Introducing The Health Assurance Podcast
In the debut episode, Hemant Taneja and Stephen Klasko talk about the future of healthcare—and why collaboration between health and tech executives is essential
Where is healthcare headed? That’s the question that drives the new Health Assurance Podcast, now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast platforms.
In episode 1, entrepreneur and investor Hemant Taneja and health system executive Stephen Klasko, M.D. discuss the promise of the health assurance sector to create great consumer experiences for patients, bend the healthcare cost curve, and bring responsible, equitable change to the healthcare world.
The duo — who’ve collaborated on a number of ventures, including the recent book UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance — say 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic are bringing permanent change to the healthcare world through the mainstreaming of telehealth, virtual care and other services. Taneja, a managing partner at the VC firm General Catalyst, believes healthcare is at an inflection point similar to that of tech when Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. “This is the iPhone moment,” Taneja says of healthcare.
The two also discuss some of the problems with the current healthcare system, which Klasko, CEO of Jefferson Health in Philadelphia, says focuses too much on “sick care.” “For the past 12 years, all our health policy has been — how do we pay for this broken, fragmented, expensive, inequitable, sick-care-driven, hospital-driven, insurance-driven system?” says Klasko. “Not, how do we change it?”
Taneja and Klasko also say that more collaboration like theirs — between people in the healthcare space and people in the tech space — is crucial. As Taneja puts it, “Over the next 20 years, the organization of care online is the biggest opportunity that exists.”
You can listen and subscribe to the podcast here.
