Relentless Health Value

My guest in this healthcare podcast is Nikhil Krishnan, who is the founder of the Out-Of-Pocket newsletter. I was talking with Nikhil, and we identified—or, more accurately, he identified—five business models of digital health. What makes each model distinct is a few factors. If you weren’t in the healthcare industry, you’d probably expect that I’m going to say that the biggest factor a business model must hinge on must have something to do with patient outcomes or care or something that has something to do with the hopes and lives of patients. Except no. Mostly, our models do not define themselves by attributes of their patients, except on one dimension: who is paying their bills. Who is paying has enormous downstream consequences that I don’t think people outside of healthcare, or even people inside of healthcare, sometimes really appreciate. It’s because of all of the perverse incentives. It’s a tangled web we weave. For example, let’s just say you’re a start-up founder trying to cook up your unique sellin