When most people think about innovation in healthcare, they imagine hospitals adopting new technology or startups building the next wearable. Few imagine the American Medical Association (AMA) — a 177-year-old institution — backing a venture studio to reinvent how healthcare works from the inside out.
That’s exactly what Health2047 was built to do.
In this episode of the Ignite Podcast, host Brian Bell sits down with Dr. Jack Stockert, Managing Director of Health2047, to explore how a unique partnership between physicians, entrepreneurs, and investors is rethinking the future of healthcare — one startup at a time.
From Practicing Medicine to Redesigning It
Dr. Stockert’s story begins in traditional medicine. Growing up in the Midwest, he dreamed of becoming a doctor from an early age. But an early experience in medical school — caring for a young patient dying of AIDS — made him question the system itself.
“All I could do was play cards with him. I realized the problem wasn’t just medical — it was systemic.”
That realization pushed him to explore a bigger question: how could he impact healthcare beyond individual patient care?
So he pivoted. He earned an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, completed residency, and transitioned into consulting at McKinsey & Company, where he gained a 360-degree view of healthcare through the lens of strategy, finance, and operations.
But the entrepreneurial pull remained strong.
Building from the Ground Up
Eventually, Stockert co-founded a healthcare startup in Chicago focused on giving independent physicians more control over their practice economics — empowering doctors to run their own bundled teams and manage capacity more effectively.
It was the first taste of how technology, finance, and medicine could intersect to drive change.
When his wife — also a physician — joined the Stanford faculty, Stockert moved to Silicon Valley and began exploring what came next. That journey led to the founding team of Health2047, a new kind of venture studio created by the AMA to bridge the gap between medicine and entrepreneurship.
The Birth of Health2047: Innovation from Within
At its core, Health2047 exists to solve healthcare’s hardest problems — the ones startups often avoid because they’re too complex, too regulated, or too deeply entrenched in legacy systems.
Instead of chasing the next app, Health2047 focuses on system-level innovation.
“We weren’t trying to build another digital health app,” Stockert explains. “We wanted to design better systems — to tackle foundational problems that affect physicians and patients alike.”
The organization works like a hybrid between a venture studio and a strategic innovation lab. Each year, it incubates a small number of startups — typically two to three — focused on high-impact areas aligned with the AMA’s mission and reach.
Four Strategic Pillars Shaping the Future
Health2047’s portfolio is built around four strategic focus areas:
Radical Productivity – Using technology and workflow redesign to dramatically improve efficiency across healthcare systems.
Chronic Disease Reduction – Moving from managing illness to preventing it altogether.
Healthcare Value and Equity – Ensuring better outcomes at lower costs while addressing underserved populations.
Data Liquidity – Unlocking insights from siloed health data to improve care coordination and research.
What makes the model unique is its loopback with the AMA — startups can leverage the AMA’s 200-year network of physicians, state medical societies, and influence in policy and standards. This gives them an advantage few health startups can access on their own.
Startups Making Real Impact
Health2047’s growing portfolio includes companies tackling everything from radiology AI to chronic care innovation:
Mineta – Using voice and AI to support dementia care.
Hopper – Building foundational AI models to transform radiology imaging.
Phenomics – Co-founded with Mayo Clinic to redefine how we understand and treat obesity.
Scalerax – A digital education platform revolutionizing medical training worldwide.
A new insurance platform – Serving special-needs and underserved populations with chronic conditions.
Each company shares one trait: it aims to solve a foundational healthcare problem, not just optimize an existing process.
A Partnership Between Mission and Market
Unlike traditional venture capital, Health2047’s model blends mission-driven goals with market-driven scale.
“Physicians want better outcomes for patients. Investors want sustainable returns. Those two aren’t in conflict if you design the right system,” Stockert says.
The AMA provides the mission and credibility; Health2047 provides the venture expertise. Together, they ensure that innovation serves both physicians and patients — not just profit margins.
Looking Ahead: Healthcare in 2047
When asked what healthcare might look like by the year 2047, Stockert paints a picture of connected care that’s both human and intelligent.
He envisions a future where chronic diseases are better managed — or even prevented — and where AI augments, rather than replaces, clinicians.
“Superintelligence is not the same as wisdom,” he notes. “Technology can’t replace empathy. But it can empower clinicians to deliver more of it.”
That belief shapes Health2047’s work: build tools that amplify the human side of medicine, rather than automate it away.
Beyond Apps: Designing for Systems, Not Screens
One of the most pivotal decisions in Health2047’s journey came early on — when the team decided not to become a design studio for healthcare apps.
“Healthcare didn’t need another app. It needed system-level design.”
That decision set the tone for how the studio approaches innovation: think beyond interfaces, and build infrastructure that changes how care is delivered, financed, and experienced.
The Obesity Revolution and GLP-1 Breakthroughs
Later in the conversation, Stockert dives into the emerging science of obesity, particularly GLP-1 therapies (like semaglutide and tirzepatide). He argues that these drugs represent a watershed moment in medicine — one that could redefine primary care, chronic disease management, and public health as a whole.
He also calls for policy change to make these therapies more accessible, emphasizing that obesity is a disease, not a failure of willpower.
From Gila Monsters to Healthcare Reinvention
In a fascinating close, Stockert shares the unlikely origin of GLP-1s — tracing back to research on the Gila monster, a desert lizard whose venom contains a compound that inspired modern obesity drugs.
It’s a perfect metaphor for Health2047’s mission: great breakthroughs often come from unlikely intersections — between medicine and innovation, between empathy and analytics, between the lab and the boardroom.
The Takeaway
Healthcare is too important to leave to any one group — doctors, investors, or technologists alone.
The power of Health2047 lies in bringing them together. Under Dr. Jack Stockert’s leadership, the AMA’s venture studio isn’t just funding startups; it’s reimagining the very systems that shape how we live, heal, and thrive.
The result? A new model for healthcare innovation — one that could define medicine for the next century.
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Chapters:
00:00 Early Medical Journey
03:18 Combining Medicine and Business
04:33 Lessons from McKinsey
05:35 Becoming a Founder
07:46 Moving to Silicon Valley
09:43 The Origin of Health2047
10:08 Why the AMA Created a Venture Studio
12:28 Identifying and Incubating Startups
13:16 The Four Strategic Pillars
14:36 Building Fewer, Deeper Companies
16:17 Problem Framing and Greenfield Innovation
18:11 Portfolio Highlights: Mineta, Hopper, Phenomics, Scalerax
20:09 The AMA’s Role and Mission Alignment
22:50 Why the Year 2047
24:00 Blind Spots in Digital Health
26:19 Healthcare in 2047
29:39 Balancing Investor Returns and Clinician Impact
31:57 AI and Wisdom in Medicine
33:09 The Human Element in Healthcare
35:38 The Smartest “No” Health2047 Ever Made
38:58 Policy Fast Track: GLP-1 Therapies
42:00 The Systemic Shift
43:18 Closing Reflections
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:01:15):
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast today. We’re thrilled to have Jack Stockert, MD, on the mic. He’s the managing director at Health 2047, the American Medical Association. I’ve heard of those guys. The venture studio that builds funds and scales startups to transform health care from within. Thanks for coming on, Jack.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:01:32):
Yeah. Hey, Brian. Great to be with you.
Brian Bell (00:01:33):
Should I call you Dr. Stockert?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:01:36):
No, no, that’s unnecessary, but I appreciate that.
Brian Bell (00:01:39):
I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your background?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:01:42):
You know, I grew up back in the Midwest and wanted to be a doc since I think I wanted to be anything. So I think it was, I have a six-year-old now and she wrote on her sign for school, she wanted to be a doctor. So I guess it was right around six, but I navigated a path that led me to University of Chicago and ultimately to medical school. So all the traditional biology, basic science research and immunology and developmental biology and when I got into medicine in my first year of clinical work, my first patient was 28 and dying of end stage AIDS on the floor. And all we could do for him was really I’d show up at the end of the day and play cards with him. He had no family that was present. And so I sat there and wondered, what’s the point of this? What am I doing? I wanted to do this. I love medicine. I love science. I love the compassion and humanity and empathy of the profession itself, the relative innovation of the profession itself. But all of a sudden I’m staring straight at a problem which has nothing to do with any of that. And I think that bugged me more than it inspired me to stay within the practice to fix it. And so I started to look for different paths and that led me to a wide variety of different ones. and ultimately out of the practice of medicine, which is something I miss, something that I sort of keep as a bellwether for the work I currently do. And is it measuring up to what that six-year-old version of me thought they wanted to try to accomplish in the world?
Brian Bell (00:03:05):
Yeah, that’s a really interesting story and I can corroborate that with my father-in-law who’s a retired MD as well and had the same, you know, like a lot of sad stories like that in medicine where, you know, all you needed to do was like spend time with this person to heal him and then he wasn’t allowed to as a resident. They kept shuffling him around and he’s like, well, I you know, I’m going to take my, it’s my own time. I’m going to go spend time with this person. That’s all they need is need companionship to get better. And the powers that be wouldn’t let him spend time with the patient, even though it was on his own time.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:03:37):
I mean, with that said, my wife’s the opposite of me and MBA econ who went back to medical school and now on faculty at Stanford. So she, you know, she’s the counterpoint to my point, which is that you can fix and drive it from within. But yeah, that experience that you shared is very similar to kind of that feeling I have, which was you know, it was all that I thought this was what it was about. And it’s, you know, where are we failing this patient? Why can’t we help him?
Brian Bell (00:04:02):
Right. Yeah. And so you you actually got a double degree. So you got a master’s in business at the same time. Tell us about that decision.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:04:11):
Yeah, so that initial spark led me to explore a variety of different things. I did clinical research for my summer work instead of academic research up at Abbott Laboratories and started to look beyond the delivery of healthcare. And Booth at University of Chicago is one of the top business schools where I was fortunate enough to join and really expanded my general understanding of the wide set of very talented folks that exist in the world that are outside that traditional track that I’d been on in healthcare. And really that was what my initial step was about, was kind of building out my ability to think about a problem from a different perspective, which is what I thought the MBA did. And then ultimately did a residency and licensed, but knew I wasn’t going to practice and then transitioned out to ultimately navigate through financing and banking and consulting to them being a founder with a company in Chicago that I helped stand up through its initial financing.
