My two recent podcast guests: Courtney Bragg and Eric Jon Larsen
It has been a fun month on the pod! If you haven’t been tuning in because you’re time constrained or more of a reader than a listener — I took some time this week to recap a few of the discussions I’ve had lately, and share some thoughts of my own.
This month, we had two conversations on the Second Opinion podcast with guests from very distinct corners of healthcare. One, an entrepreneur, with a background in education, is building a company to enroll thousands of primarily lower-income women into Medicaid and other public services that they’re eligible for. That’s Courtney Bragg, the CEO of Fabric Health, a startup that is backed by investors like TMV and Alumni Ventures. I was fascinated to talk to Courtney as the health care sector is bracing itself for Medicaid cuts. Fabric, by the way, is a reference to literally fabric, because Bragg’s company interfaces with patients at the laundromat.
Eric Larsen, my other guest, has made a career of thinking about the future of healthcare, and spends a lot of time advising health system and health plans on how to incorporate AI into their day-to-day operations. As a person who is on a first-name basis with Vinod Khosla and Sam Altman and CEOs at health systems, he bridges the gap between the healthcare and technology sectors better than almost anyone I know, as he’s able to speak both languages fluently. Larsen is also a deep thinker, who rapidly flips between reciting quotes from philosophical and historical texts with intel from the front lines of AI. Dr. Ash Zenooz, a radiologist and health-technology executive, joined the discussion and provided a valuable clinical perspective.
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These may seem like very different topics and guest profiles. We started from very different places in our conversations, and yet we somehow landed in the same subject matters at the end:
The future of healthcare will incorporate AI deeply, automating processes, administration, and diagnosis, but the importance of the face-to-face interactions. I walked away thinking that there’s more role than ever for marrying the scientists and technologists (bolstered by AI) with the artists and philosophers. There’s so much uncertainty right now in what the future will hold, particularly as we read headline after headline about the oncoming wave of job cuts and read articles about the computer science bubble bursting because of AI. It used to be that to ensure a job in an unstable market, smart students have gone into computer science or any other STEM degree that could get them to a more technical role. Now, that’s not even a guarantee, particularly as demand for technical roles already appears to be dropping (whether this is a temporary blip remains to be seen).
So what does that mean for the future of work, particularly in the healthcare industry?
Larsen didn’t sugarcoat any of the changes that he believes are coming in the near future, noting that all the talk of augmentation versus dislocation or job replacement is really “fairy tales” that industries are telling themselves. He also doesn’t believe that there’s one “lump of labor” where if you automate some things, then you’ll see an overall reduction of jobs. Instead, he thinks the nature of how we work will change, both in how it’s structured and the skills required to do the job effectively. Look at medicine, where we still admit people based heavily on quantitative skills. Should we actively seek out a very different type of medical student in the future? Perhaps it’ll be more of the individuals with deep empathy, who have the potential to have the best bedside manner, to work alongside those who are highly proficient scientists working on new treatments and cures. Yes, there’s certainly LLMs that exhibit elements of empathy, with some used in therapy settings. But imagine finding out you have cancer, or you have a relative struggling with addiction. There are truly powerful moments where a human being with lived experience, or a provider who’s treated patients with similar journeys, can truly empathize with what that person is going through.
I’ve also heard a compelling argument that we touched upon that because ChatGPT reflects back the sum of common knowledge today, do we need more people in roles pushing boundaries in research? For instance, doctors who are also scientific researchers and pioneers? In theory, that kind of work could be more important than those doing pattern matching related to common knowledge.
On a more optimistic note, Larsen spoke to long-term benefits where GDP rises and we create a post scarcity society. So perhaps we’ll all just end up working less because we’ll be so augmented by machines. Our future could be that we all work 15 to 20 hours a week, and spend the rest of our lives painting and reading philosophy (one can only hope). But all joking aside, the relationship between labor productivity and leisure time does not appear to be entirely linear. Work weeks got shorter when Henry Ford implemented 8 hour days on his manufacturing lines, since the 1980s in the UK and US, increased productivity does not appear to have results in increased leisure time. Something tells me that our constant need for GDP growth combined with a contracting labor market problems means that we’re not heading into some AI-enabled leisure utopia in the future.
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At the surface, Courtney and Eric should have polar opposite views of where healthcare is going. One is working at the grassroots of healthcare, while the other is involved in private equity deal making. But they didn’t. We concluded in both conversations that there will be a version of healthcare in the future where the most “physical” jobs are the most protected. Larsen believes it’s the jobs that require human presence will be valued by society in the decades to come. Embodied AI may be in our future, but it’s going to be some time before that happens. And in the meantime, who is going to help an elderly, frail person with mobility issues out of the bathtub? Or hand an overwhelmed mother at the laundromat a laundry cart and ask them how their day is going?
If you have a long car ride ahead of you, tune in to both episodes ideally in the following order: