Traditional electronic health records often feel like a digital burden rather than a helpful tool. Paul Brient, Chief Product Officer at athenahealth, joins the show to discuss how they are transforming the industry by building an AI-native EHR designed specifically for the modern ambulatory setting.
Paul shares the evolution of athenahealth from an OBGYN startup to a multi-billion dollar platform supporting 170,000 providers. We explore how ambient dictation is moving beyond simple transcription to automate clinical orders and significantly reduce clinician burnout. By leveraging data-driven insights, athenahealth is helping independent practices remain competitive through streamlined revenue cycle management and integrated patient engagement tools.
If you are a healthcare leader or clinician looking to reclaim your "pajama time" and understand the future of clinical documentation, this episode is for you. Learn how to navigate the AI hype cycle and implement technology that offers real, incremental value to your daily workflow.
Episode Resources
Introducing HealthTech Remedy and the Hosts
Dr. Trevor Royce: Welcome back to HealthTech Remedy, the podcast where three physician leaders unpack what's actually working in health technology. I'm Trevor Royce, radiation oncologist with a background in AI diagnostics and real-world evidence.
Dr. Tim Showalter: And I'm Tim Showalter, radiation oncologist, former medtech entrepreneur, and currently working at the intersection of AI, clinical workflow, and health system adoption. Missing in action today is Paul Gerrard. We will have to do our best without his insights on reimbursement policy, market access, and the economics of AI enabled healthcare. So Trevor and I will be a little bit on the struggle bus, but I think we've learned enough from Paul over the years to provide some perspective.
Dr. Trevor Royce: I think we'll have Paul when we do the interview with Paul Brient, Executive Vice President of athenahealth for the interview session. So that'll be good to have Paul's insights there.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Perfect.
The History and Market Presence of athenahealth
Dr. Trevor Royce: So today we're going to chat about athenahealth, obviously, and this is in the health technology world, probably one of the more historically renowned and famous and innovative companies in health technology across the board. They've been around since the mid 90s when they were founded. That was in the world of paper charts. They really have done a lot to advance technology and healthcare, particularly in the EHR and applications for the EHR.
Dr. Tim Showalter: It seems like they've carved out an interesting space in the ambulatory setting, whereas I think the other behemoth obviously is more focused on the hospital setting. I think it's really interesting recently how athenahealth has really carved out a role at the intersection of documentation and billing, as well as patient engagement and using AI to power some new performance for their products. It's all inside a cloud-based platform. I think their adoption is pretty remarkable. For myself as a clinician who practices at a large academic medical center, it's not something that I knew about until relatively recently.
Dr. Trevor Royce: It's pretty cool to see the history arc of a company like this, where they came on the scene in the 90s, pre-EHR, and then have gone through this story where they went public and became private. They started in OBGYN and now there's so much more than that. It's just cool to see how companies can adopt and thrive. They are these sort of living entities over time.
Dr. Tim Showalter: As you pointed out, they've been around for a while. They were traded on NASDAQ for years under ATHN, and then they were taken private by Veritas Capital. That deal was reported as having maybe a value of almost six billion dollars. Then there was another acquisition in 2022 by Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman for $17 billion. So obviously, this is a major player in this space, and their valuation is obviously supported by a broad level of uptake.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Excited to have Executive Vice President Paul Brient, who's the Chief Product and Operations Officer. He's been at athenahealth for a long time, so we'll hear more about how they're adjusting in this world of AI. I think they're well positioned for that given their focus on the electronic health record and their history there, but also in a world where the EHR is so much more than just documentation. You're using things like ambient dictation, revenue cycle management, and the like.
Dr. Tim Showalter: If you're not familiar with athenahealth, maybe you're like me and you practice at just a large hospital-based practice. But it's important to know that it's one of the largest ambulatory EHR vendors in the entire country, roughly 7% market share. That's real numbers trailing behind only Epic and eClinicalWorks and outpatient care. They're real bonafide and it's not just the share of the market they have. It's really the way it's designed as well. It's a single cloud-based network. They've got over 140,000 ambulatory providers. They're in all 50 states and over 120 specialties are represented.
Product Capabilities: athenaOne and Revenue Cycle Management
Dr. Trevor Royce: They're processing over 300 million claims annually. Their flagship product, athenaOne, frames this all-in-one software platform. It's got the EHR, which I think is probably the backbone of all this, but then you can have practice management on top of that, the medical billing side of that, dealing with claims denials, prior authorization, and revenue cycle management. These are all topics that we've talked about on HealthTech Remedy and often about products that focus on specific ones of those verticals. This is an all-in-one platform that they highlight.
