Ways to Disrupt Healthcare

Exploring the biggest opportunities to transform how we deliver, standardize, and scale healthcare

The healthcare industry is ripe for disruption, but not in the ways most people think. While everyone's chasing the next breakthrough drug or AI diagnostic tool, I'm more excited about the fundamental infrastructure problems that, once solved, could unlock massive improvements across the entire system.

Here are the areas that keep me up at night thinking about solutions:

The Power of Standardization

Healthcare has fallen into the trap of believing everything needs to be customized for each provider or health system. I think there's a massive opportunity to flip this script and create standardized solutions that become cheaper through scale and create valuable distribution networks where partner solutions can roll out quickly without expensive implementations.

I see three specific opportunities:

Standardizing Clinical Measurements: There's huge variance in how physicians measure scales like PHQ-9 depression scores or calculate body surface area. Software can handle these calculations better, more passively, and with greater consistency than the current patchwork of manual methods.

Standardizing Healthcare Processes: Companies like Redox (integration), PatientPing (ADT feeds), and CoverMyMeds (prior authorization) succeeded by creating single standards where previously there were countless custom processes. They saved everyone time while building true network effects as more participants joined their platforms.

Standardizing Healthcare Data: Flatiron Health transformed highly valuable but messy unstructured oncology data into structured, standardized formats. Registry companies do similar work for different specialties, and Health Catalyst standardizes hospital data through their warehousing solutions. The opportunities here are endless.

Physician Independence and Hospital Unbundling

How do we make it easier for physicians to build income streams independent of hospitals and potentially launch their own practices? With physician burnout at all-time highs, widespread hatred of existing tools, and excessive hospital consolidation, we need to make the provider landscape more competitive.

Virtual-First Independence: Virtual work makes it easier for physicians to develop side practices and gradually shift hours away from hospital employment. DocSpace, a company I'm involved with, helps physicians build virtual practices from scratch, letting them choose their own tools and workflows while generating new supply of independent physician services.

Enabling Higher Physician Productivity: We need companies that help independent physicians see more patients or earn more per visit. This means handling non-physician work through home monitoring tools and enabling practices to participate in alternative reimbursement models like shared savings plans and collaborative care arrangements. I'd love to see a new tech-enabled management services organization (MSO) tackle this.

Quality-Based Physician Discovery: A physician's ability to go independent depends heavily on patient acquisition, which currently relies more on convenience and relationships than demonstrated quality for specific services. We need better ways to identify and showcase high-performing physicians.

Embedded Patient Acquisition: Patient acquisition remains one of the biggest challenges for independent practice. Embedding physicians where patients already congregate reduces practice overhead and improves patient convenience. We've seen this with VillageMD partnering with Walgreens, but what are the other high-concentration patient locations we haven't tapped?

Patient-to-Patient Support Networks

Using patients to guide and support other patients is massively underutilized as a cost-effective form of engagement. These peer supporters are knowledgeable, consistently present, and naturally empathetic.

Condition-Specific Peer Networks: Building structured peer support programs—think Alcoholics Anonymous but for other chronic conditions—could provide ongoing support that's both more relatable and more scalable than traditional clinical approaches.

Data-Driven Patient Guidance: Companies that use data from similar patients to guide others through their health journeys show real promise. Cancer navigators have demonstrated positive outcomes and better patient experiences. What other conditions could benefit from this model?

Services-as-APIs for Healthcare

Too many healthcare companies still build non-core functions in-house. Creating outsourced, plug-and-play services like CredSimple, TruePill, and Eligible for other common obstacles that digital health startups face represents a huge opportunity.

I'm particularly interested in companies building these plug-in services to enable home health businesses to scale more effectively.

Proactive Diagnostics

Patient-initiated diagnostics are fundamentally changing the physician-patient relationship by arming patients with information and giving them more agency in choosing their care. Combined with improvements in machine learning and sensors, we're seeing diagnoses happen in entirely new settings and contexts.

Most diagnostics companies stop at delivering the diagnostic result. There's a big opportunity to build new workflows around patient diagnostic tools that create a proactive healthcare system where someone reaches out to the patient, rather than waiting for patients to seek care reactively.

Automated and passive diagnostics creates more standardization across the system.

Scalable Audits and Compliance

We're living through a golden age of healthcare fraud that's yet to be fully uncovered. Money flows through the system with virtually zero traceability or understanding of how it's distributed. Most audits require physical presence, rely on ad-hoc spot checks, and don't scale relative to the system's complexity.

Fraud Detection: How can we make audits more scalable and consistent? This isn't just about catching outright fraud, but also identifying waste through better behavioral monitoring. As a thought experiment: what would change if patients wore body cameras as they moved through the health system?

Payment Recovery: Identifying fraud and waste is one thing, but actually collecting owed payments and enforcing collection is another challenge entirely. Are there companies helping with that enforcement process?

I'm definitely not limited to these areas—they just happen to be the ones that get me most excited about healthcare's future. Each represents a chance to solve fundamental infrastructure problems that could unlock improvements across the entire system.

What healthcare problems keep you up at night? I'd love to hear about the opportunities you're seeing that others might be missing.