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.
How a Small Team Built the Fastest-Growing Clinician App Ever | OpenEvidence Co-founder Zack Ziegler
On the heels of raising $210 million at a $3.5 billion valuation, OpenEvidence is the fastest-growing physician app in history, now reaching over 40% of U.S. physicians and powers 17 million monthly clinical queries.
UpToDate’s AI Glow Up | Wolters Kluwer Health VP BD & Strategy Dr. Holly Urban
Over 3 million clinicians around the world depend on UpToDate to guide patient care, and now the gold standard in clinical decision support is integrating generative AI. But in a world where AI models often hallucinate, how do you build something that doctors can actually trust?
Inside the Rise of AI Agents | Sierra Co-founder Clay Bavor
Most people spend over 30 hours a year dealing with customer service—on hold, repeating account numbers, and navigating endless phone trees. But what if AI could fix that without losing the human touch?
The Reason Hospital Software Fails | Commure CEO Tanay Tandon
Hospitals are under immense pressure: burned-out clinicians, outdated systems, and rising costs have made delivering care harder than ever.
This Founder Just Raised $243M to Free Doctors from Their Screens | Ambience Co-founder & CEO Mike Ng
Fresh off a $240 million fundraise from Oak HC/FT and A16Z, Ambience Healthcare is on a mission to kill medical billing — and build “Iron Man suits for doctors.”
What’s Stopping AI from Taking Over Hospitals | Coalition of Health AI CEO Dr. Brian Anderson
More than a thousand AI medical devices have FDA clearance, yet fewer than two percent of radiologists actually use them.
Do We Really Need Healthcare Superintelligence? | Color Co-founder & CEO Othman Laraki
Most AI in healthcare promises superintelligence—but what if that’s the wrong goal entirely?