Dr. Tim Showalter: It's actually a management of billing that is built into the system. I've seen on their reports that they've got metrics about the clean claim rate. They're obviously working to verify claims submitted against the documentation. They've reported a lower than average median denial rate for claims, showing that using that platform to embed some intelligence into the system provides some benefits.
Dr. Trevor Royce: I think they're a good example of what we've talked a lot about on the show where you have your product and often that product is fundamentally processing data in some way, serving as a tool for documentation for the electronic health record. But then the data itself that flows through this system that they've built becomes an asset. They can use that data for all sorts of interesting use cases.
Dr. Tim Showalter: And I think when it's integrated, if you're thinking about the workflows and what's going into your documentation, it's obviously really important to have it all integrated so that you have a sense of if you provided a service, have you appropriately documented it? And can you bill the appropriate level against that? I think there's some real advantages to having the end to end flows built in.
Addressing Clinician Burnout with AI and Partnerships
Dr. Trevor Royce: Ambient dictation is a huge topic for providers. They're focused on ambulatory care clinics and there's a ton of documentation in that. There's a lot of burnout related to that documentation. Unsurprisingly they have their product Ambient Notes, which is basically an ambient dictation service to reduce the documentation burden and that idea of pajama time which we've talked about a couple times.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Back to pajama time.
Dr. Trevor Royce: The more depressing concepts in healthcare: the idea of doing your notes when the kids are in bed at 9 p.m. at night so you can be ready for your next clinic day.
Dr. Tim Showalter: The other thing that's nice to see is this platform or open ecosystem approach that they've adopted. It's one thing to make your own ambient solution, like they have their Ambient Notes, but also being aware that health systems will make various choices and may have different care settings where they're implementing tools. They've also partnered with others, including Microsoft, to offer DAX Copilot inside the workflow. They're obviously responding to providers and practices' desire to have a choice rather than locking them into a single all-encompassing contract.
The Future Strategy of athenahealth
Dr. Trevor Royce: One way to think about athenahealth is analogous to Epic. Epic has been primarily anchored in academic medical centers, at least to start, in complex care locations, whereas athenahealth has been on the ambulatory side by and large. You could think of them as an Epic for ambulatory care, given their scale and their history. It'll be really interesting how they can empower these ambulatory sites in their world of consolidation, where practices are getting gobbled up left and right.
Dr. Tim Showalter: They've obviously done a lot of work over the past few years as technology has really picked up steam and is moving so quickly in the era of AI. Ambient Notes is one example, but I think they've gone a little bit further. The other question is: are they going to take even more market share in the ambulatory space? I'm also wondering, what's the long term player? We talked about their corporate journey and they recently had the transaction in 2022. I am curious to know what's next for them in terms of a company. Is there another IPO in the future? Is there some sort of massive acquisition with an AI player or a big tech company? They're poised for that, right? They have the cloud-based infrastructure. That'll be something interesting to look out for over the next couple of years. For listeners who have been bored by Trevor and I without Paul, just be aware that after the theme music, we're going to have two Pauls. We'll have our guest as well as our co-host, Paul Gerrard.
Dr. Trevor Royce: The only thing better than one Paul is two Pauls.
Interview with Paul Brient, Chief Product and Operations Officer
Dr. Tim Showalter: Today we are delighted to welcome Paul Brient, Chief Product and Operations Officer at athenahealth. Paul has a long career in health technology and has been at the forefront of healthcare IT innovation. We're excited to learn more about his career and what athenahealth is up to. Paul, welcome to HealthTech Remedy, we're thrilled to have you.
Paul Brient: Excellent, it's great to be here.
Dr. Tim Showalter: I wanted to go back to the beginning. I've read that you had a very early start in health technology, even before you were officially an adult. Can you take us back in the time machine to understand a little bit about how you got your start in terms of innovating within healthcare?