Brian Bell (00:05:07):
Wow. That’s a big pivot, right? You go from medicine and then you go kind of the business route, McKinsey. And then, you know, were you working on healthcare related things there at McKinsey as well?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:05:18):
Much later. I tried to resist that, actually, when I first started. They were going to put me on all the healthcare stuff because I had an MD and I think it looked good for the clients. But I was interested in doing a wider scope of work to better understand different problems in different industries. So I did airline operations. I did economic development work. I did academic redesign. But then I also did bread and butter healthcare stuff that helped me understand the industry better from strategically pricing to customer segmentation on the payer side to a variety of other value-based care efforts. So really sampling across where healthcare was navigating and in the aftermath of a lot of the early consolidation work. But I also did this other really interesting work in other industries. And that also exposed me to some of my first software and technology-sided work beyond that kind of traditional exposure to it as a student and as an academic advisor.
Brian Bell (00:06:09):
So tell us about the transition into being a founder. Like what was the impetus for that?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:06:12):
Well, I was in Chicago and had met another physician founder who was thinking about a problem on the physician side. And he wanted to tackle the issue of volume and control at the practice level for independent physician practices. And so for me, it stuck along this line of what I wanted to do since I had started. And so that since I was young, so the through line to me was how could I empower this medical profession, this profession I found very beautiful and and And this company was trying to do that. It was trying to put kind of a more control into a physician’s ability to maximize what they wanted to do with their day-to-day and their, whether it was bandwidth and capacity of their GI suite to being able to put together their own bundle team to do shoulder procedures. And so it was an insurance arbitrage business, but instead of aligning with larger insurance companies or with payers, we put the economics into the physician’s hands. And I wanted experience as an entrepreneur. I had done entrepreneurial things throughout my career and my life. And so this was a chance to kind of take my MBA experience, my medical training experience, and then do something that was close to what I found as a mission-oriented piece of work.
Brian Bell (00:07:19):
It’s amazing how did it all turn out, you know?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:07:22):
Well, it was pre-pandemic and my wife had the opportunity to continue her career at Stanford. And so that led us across the country and an inability to apparently work remote. But here we sit on an interview from across the country. And so how wrong that initial hypothesis was. But at the time, it seemed impossible to continue the depth of energy and work and time that goes into a startup. and to do so across the country. And so I transitioned out here with my six-month-old at the time, my first daughter Juniper, and tried to sort out what to do next. And my wife said, take your time because you’re not fun to be around when you’re doing stuff you don’t like. And so that led to my journey out here and ultimately health 2047.
Brian Bell (00:08:04):
Amazing. So walk us through kind of the through line of joining this venture studio and kind of what’s the backstory there?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:08:10):
Yes, that was about a decade ago. And my adventure out here led me to meet with a wide variety of different investors, companies and founders. And that was an enjoyable experience to get to see. And I did what any self-respecting McKinsey person would have done. And I built a model for the market, figuring if I was going to pick a company to go to, I ought to know if it’s in a big area and a big market opportunity. And since I’m not an investor where I get to sprinkle out across a variety of different potential opportunities, I better try to make the smartest decision I can so that in spite of me will still wash ashore. So that led me to kind of consolidate all these different exposures I was having with investors and companies and a mentor of mine who was at the time back at the AMA helping them think through how to create more leverage and partnership from the American Medical Association and their reach into the business side of health care. to try to bring the voice of the physician and the patient into that innovation space. He was helping stand up the initial version of what was going to be Health 2047. And he asked me in one of our mentoring conversations what I was up to. I showed him what I was up to. And he said, well, will you come show that to us and help us stand this up? And so ultimately joined the founding team of health 2047 with dr douglas given and dr james madeira the ceo of the ama at the time and for me it hit close to investing it close to entrepreneurship it close to the medical profession it was focused on innovations that were solving things at the doctor and the patient interface which was important to me as i alluded to since i was young and ultimately became the exciting opportunity for me to help kind of start out from scratch which I felt like was more important than joining somewhere else under someone else’s thesis.
Brian Bell (00:09:54):
Right. Yeah, I like that. So you were there right from the inception of this venture studio backed by the AMA, which is called Health 2047. And maybe you could walk us through a little bit of like the mechanics of the venture studio. Why does it exist? Why did the AMA do this? What are the economics of, you know, getting getting these startups off the ground? How far along do you get them before you put founders in and all that stuff?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:10:16):
Yeah, I think as any good venture entrepreneur should do that, you got to frame the problem in the right way. And I think what the AMA and the initial two kind of founding visionaries for the organization felt was that there was a gap in the market for focusing on the right problems in healthcare.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:10:16):
Yeah, I think as any good venture entrepreneur should do that, you got to frame the problem in the right way. And I think what the AMA and the initial two kind of founding visionaries for the organization felt was that there was a gap in the market for focusing on the right problems in healthcare. You basically looked at a large ramp of investment that was happening at the time. So I think 2010, you start to see a crest and ramp of digital health investment. A lot of that time was apps and things to that effect. And the question became, what are we actually transforming in healthcare? The experience wasn’t that different at the hospital’s interface. The experience from a physician perspective was not that productive. All the problems were sort of the same problems you kept hearing. It was These EHRs aren’t that novel. They don’t help us do our job better. They’re actually getting in the way of what we loved about medicine. And for me personally, they weren’t solving any sort of the endemic problems that were challenging the actual health of the population or the ability of those care providers, physicians or others to deliver that health care. And I think the question became, how do we then bring that voice? And they’d tried being partners with different investment approaches. but they wanted to be more active than just an LP and a fund. So the request initially was, we don’t want a venture investment fund. Like we want to invest. We want to help shape businesses. We want to help entrepreneurs accomplish their visions and help shape those visions. But we don’t want to be, we want to be more active, I guess would be the way to describe it. And so the initial iteration of the organization had a view of partnering with larger scale downstream incumbent partners, players within the healthcare system, to help identify the right problems to focus on. And then if you frame around the right problems, then you can work to solve the solutions. It’s a subtle difference than perhaps how you might think about it from an investment perspective, where the problem is, of course, important, but that problem and solution match is important. a little different when you’re iterating around that and have a little flexibility around the definition of the problem. We were trying to identify problems that weren’t being solved or weren’t being tackled by current investment and current entrepreneurship, and then try to figure out how to start businesses or partner with entrepreneurs to tackle those problems. So whether that’s an insurance business that meets the needs of underserved minority populations or an obesity business that we co-founded with Mayo Clinic that’s focused on redefining how we think about the disease of obesity, Or it’s an AI business focused on understanding how to actually innovate around clinical decision support or radiology and the use of those images to transform things. So there’s a through line to every business within the portfolio that tacks back to a problem that fits within the kind of focus areas that we look at.
