Healthcare is one of the biggest line items on any employer’s budget, yet most business leaders get almost no training in how to manage it. Dr. Adam Brown sits down with his former attending, Dr. Kristi Artz, to talk about the white paper they just co-authored, Teaching the Business of Healthspan with Lifestyle Medicine.

Dr. Artz is board-certified in emergency medicine and lifestyle medicine and serves on the board of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. She and Adam make the case that healthcare costs aren’t just an HR problem. They’re a strategic risk that tomorrow’s leaders should learn to manage in business school.

Dr. Lara Zibners brings her own questions (and a hypothetical 55-year-old with a WHOOP), and the three get into:

• The growing gap between healthspan and lifespan, and why Americans now spend more than a decade in poor health
• How lifestyle medicine differs from functional medicine, longevity clinics, and wellness influencers
• Clinical evidence that intensive lifestyle programs can put type 2 diabetes into remission
• Why employer wellness programs often fall short, and what “dosing” lifestyle intervention actually means
• The $18,500 per employee that employers spend on health coverage every year

Read the white paper: https://www.abighealth.com/white-papers/healthspan

Every clinician has opened a new tool at work and wondered who picked it. Michelle Higginson co-founded Inlightened to get that question asked before the product ships. Her platform connects vetted healthcare professionals with the startups, pharma companies, and innovators who need their input, and pays them for it.

Michelle came to healthcare from Boston startups and tech, then led service line marketing for the transplant and heart centers at Boston Children’s Hospital. She tells Dr. Adam Brown and Dr. Lara Zibners why founders build too much before talking to the people who will use the product.

They also talk about why so many women physicians say they have no consulting experience and then describe years of it, unpaid. Michelle explains what it was like to recruit doctors in 2020, how outside work gives burned-out clinicians another option, and why AI-driven fraud has made vetting a bigger part of her job. She also describes the clinicians she recruits to help train AI models, and the mistake she sees founders make most often.

Clinicians who want to join the network can sign up at getinlightened.com.

Why does almost nobody talk about how hard it can be to get pregnant?

Dr. Lara Zibners and Dr. Adam Brown are joined by Audrey Ward, a former Sunday Times writer and editor and the author of The Waiting Room: Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope on the Path to Parenthood. Audrey went through recurrent miscarriage and failed rounds of IVF before she had her two sons. For the book, she gathered stories from people aged 28 to 68 who took every possible route: IVF, egg donation, surrogacy, adoption, and choosing a life without children.

In this episode:

• Why men rarely talk about infertility, even though a large share of fertility problems start on the male side
• How clinical language like "spontaneous abortion" and "incompetent cervix" makes a hard moment worse, and what doctors can do better
• The economics of fertility care: add-ons with little evidence behind them, prepaid IVF packages, private equity, and money as the thing that decides who gets options
• Egg freezing sold as an "insurance policy"
• What to say, and what not to say, when someone tells you they're struggling to conceive
• Audrey's view on what would stabilize the system, from fertility education in schools to investigating miscarriage sooner

Content note: This episode discusses infertility, miscarriage, and pregnancy loss.