Paul Brient: I had an experience that most people do not have in healthcare IT. When I was early in my high school career, my father, who was a general surgeon, decided to leave academic practice and go out into private practice on his own. I had the formative experience of trying to help my father set up an independent healthcare practice. Of course, at least at the time, no one is taught how to run a practice when they go to med school. I can remember sitting with the CPT codebook on my lap and a HCFA-1500 claim form that we were filling out with a typewriter to try to figure out how to get paid for the surgery he had just done. That translated into a desire to get an Apple IIe computer to, in full transparency, mostly play video games. Even back then, one wanted to play video games as a high schooler. But it morphed into me writing some software to fill out those claims, which then morphed into writing an entire practice management system, an appointment scheduling system, and becoming the first vendor in the state of Florida to submit an electronic claim when those things were introduced. I built a nice little business servicing physicians in the greater North Florida area before I went to college. I took some time off after high school before going to college and just learned a ton about what it was like to be an independent provider. The biggest practice I had was seven GI physicians at Digestive Disease Associates in Gainesville. I learned a ton about the business of medicine and the challenges that people faced getting paid. These were the good old days as people refer to them now, but at the time, it didn't feel so good because managed care was just coming to the forefront. The fun coda to that is that I had physicians using that software well after I had gone through business school and I had my first couple of kids. When the second kid arrived, I had to call them and tell them that I was no longer going to support their Apple IIe computers. It was like the year 2002. It is also a testament to how wed people can be to their old technology.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's remarkable. Before we move on to the rest of your career, I'd love to hear more about what you did after high school in terms of your educational journey and what that looked like.
Paul Brient: I finally pried myself away from the business. I went up to Princeton to study computer science and then worked at the Boston Consulting Group in New York for a couple of years, mostly in their health tech practice. I then went to Harvard Business School and went back to BCG briefly. Then I couldn't resist and had to leave and join a healthcare IT company that had just gone public. I dove right back into the space and was there for quite a while. We sold the company to HBOC and they sold to McKesson. I ran all the payer businesses for McKesson, making my previous clients hate me because they're like, "How are you working for those evil payers?" I learned actually that payers weren't so evil; they were just playing a different game. Then I joined a startup called PatientKeeper and focused on automating physician workflow in hospitals and spent 17 years doing that before selling it to HCA and working at HCA for five years before athenahealth. It's been a healthcare IT journey for sure.
Shifting Focus to Clinical Behavioral Change
Dr. Tim Showalter: It sounds like in the earliest days, your business model was serving practices. I think one of the things that we've seen in health technology is that technology can not just submit claims and make sure that your father gets paid for the surgery that he performs, but also can change how physicians practice and empower physicians to provide better care. When did you first notice that trend towards actually being part of the healthcare service and improving the care that patients receive?
Paul Brient: That really came in my experience as a PatientKeeper. It was a startup company when I joined, focused on using the Palm Pilot to help providers collect charges as they round. We morphed it into a complete physician experience, an overlay onto an EMR in the hospitals before Meaningful Use and after Meaningful Use. What we found when you talk to providers is providers obviously have lots of training and all kinds of good stuff, but especially in the hospital setting, they are overburdened. A hospitalist covering the night shift has got 40 or 50 patients. What we found was that rather than the classic CDS pop-up—decision support popping up in your face where all you want to do is press escape—that wasn't a way to change behavior. What we found is making the pathway that you wanted to do easy in the software was really a great way to do it. It wasn't like, "Hey, this is CDS and you get the shock on the screen for not doing the thing that the computer thinks you should do," which you probably knew that already and didn't do it for a good reason. Rather, we put the pathways up on the screen in a passive way, through order sets, through suggestions, and single clicks. We made the things that you might otherwise forget just easy. It becomes a helpful assistant rather than a shock and awe approach that the early CDS systems have.
Supporting Independent Practices at athenahealth
Dr. Paul Gerrard: You've done all these great things in numerous different places. What drew you to athenahealth? What opportunity did you see there that made you say, based on all my past experience, this is the next place I want to go?
Paul Brient: I sold my company to HCA and I was there five years. HCA is an incredible company with an incredible culture. HCA is the largest for-profit healthcare system in the country. For-profit has different feelings associated with that in terms of healthcare, but it is an incredibly well-run company with an incredible culture. They have 200 or so hospitals across the country, a whole bunch of ambulatory centers and outpatient practices. I had the opportunity to work with their senior leadership. When I sold the company to them, they said, "Hey, we really want you to come spend the rest of your career here at HCA," and that's not usually what you do when you sell a company; you tend to exit as a CEO. I was very happy there and was contemplating going to run a hospital because that's the thing you do with that company. I got a call from Bob Segert, who had just won the bid for athenahealth, taking athenahealth private. There were probably only one or two companies that I would have even taken a phone call from, and athenahealth is one. It so happens that Bob Segert was a business school classmate as well. I would love the opportunity to work with him and I have loved the opportunity to work with him. What an incredible project. athenahealth is such an incredibly well-respected company. He had just grown and made a couple of strategic decisions at the time that weren't ideal and just kind of got themselves stuck a little bit. The idea on taking the company private was to unstuck and to really fulfill the mission of being a partner to independent ambulatory practices. That just tugged at my roots. When I made the decision, I told my mom that I was going to join athenahealth. She's like, "Oh, that's like what you did in high school." I'm like, "It is, it's just for 160,000 providers instead of 150 providers." But it is the same idea. Certainly a lot of the things that I learned back then applied to my job today.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: You talk about this need to get unstuck. When you joined athenahealth, what was your vision of what athenahealth would do or how things would evolve in the foreseeable future?
Paul Brient: I think the wonderful thing about athenahealth is our scope and our focus on the ambulatory provider. I tell people that our job is to keep independent practices independent. There's so much consolidation going on. So many physicians are saying, "I can't have my independent practice anymore. It's too complicated. I have to go join a health system." Coming from a health system, those physicians aren't always the happiest ever. You give up a lot of autonomy and you're told how to work. In my view, coming from my background, there's a real opportunity to have independent providers who care for the patients in the way they want to care for them and can build a practice the way they want to build it. Those practices are lovely to be a patient of. We're really all about how do we help those practices be independent and focus on patient care and not have to focus on all of the other administrivia that the healthcare system throws at them.
Corporate Evolution and Specialized R&D
Dr. Trevor Royce: Maybe in a very quick version, tell us a little bit about athenahealth and then how it came to be. More importantly, where it is today. We'll want to focus on the AI side and the product side of the present day, but I want our listeners to appreciate the incredible role that athenahealth has had in health technology over the last 20 years.
Paul Brient: athenahealth's got an incredible history. First of all, something that not everyone appreciates is athenahealth was founded as an OBGYN practice. The founder's original vision was to create a network of OBGYN clinics. What they found, which almost everyone who tries to start a practice finds, is it's really hard to get paid. They decided to build a bunch of software to figure out how they would get their practice paid. They built what is now the athena Collector System and realized that that was actually much more valuable than being a bunch of OBGYN clinics. They did a massive pivot, moved from California to Boston and founded athenahealth, the software company. They marketed essentially what you'd call a practice management system with embedded revenue cycle services. That was even today one of the big differentiators: it's not just software. They continue to do work on behalf of customers. Not only are we going to get the software to do all kinds of cool ways of getting paid with a really powerful rules engine, but also a set of services where we, athenahealth, are doing a bunch of the work for our customers. That's really what propelled the company to get past escape velocity, make money, and do all things that companies do. Then with Meaningful Use, the company added an EMR to the equation very quickly, as most people did. That was another big shot in the arm for growth. Then they made a decision which we've reversed, so I can say in hindsight not the best decision, to try to go into the hospital space and build a hospital product. That proved to do two things. One is it's very hard to build a hospital product. The second thing is that it siphoned resources away from the core ambulatory product. The core customers were suffering. That's kind of the time when our CEO, Jonathan Bush, left the company. Jeff Immelt took over and the company is put up for sale. Bob Segert and Veritas won the bid and then I joined. It was not a great decision to go into the hospital space and the way it was executed wasn't serving the core customer as well.
The Transition to an AI-Native EHR
Dr. Trevor Royce: I really appreciate that. That's such important context for how the healthcare industry has evolved. Now on the present day, serving over 170,000 clinicians with this cloud-based platform, tell us a little bit about what the product looks like today, particularly in this world of AI.
Paul Brient: It's been an incredible journey. I've been in athenahealth for six years. We just actually crossed 170,000 providers, which is a fun milestone to celebrate. We've focused all of our R&D on the ambulatory product and made it much more tailorable. The original athenahealth EMR was kind of a one-size-fits-all EMR. We have put a whole bunch of configuration in it and built it out for specific specialties. It works great for orthopedists or FQHC or ACOs. We're really super excited about that. With this new generation of AI, we can solve a whole bunch of problems that we just couldn't solve before. That's the super exciting part. I am more excited about the potential of technology today than I have been in my entire career. We've been going back through the whole stack for the past two years and reassessing all the problems that we've solved. The problems haven't changed, but we now have this new tool or a set of tools that we can use to solve problems that weren't solvable before. Our terminology for it is the AI-native EHR, which is a little bit of a marketing buzzword. But basically, it means we're going to rebuild athenahealth as if we'd built it from scratch today with AI. That's all coming out over the next six months. It just takes the EMR and turns it into this incredibly useful medical assistant that we all envisioned it would be when we conceived of EMRs. I think 1967 was the very first EMR out there. We conceived of this idea that a computer could be really helpful to physicians. I think we've been around enough to know that not every physician views their EMR as a super helpful companion. But I think over the next two or three years, at least in the athenahealth space, they certainly will.
Ambient Notes and Automating Encounter Tasks
Dr. Trevor Royce: In terms of specific use cases, another really hot area is ambient dictation and how that can make clinic workflows better and decrease the documentation burden. Have you guys been working on that area at all?
Paul Brient: We released a product we call Ambient Notes. It allows providers to go into the exam room, put down their phone, press a button, and have the computer listen to the patient-provider interaction. At the end of that, it generates a note. The cool thing is that we are taking that to the logical next step. After we generate the note, we'll list all the diagnoses that you might have talked about during that conversation and go back into the medical record and find any diagnoses that the patient had that you might not have talked about that should be part of the encounter. If you've suggested a medication, it will tee up the medication orders and any other orders or referrals that you might have discussed and have those all available. Now, we're not going to automatically order those things. You're going to get a screen and you're going to say, "Yes, yes, yes." In the case of medication, you might need to add some additional information to make a fully qualified SIG. The vision is we want to have the providers go in, see the patient, close the encounter and be done. There's so much burden on providers and so much need to keep up with the schedule that sometimes you see providers who wait until the evening to do all their notes or wait till the weekends. That has all sorts of not good consequences, both for the provider and for the practice. We think with ambient dictation, coupled with the AI interpretation of the transcript and some other technology we're working on, we can make it so that almost every encounter is closed on the same day and ideally before you see the next patient.
Clinician Trust and Viral Adoption Models
Dr. Paul Gerrard: We see a lot happening with AI hype cycles. I've heard it compared a little bit to the 90s dot-com boom. We certainly are seeing AI hype cycles in healthcare. When you look into healthcare and some of the skepticism regarding AI-powered tools, what do you think are the biggest barriers? How can you get clinicians to start to trust AI?
Paul Brient: The analogy of the dot-com era is actually a very good one, especially in the capital markets side. In the dot-com era, there were gazillions of companies, and there are a few today that have survived. Amazon made it through just fine and would have been a great investment, and there's many more that would not. We're seeing a similar thing with dot-AI companies. They're not all going to make it. However, just like the dot-com era, this is actually a real technology that's going to make a real difference. If you're a physician that used athenahealth, this is not a mandate thing, which is actually kind of cool. This is a go at your own pace kind of thing. This is a technology that used well can really make a big difference to your practice and your life. Our approach is very much go at your own pace. The best kind of adoption push is a peer. The way we built PatientKeeper was very much peer-driven. HCA became a customer of PatientKeeper because the doctors who use PatientKeeper at another hospital showed up at an HCA hospital and said, "Hey, I want this." We find there are doctors out there that are very excited about AI and using it. The great thing about athenahealth is that we're a SaaS-based system, so it's available to everybody. You don't have to do any work to get this stuff; we just put it in there. You do need to decide to use it. Our vision is very much about finding a few doctors in a practice who start using it, they start to tell their friends, and it becomes more of a viral thing as opposed to "thou shalt use this." We're building all of our AI in a way that it can be used incrementally when people are ready. It's not a big binary switch. There are going to be little things in the software that you will not know are AI, even though we'll put a little AI tag by them. One silly but powerful example is that we get all this data from HIEs and other systems. They come with very ambiguous titles like "discharge summary." If you click on it, you can read it and know that it's from Mass General on June 1st. But you have to click on it to know that. We're using AI to read those things and make the title much more descriptive, like "Discharge from Mass General on June 1st for Colitis." That can make the software much more delightful to use even though you don't go, "Oh my god, AI just changed my life." Now I've got a list of things the way I expected them to be. There's a bunch of things like that throughout the software. The big things like using a new AI-driven encounter and using ambient and letting it listen—that's a big change. You really will start to talk to your patients differently. We're still learning about that. If AI is listening and trying to build your note, there are things that you might say to a patient that you wouldn't have otherwise said. Or a feature that we're excited to release soon: afterwards, you can just put it in dictation mode and say, "I'm going to tell you a bunch of things that I want in my note." That's going to take some time and it's not for everybody. It's also not for every encounter. Some encounters you don't want to go through the rigmarole of having AI listening. If it's a wound check post-op, you look at the wound, it's fine, you talk to the patient for a while and move on. You don't need that complex setup process. It is bringing a tool to providers that's going to make a big difference and letting them adopt it at the pace that makes sense for them.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: You just mentioned this idea that AI is not optimal in every situation. Are you noticing particular specialties or practice types where adoption may be faster or slower?