Brian Bell (00:13:02):
Interesting. And I have in my notes four strategic focus areas, radical productivity, health care value, chronic care and data liquidity. Is that right?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:13:09):
Yeah, what I would say about the healthcare value or the equity piece is one that cuts across as my colleague tells me it’s a lintel, which is an old Latin term for a horizontal architectural piece, which was news to me. Regardless, I think what we found is that as you focus on businesses around radical productivity, which would be, you know, AI is the conversation of the day of those types of things, but that’s just a tool. The question is, what’s the workflow you’re impacting? How do you transform that? That’s how we think about radical productivity. You know, the improving health outcomes and chronic disease reduction is really about not managing disease, but trying to tackle and reduce disease differently. There’s really three core pillar areas that we focus in, and then the equity cuts across each. So does value. It cuts across all. So is the innovation going to transform better outcomes, or is it going to generate equivalent outcomes but at a lower cost? Those are the types of things we want to focus on.
Brian Bell (00:14:05):
Interesting. So how many startups have you guys incubated and kind of what’s the success criteria? Like, how’s it been going?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:14:13):
So I think we have a more closely paired model with our company. So we don’t do a high volume number of inbounds. We try to do two to three of these efforts a year and we try to help those businesses grow along their financing pathways and or find sustainable models that lead them to the end. And we’ve been relatively successful in doing that with the companies that we have. And then the companies that have not worked out because we all have our failures. The nice part about the partnership with the AMA has been by tackling a problem. The problem is no different. It’s just learning why the market failed to tackle or solve that problem then becomes an important feedback loop that we collaborate and work with our AMA partners on to really expand the reach of the entrepreneurship work that we do here. And ultimately, our hope is that perhaps if that business didn’t work out today or a couple of years ago in this case, that you’ll see that business unlock market opportunities through its lessons learned. And you’ll see a business tackling that problem a year or two from now. So I think it’s a helpful kind of through art to have for entrepreneurship, which is what’s the broader mission and focus here of the problems that matter? And are we actually working to solve those problems?
Brian Bell (00:15:30):
And are you kind of looking for greenfield opportunities? So like if you look at something and you’re like, there’s not an AI company out there that’s tackling this and the way that we see it, you know, it’s not meeting the needs of health care. So we’re going to we’re going to incubate something.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:15:43):
I guess there’s a way to view the problem identification approach that we use as a way of identifying greenfield spaces. The challenge we often have is why isn’t, I’m never the first to think of an idea. So I’m often asking the question of what are we going to be able to do that’s different in order to tackle that problem? And I think that Well, yes, oftentimes that’s a greenfield space that’s open to run. Other times there’s some issue within the market dynamics that aren’t allowing it, or perhaps there’s an angle around go-to-market that we might be able to unlock or empower a company to do, whether that’s with physician practices or perhaps it’s leveraging some other aspect of the partnership and collaboration that we have with the American Medical Association. So there’s a lens around how we think about building companies that tackle problems that matter and that we can bring an unfair advantage to through our both capabilities in-house here, but also our relationship with the American Medical Association. So I guess that comes back full circle, your question around the Venture Studio function. That would probably be the defining differentiation for us is that loop back. And I think it works really, when it works, it works really well. We have a digital education business that We’ve helped reach larger, more significant heights in terms of global education and digital education, as well as expanding within the U.S. market. And so when we find it and it works really well, it’s wonderful to be a part of. And sometimes, inevitably, you hit a wall and then you have to figure out why and try to work and unsolve and unstick that for future times.
Brian Bell (00:17:18):
And so are there, speaking of companies in the portfolio, anything stand out besides the one you mentioned?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:17:24):
So we have two more recent ones that just actually closed and announced financing. One is called Moneta, which is focused on combining voice and AI with clinical care delivery around dementia. And one is called Hopper, which is a foundational model approach within radiological images and trying to transform the ability to make the most out of the radio radiology space and transform that market so those are two that are exciting and then i always the rest of that are in my portfolio that i enjoy phenomics is a co-founded business with mayo clinic that’s reframing obesity a scholar x is the digital education business i mentioned which we are spending a fair amount of time on in the current space it’s an important mission for the ama and one that we care deeply about and that’s an interesting one to try to build a sustainable and financeable model behind And then we have a larger insurance company that’s focused on chronic special needs for unique and specific populations that have historically been overlooked or not served by traditional payers. And so for us, from an equity perspective, it’s really fun to build a business that has a viable and scalable business model that tackles a problem that oftentimes people think you need to have a subsidy model to solve. And so those are just a sample of the few that we’re excited about.
Brian Bell (00:18:43):
Yeah, that’s great. And, you know, to go back to your, you know, the AMA pedigree and the advantage Health 2047 has, you know, that described it as a loopback. But, you know, what do you think is like kind of, you know, the 80-20 and the value? Is it access to the clinicians, the credibility, the alignment with the AMA? Where is the secret sauce there for you guys?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:19:04):
I think it’s, so the AMA itself is 175 seven-year-old institution of American medicine. I think they represent the House of Medicine, which is all medical specialty societies, all state medical societies, and they all consolidate under the House of Medicine, which largely set the general policy position of the AMA moving forward. And then they interact in DC to help shape legislation and policy and the like. And so those functions, as well as the headquarter functions out of Chicago, are really focused on transforming healthcare and with a very pure mission focus. I think the question around how we best leverage that mission is by matching the the leverage of market-driven scaling of solutions with mission that the AMA is focused on.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:20:00):
And I think that interplay means that you tackle the right problems in the right manner and are able to scale them in a significant way that maybe the AMA couldn’t have done independently. And I think that’s the partnership that we try to strike. I think for the companies that partner with us, they’re interested in a variety of different aspects. I think the The idea that they’re aligned with that broader mission gives a sense of purpose and meaning to the company that independently wouldn’t exist. Oftentimes that’s helpful in just opening doors for meetings, whether those are doors that we open or that they’re able to open because of the partnership and because of the almost identification of having been of being a health 2047 company. I think there are natural just bread and butter go to market work that we’re helpful with in terms of physician engagement, you know, how to think about going through the state, whether it’s perhaps there’s a go to market pathway through state medical societies or through different associations or through some of the other partnerships that we have because of who we are. And I think those are all part of it. But I think ultimately it’s the tie to that broader mission and the feel that what they’re working on is seen as a big and transformative problem. The name Health 2047 comes from thinking about what healthcare should look like in the middle of the century and being able to draw through lines back to the work we do today. So we’re going to try to work on foundational problems, not second order problems. And I think that’s a compelling thing to find. And there’s different mixes of companies, as you know, as an investor and some there’s good investments that are solving second order, second-level problems, but we’re interested in those foundational ones and trying to unlock them.
Brian Bell (00:21:27):
Yeah, it’s interesting. 24-7, the way you say it could mean 24-7, like 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but it could also mean the year 2047. It’s a weird year. Yeah, why that year? Was that 30 years out when you guys kind of set the mission?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:21:42):
Well, it was 30 years out, but there’s a subtle joke, which was the URL was available for 2047, but in reality... Yeah, exactly. Health 2050 was taken. But the reality is that it’s a tip of the hat back to the AMA. The AMA will be 200 years old in 2047. And so the idea was a tip of the hat back to them for having a vision to start an organization. It was a leap for the AMA to start an organization like Health 2047 and to let it be something novel, to not just copy an in-market option. And I think... They tried to say for unique entity, what should this entity look like? And we’re still evolving and we will continue to evolve in that manner. But I think the basics of the work and the basics of the core team here are relatively consistent now. We have a nice rhythm to it.
Brian Bell (00:22:32):
So you’ve seen health care from a lot of angles over the years. What feels like the blind spot most people have in digital health? What are they overlooking?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:22:39):
Yeah, I don’t know if I’m smart enough to identify the blind spot everybody else is missing. I mean, my life has been developed around the idea that collaborating with different folks from different backgrounds ultimately allow you to look at a problem from a variety of perspectives. And so my blind spots are ones that you solve because you have a different set of experiences that you’ve brought to it. And so I think I see clearly from my own experiences, although those are limited now, and I think it’s where physicians can play a role in innovation, is by bringing their perspective in and then solving my blind spot to that, which is I haven’t practiced surgery for 25 years, right? But I also haven’t been an engineer developing and writing and creating solutions on the solution side. And so I think oftentimes as an investor, the companies we see, the blind spots are often products of that team more so than things that I might identify otherwise. And so helping teams understand those blind spots is really kind of building off of my view that There’s a bunch of talented people. And to solve some of the problems in healthcare, you need a variety of different capabilities, skill sets, and experiences to bring to bear on the problem. So I think it’s great to meet teams that worked in airline ops, you know, just still back to my McKinsey days, and want to bring that experience into healthcare to solve operational problems in healthcare. I think those are really unique, really unique insights that would solve blind spots that people within healthcare traditionally might have. So it’s not one blind spot. I think it’s just a matter of how you get the right team and then pick the right problem area to focus on.
Brian Bell (00:24:12):
So there’s so many ways I want to take kind of the next set of questions about the future, right? Kind of looking ahead, right? I like that it’s in the name health, the year 20, 2047. What do you think healthcare looks like in that year? You know, we’re, you know, we’re sitting in 2025 now as we record this. So that’s 22 years from now. What do you think healthcare looks like?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:24:32):
I’d like to think that the profession of medicine is one that still has highly talented, emotionally motivated, innovative, and thoughtful people moving into. I wanted to be a profession I can tell my children. It’s exciting to go into. And I think to get to that point, at least on the care provider side, it requires us to think through how we evolve those workflows, how we improve the ability to deliver information to those clinicians in the places that they need them, how we empower them to make better clinical decisions in the moments that they’re encountering, how we allow them to have empathy in every moment that they engage.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:25:00):
And then on the flip of that, I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t concentrate on the patient and the physician. From a patient side, I think that we have constructed a system that worked really well till now, and that the challenges over the next 20 to 30 years related to chronic disease and the management of demographics that age and encounter diseases differently are are very different. So, of course, I want additional cures for difficult and hard to manage cancers and childhood cancers and the like. And those will progress as we’ve continued to kind of funnel and research and try to solve solution, solve those problems. But I think from a chronic disease perspective, having a system that’s able to contemplate management that meets the patient or the individual more so than it is a patient, where they’re at, help them navigate the decisions that they’re making already from a health perspective or a personal care perspective, and linking that to what they’re doing from a healthcare perspective would be meaningful. So what’s that? Connected systems that allow the right care to happen in home, the right care to happen in lower triage sites of care, all those different movements of of care beyond where it’s currently being delivered, but also the integration of what people are doing from their own health perspective into what medicine’s doing and how medicine’s interpreting that within the care and space of healthcare delivery. And I don’t think we do that well. I also think that obesity will transform what we think about primary care over the next 20 years. And so that will be different in 2050. And I think what the technologies that we’re developing in the current time will also change the way that we think about who and where and how we get care from it and what that actually looks like. What is a care provider? And I think that will shift too. So there’s like broad general themes, but then under the specifics, you know, I wish I knew better, but we’ll have to see how it goes. Depends on how successful you are as an investor, Brian. I’m picking the right companies to back.
Brian Bell (00:27:04):
Yeah, I like to say I just try to hit the average. Average venture is really good. I just wrote an article on it today, actually. 20% IRRs. But, you know, there’s a big variance around that average. So how do you balance being clinician-friendly with delivering investor returns? Or do investor returns matter for the AMA? Is it more about just solving the problems they see in healthcare?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:27:23):
Of course, investor returns matter. That’s the only way that you make a if you don’t have a sustainable model, then you’ve got a model that requires a ongoing support. You won’t reach the scale you want to reach. So I think that inherently what physicians and what patients want is they want better, better health. more for what they’re paying, better outcomes, better ease of the delivery and the enjoyment in the work. And enjoyment for a physician, at least in my experience, is being able to connect and be with your patients, being able to feel like you’re giving your patient the best version of yourself and the best version of care that you’re able to deliver in that moment. And so how do we level up physicians and help support them in delivering that care, I think is an important thing to answer. But ultimately, I don’t think that’s in conflict with at least the way I invest the companies I want to look at is not in conflict with where investors want to go. I think that physicians should be a part of the conversation of AI and what its use is as a tool, what its use is for replacing things that they’re currently doing, what it is they’re doing in the future that they couldn’t do today that the technology enables. Joining and pushing that conversation, I think, is a really important thing for physicians to do, or else it will feel, as you framed it, as they’re in conflict with the evolution that’s happening.
Brian Bell (00:28:43):
Do you feel like I’ve heard some predictions, you know, given large language models now are 150 IQ, like Rock 4 and GPT Pro, and they’re only getting better, right? They’re only getting better every year, right? I don’t think that’ll stop. At some point, they can, you know, take in all of the medical data and make an accurate diagnosis, right, based on the medical research. And so do doctors play a lesser of a role going forward in the delivery of health care, given that we’ll have these like super intelligent AIs that can make an exact diagnosis? And then it’s like the PAs and the nurses become more important. Like, how do you see that kind of playing out?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:29:20):
I think super intelligence is different than wisdom. So those large language models can also tell me how to throw a pitch, but I wouldn’t throw a very good pitch even having been fully explained how to do it. And so I think this idea of wisdom and what the role is for us is not even just a unique healthcare question. This question is confronted by you and I as investors. What’s it mean if they can invest and do all the things that we do?
Brian Bell (00:29:45):
I think your question could be- It does make all my decisions already for me as an investor. No, I’m joking. But no, I do actually consult it every time I’m making a decision.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:29:52):
That’s why you’re the average. I think that you have to be open to the idea that it will look very different and then shape what that world looks like and be a part of shaping what that world looks like. Because I don’t have the answer for what a super intelligent capability is.
Brian Bell (00:30:07):
Well, then you layer in like robotics right behind it, you know, humanoid robots roaming the hospitals, you know, with all the degrees of freedom that humans have. And then you have super intelligent AI. Yeah. What does even medicine look like then?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:30:19):
So I think it’s going to be an evolution versus a revolution. And I think that is because ultimately, the first thing I did in my medical training, you have what’s called a white coat ceremony. Are you familiar with those?
Brian Bell (00:30:36):
No, no, I’m not.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:30:38):
So it’s the first time you wear your white coat. You’re a medical student and you get your white coat, you walk in and they have a ceremony and you take the Hippocratic Oath for the first time as a medical student. And there’s a depth of empathy within that process, which is acknowledging that you’re embarking on a profession that has this intention beyond just the nuts and bolts, the day-to-day of the practice. So I think ultimately that empathy piece is an important part for physicians to carry forward and that they should feel confident that that won’t be replaced by what technology allows. And then if you accept that, then you open up a horizon that allows you to say, well, how do we use these tools? What does it look like? How do we actually get to where we want to go faster? How do we partner with the developers of these technologies and tools? I’m certain that most of the way these models work, which are mathematical predictive type of models, that the wisdom of a clinician with empathy and depth of understanding of a patient experience and story will still break new ground in terms of understanding disease. And we should be open to that idea, which then improves the ability of the model over time to do even more. But it won’t take that human component piece And, you know, with fortunate luck, we’ll tackle problems and allow access to care that people don’t currently have. And we’ll be able to give you or I, who have plenty, I trust you probably have better access to care than some others in a population similar to me. We’re very fortunate in that way. Hopefully that others have equivalent level, but that even our access and our development is exposed to kind of better outcomes and better future states of health than we currently have through what we’re able to understand.
Brian Bell (00:32:25):
Awesome. I’m learning a lot. Let’s wrap up with some rapid fire. What’s the smartest no Health 2047 has ever made and why did that matter?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:32:33):
We turned very quickly against the concept of design. So at the start, I mentioned there was a bunch of app design work and there was question around what was available in the app store for health. And although health care does need novel design and to understand the kind of workflows to design things appropriately. I think ultimately what it needs is system level design. So we said no to a more narrow focused design studio construct to start. It was a meaningful start because it kind of served as a sample for what could be with Health 2047. But ultimately, it would have been a very different path that we would have gone down. And so we said no and evolved to trying to do more system level stuff and have the problems that we’re working on be more system level. And that was a great decision by the CEO at the time.
Brian Bell (00:33:22):
Yeah, I understand the distinction. So maybe you could explain the difference between those two approaches.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:33:26):
This is 2015. You have to go back in time. It’s a pre-AI, no-AI world. People could download an app that would measure your heart rate or something and then help diagnose something. And there was a question around, well, there’s a lot of snake oil. I think was the statement. So people felt like it was like way back to the old traveling doc who’d go around to towns and have a mix of snake oil and actual things in their cart. And so at the turn of the century with the AMA evolving medical education, they were trying to get away from that and get to teaching and educating around real science and real data-driven education. kind of research for how we’re thinking about care delivery. And so there was a question of, was there a new explosion of what people had access to, to help them manage their health? And it was apps. So the thought was design better apps, come up with a better process, design those apps. And I think our view was, this is a very narrow moment in time and the apps are a very narrow view of what design is. And so it’s more, that was more traditional design in the sense of what the interfaces look like and could they be more intuitive. And while that’s necessary and important, our view was what was limiting was, you know, you had people who couldn’t get the level of care they need. People don’t need an app if they need a surgery. And if they need a surgery, are they getting access to where they need surgery from? So our question was, and then if they are approved for, maybe they need a head MRI and they’re running into prior auth issues. Like whatever the issues were, they were system level types of issues and that we needed to operate at that level. And so it wasn’t necessarily that the design was bad. It just was given the AMA and given that we had one shot at doing this, we needed to think bigger around how that system level design works and how we interacted at that.
Brian Bell (00:35:09):
You know, it’s funny. This is not really rapid fire. It’s like it’s kind of like the closing questions. If you could fast track one piece of health care policy change, what would it be?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:35:18):
I’d want to cover obesity therapy, GOP-1 therapy, as well as the disease or disease reduction management tools that are around it, because I think that it’s a watershed moment for primary care and for health care in general. I’ve seen this personally in my own family with
Brian Bell (00:35:35):
Oh, yeah. Me too. I’m on GLPs. I lost 30 pounds. So I’m a believer. And all cause mortality goes down with weight.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:35:43):
My father’s off his CPAP. And so sleep apnea goes away. Blood pressure management’s different. Primary care becomes so different. And it’s such an opportunity to take advantage of it. I recognize that there’s a cost issue that we have to work through. But if I could have... that covered for the patients who would benefit from it. Not everybody benefits from GLP-1s. There’s a wide variety of phenotypes of obesity. But for the populations that do, I’d love to cover the right therapies for them. And for the populations that won’t be responders, which we’re able to identify and understand, what’s the right therapy and plan for them? And then can we fund research that actually is tackling that? I would focus energy on that, especially since I want to try to have an answer that’s not just AI since 95% of the companies.
Brian Bell (00:36:25):
You know, what’s funny is, you know, we have major medical through Kaiser because my wife and I are both working on startups. You know, Team Ignite’s a startup. You know, we’re a venture capital fund, but we’re still emerging.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:36:34):
Yeah, got it.
Brian Bell (00:36:35):
You know, she’s working on her own AI startup now. And so we have, you know, the high deductible plan, right? And, you know, so you still go to Kaiser, you do your thing, you get your, you know, checkups and everything, and those are free. But then I’m like, okay, well, my BMI is over 30, you know, 6’2”, 250-something pounds, and I could probably lose 30 pounds, 40 pounds even. They’re like, well, why don’t you do this like weight loss stuff? No, I’m like, no, I work out six, seven days a week. I play basketball three days a week. I count my calories. I’m not losing weight. I’ve been plateaued for like a year, right? And a lot of people know about this because I made a pretty public post about it a couple of months ago. And so I just took matters into my own hands and went with a compounded pharmacy and got it for $300 a month. And I probably eat $300 less in food every month, you know? Incredible story. Yeah, it’s paying for itself. So and I just I recently switched from semaglutide to terzepatide because it has two antagonists and it’s a little stronger. And I’m noticing now I’m starting because I plateaued on the semaglutide for about three or four months. And so I switched. I want to get back down to like my college weight, which would be 200 and put me down until like the teens for body fat. And then I’ll go off and see where I’m at, you know, but like, you know, my blood, blood pressure is better. You know, I’m sleeping, sleep apnea, you know, like snoring less. My wife tells me my wife’s blood pressure is also down.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:37:55):
Think of all the downstream impacts of that too. So years of sleep apnea, which lead to the chronic disease that generates on the follow through that, whether it’s orthopedic and joint replacements for the broad population, not for you specifically, but like how do you, it changes all of that. The other interesting thing is your experience represents an opportunity to think through how This delineation between personal care and health care, my dad and other family members who have taken it have also been comfortable paying out of pocket for the same reasons you said. So I think that the system, which is set up to triage, you know, when you break your arm or sickness, isn’t equipped to set up for that. So that’s why... I think we aren’t setting ourselves up and physicians should be a part of thinking through, like, what’s the physician’s role for that? Because your set of problems and problem list is different now. And how do we think about evolving that? I think the other big thing that happens with that recognition or regulatory change, or even in your experience is, Understanding that obesity itself is a disease with a disease process is an important concept because GLP-1s are treating physiologic lesion, if you will. We know that there’s different phenotypes of people whose stomachs empty too quickly and the stomach doesn’t stretch and secrete GLP. And so you don’t get the signal back into the brain to signal you’re full. And so we know those populations respond really well to GLP-1.
Brian Bell (00:39:19):
That was probably me. I could eat a whole pizza, no problem. Like just put it away.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:39:22):
But then there’s other people whose receptors, you can look in fMRI studies. This is some of the work that Mayo did that led to phenomics. You can look and no matter how much GLP-1 is being expressed, they don’t light up on fMRI, meaning that the receptors in the brain aren’t signaling. You aren’t getting the satiation film signal. And so you keep eating. And so there’s Those people respond actually to a different therapy. And so understanding it as a disease and then imploring us to kind of both engage earlier to help people before they get sick, which gives people a better life and changes how we think about what we spend and how we spend it. Anyway. We dove deep on it, which probably is a whole nother topic to talk about.
Brian Bell (00:39:59):
Yeah, it’s like a whole nother podcast. But, you know, it’s interesting about the medical system. There’s a few things to unpack there that you mentioned, which is really, really interesting. It’s like the system is designed to treat disease, not prevent it. Right. That’s a key thing to understand. And then you think about all like the the payers and the providers and the whole system is set up to, you know, transact all these fee for service things back and forth. Right. Right. So they only get paid when they do things and the preventative stuff doesn’t really pay them unless they’re charging like the $1,500 or $1,200 a month on Ozempic that they were charging, even though it’s like, I think it’s off patent, right? So you could just get it through a compound pharmacy.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:40:41):
No, Zempic’s still on. The issue they have was... So any of the GLP ones are still on patent.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:40:48):
Yep.
Brian Bell (00:40:48):
So the semaglutide’s actually patented, but if you’ve compounded, it’s not, so they’re kind of getting around it.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:40:52):
No, there was an emergency use, right, that allowed pharmacies to compound it, which is why some of your... More direct to consumer health companies were able to compound it too. But that was for obvious IP reasons. The larger companies, Lilly and Novo and others were against it. But the FDA, I think it was the FDA ruling at the time was related to allowing it for emergency use. There was a need. People need it. You can’t manufacture it enough for what’s needed. And so they allowed for it. But that’s been actually pulled back. That’s why you saw, you can go look at the stock performance of HIMSS around that announcement.
Brian Bell (00:41:28):
Interesting.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:41:29):
Yeah, so it dropped. So it is on patent for a while. But the thing is, there’s going to be all types of therapies. So like you experienced, you plateau, there’ll be orals that are going to come out of the, and so that’ll increase the exposure and opportunity for people who are more, less inclined to use an injectable. But then there’s additional therapies that are being worked on and discovered, which are either going to be in combination or the like. It’s a whole level. It’s a fascinating field and background. Yeah.
Brian Bell (00:41:54):
Yeah, we’re just kind of now, like you said, scratching the surface on all these, and it’s really exciting.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:41:59):
Well, we’ll come back and talk about it. The origin story also involves Gila monsters.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:42:04):
What is it?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:42:06):
You know the Gila monster?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:42:07):
No, what is it?
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:42:09):
So it’s a type of lizard, but their prey has a long acting form of GLP-1, which is we’ve known about GLP-1 for a while, but we couldn’t create it or we, the scientists couldn’t manufacture it in a sustainable state that would be in the blood for long enough to then have the signaling capabilities of like a traditional hormone. And so, but someone just had been researching Gila monsters and discovered that their prey remained almost paralyzed from a hypoglycemic state, and it turns out that it’s a longer-acting form of GLP-1. So the research scientist, who I’m going to forget his name, I didn’t know we were going to end up here. So I apologize. We’ll go back and appropriately cite him. They flew back on a plane with a Gila monster ultimately. Anyway, it’s a fun history of how science is random. It also is a good foundation for my view on AI, which is, I think it’s incredible, but we need to understand the brilliance of science and discovery and its relationship to what the technology can do and figure out how to link those two things. That’s where I’m excited about in that area. Yes.
Brian Bell (00:43:07):
Well, thanks so much for coming on, Jack. I learned a lot. It was a great conversation.
Dr. Jack Stockert (00:43:11):
Yeah, thank you.