Paul Brient: I'm a little surprised in that it seems to be more about the provider than the specialty at this point. Certainly the more complex a visit is, the better AI is. Almost every provider has certain encounters that are more complicated, like working up a new patient, an annual wellness visit, or evaluating someone for surgery. Those are longer visits where it's really helpful to have AI listen to it all and capture it all. Then there are shorter visits. We don't see 100% adoption on an encounter basis, even for the providers that are using it all the time, because it doesn't make sense every time. We're totally supportive of that. It really so far appears to be fairly ubiquitous across our specialties. We're seeing pretty good adoption throughout the specialties we serve, and we serve just about every specialty. It's a very neat and kind of groundbreaking technology. Again, if you go back to the Wall Street thing, Wall Street's way overhyped on this stuff. There are hundreds of companies doing this because it's such a good idea and we don't need hundreds. We need a handful or two.
Measuring Success: Pajama Time and Data Geeks
Dr. Trevor Royce: An amazing capability of you all is the 170,000 clinicians you're reaching. Can you reflect a little bit on how you measure the success of these innovations? How do you measure the impact on the patient level?
Paul Brient: We are incredible data geeks. Because we have a SaaS system, there's only one athenaOne system for everybody. We can gather all the stats about how everyone is using it, all the outcomes, all the good stuff. For the AI stuff, we look a lot at what we call pajama time. We know when you're working and when you're not seeing patients after hours. We can track and see how much time providers are spending. We know how many encounters are closed on the same day and how many are closed at roughly the same time as the appointment. We look at those things and then we can correlate that. A provider adopts Ambient Notes on June 1st, and we look across the next month or two and see how they're doing on those metrics. The answer is they're doing a lot better. You can see the same day encounter close rate go up. You can see the pajama time go down and it's really great. We learn from that and how to optimize the software. I love to go out and spend time with our providers and talk to them about the analytics. If we've observed that on Wednesdays you're not using Ambient Notes, we ask why. You learn stuff; maybe it's because it makes sense or maybe it's because the software is doing some weird thing. We work to optimize it.
Driving Systematic Change in Healthcare
Dr. Tim Showalter: It's been fascinating to hear about the work you're up to. I'd like to transition to a little bit of your thoughts about career and making an impact within health technology. Based on all of your experience starting back from even before college, what have you learned about driving change in healthcare?
Paul Brient: Wow, that is a very interesting question. Until recently, perhaps, but certainly historically, change is hard. The healthcare system works in ways that do not make intuitive sense to people that are outside of healthcare. I have a speech that I give people when they're taking their first healthcare job. The rest of the economy works very differently because my view of root cause is that the consumer picks the product, pays for the product, and gets the benefits of the product everywhere else. In healthcare, we've separated those roles across three different entities. It creates all kinds of weirdness. You come into healthcare and you say, "I don't understand why it isn't better." People want to change it overnight. What you really have to do is you have to go back to the "why is it like this?" It's not full of a bunch of numbskulls or Luddites. It's a very complicated system that has a bunch of different economic rules and different benefit rules than the rest of the economy. You can't take "rest of economy" solutions and apply them directly to healthcare to drive change. You have to really understand why the system is the way it is and work within that concept to drive change. It's just hard. We keep seeing the percentage of our GDP applied to healthcare go up and up to levels that when we first started looking at it in the 90s, we said it could never be above 16%. Now it's like 18 something. It continues to go up. One of the things that I think is frustrating about the U.S. healthcare system is that we have both the best and worst healthcare in the world simultaneously. Personally, we'd love to see if we can bring that "worst" up so that everyone in the U.S. could benefit from our wonderful healthcare system.
Conclusion and Outro
Dr. Trevor Royce: Paul, we really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. It's been an amazing conversation.
Paul Brient: Really enjoyed it. Thank you all. Appreciate it.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Well, that's it for this episode of HealthTech Remedy. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and share the show. It really helps support our mission. Looking forward to seeing you all next time.
