Interview with Novocardia CEO Dr. Dan Blumenthal

0:00:10 - David Williams
Value-based payments are often associated with primary care, but the big spending is in specialties like cardiology and oncology. Today's guest, Dr. Dan Blumenthal, is an MD MBA who founded and runs a value-based care company that pursues innovative clinical and contracting models in cardiology. Hi everyone, I'm David Williams, president of Strategy Consulting Firm Health Business Group and host of the Health Biz Podcast, a weekly show where I interview top health care leaders about their lives and careers. Please rate the show and subscribe, dr Blumenthal. Welcome to the Health Biz Podcast. 

0:00:44 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Thank you, david, it's a pleasure to be here. 

0:00:46 - David Williams
Excellent. Well, let's, we're going to talk about what you're doing today, but we're going to wind back the clock. Before that, I want to hear a little bit about your childhood and any particular influences you had that have stuck with you that you're willing to talk about. 

0:01:00 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
I grew up in a medical family, so both my parents are physicians. I really was given an opportunity to learn a lot about medicine, a lot about health policy, a lot about some of the challenges that we face as healthcare delivery organizations from a pretty early age and that was one of the major influences for me growing up in terms of my interest in healthcare. But I actually didn't really think that I wanted to be a doctor until I was towards the end of college and a very close family member got sick and that for me was one of the triggers to go into medicine, pursue a career as a physician. So I applied to medical school, actually after doing a post-bac year, doing my pre-med courses, after graduating from college. 

0:01:44 - David Williams
Sounds good. Well, you spent a lot of time at Harvard. You know I have another podcast that I co-host and the guy went to Harvard undergraduate, which we call Preparation H and I don't know what we call a triple threat. So, yeah, thanks. 

0:01:57 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
It's a, it's a. It's still a term that's thrown around a little bit, for for people who went to undergrad and graduate school at Harvard so yes. 

0:02:05 - David Williams
But you did medical school and you did an MBA, which is what I did too, not at the same time. 

0:02:10 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
But yeah what was that like it was? It was great. I was really kind of influenced when I was in medical school by some work that I did in India. Actually, I spent a summer working on a project where I was writing a case study about polio elimination in India, and I got the opportunity to travel to India and participate in some polio immunization campaigns in different parts of the country, meet with epidemiologists who were tracking polio, learn about the the massive operational coordination required to deliver polio immunizations, both live and killed, to over a billion people every year and including children in really underserved rural parts of the country. And for me, that was a real eye opener in terms of exposing me to how important it is to understand how to operationalize the delivery of care and how how much that matters to the quality of services that end up getting to the front lines, to to the people who need them. And so that for me, was was one of the real drivers behind my decision to go to business school, in addition to to becoming a physician. 

0:03:32 - David Williams
Got it. Now there's a lot of. I think you definitely had like a far ranging view when you were, you know, in those really days and I think still today, because I you talk about India, I was going to ask you about Russia. 

0:03:46 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Because I saw your yeah. 

0:03:48 - David Williams
I saw your resume that you were working with CIMET and this had to do with, you know, helping the all the, the Soviet nuclear scientists. Go and do good things as opposed to some of the bad things they could have gotten up to. Is that a fair summary? 

0:04:00 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Yeah. 

0:04:00 - David Williams
Yeah, that's right. 

0:04:01 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
That was a. 

That was my first job out of college after spending, after coming back to Boston and doing my post postgraduate pre-medical work, and the the thinking behind that that effort, which was a State Department funded program, was that, you know, at the at the end of the Cold War, the, the Soviet Union had 30,000 former bio and current bio weapon scientists who had been employed by the state one day and were unemployed the next, and were very highly sought after by untoward actors around the world for their expertise. 

And so the State Department was funding scientists in the United States to engage with them and help them to become productive scientists in a world where they would need to apply for grant funding, understand how to translate their research into clinically relevant products that could be used to help improve health outcomes or be used for different business purposes, including in agriculture and chemical, the chemicals industry, et cetera. 

And so we were engaging with a number of former bio weapon scientists in several different scientific institutes around the Russian country, and it was fascinating to hear about their experiences with, you know, planning the, planning out how they would respond to certain conflicts with the United States and other other countries, and how they had shifted almost immediately from thinking about that work to then starting to think about how they use their scientific training to do good, and it was really meaningful work it was. It was fascinating. Tons of great stories really helped expose me to science in a way that was directly relevant to some of the things that I had been interested in prior to going back to do my scientific undergraduate work as a post back. 

So great transition preparation for going to medical school. 

0:06:26 - David Williams
And then, closer to home, it seems he also got involved in reorganizing healthcare delivery, I think, with the Crimson care collaborative. I mean, what was that? 

0:06:33 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Yeah, yeah, and that was in medical school. So that that was a. That was a primary care clinic which was organized by a group of medical students that I went to medical. Why went to medical school with? 

really focused on delivering free care for underserved populations in the greater Boston area and was supported by Boston area hospitals, chaperoned or overseen by a handful of attending physicians and really enabled, at that point in time, third and fourth year medical students to get our hands dirty in caring for underserved patient populations who who really needed access to primary care. And I'm still very good, it sounds like a great mission Were there? 

0:07:17 - David Williams
were there tensions in doing that? Because sometimes you know one of the challenges we run into, I think, especially in Boston, maybe not just here a lot, of, a lot of well-meaning things that can't happen because there's a lot of safeguards for good and not so good reasons that are around them. So it sounds great but you're able to really do it. 

0:07:35 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Yeah, we were, we were, we we saw patients. I think it was. It was every Thursday night. We we had a handful of medical students with an attending who was there helping us to take care of those patients, and and we had a, we had a clinic schedule. Patients would come in, we'd we'd see them, we'd, you know, evaluate them. At that point in time that the the majority of us were fourth year medical students, so we were applying for residencies, we had taken most of our exams, we had done most of our clerkships, and so it was not a. It's not, it was not as though we we were first or second year medical students without any clinical experience or training, unsupervised. We had, we had a lot of, a lot of support and already a lot of training. So we, we had the skills needed to. 

0:08:24 - David Williams
And then devoted health. I saw you spend some time there. It was it sounds like a nice name. All these things sound, you know, so wonderful I should. I should have done that while you're having a sip. You know, that's a good sense of timing. 

0:08:43 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
So devoted is. 

A is a Medicare Advantage health plan founded by Todd and Ed Park, who were the founders of of Athena Health, and devoted is what what I what is commonly kind of now called a, a payvider a combination of a payer and a provider organization, and it has both a, a very successful health plan, a Medicare Advantage health plan that's privatized Medicare, and a home based care delivery arm called devoted medical group, which I was very deeply involved with when I was at devoted, and I joined devoted shortly after finishing my cardiology fellowship. 

At that point in time, I was a grant funded health services researcher and that's how I joined the, the faculty at the Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and was doing research on quality of care and outcomes, particularly in alternative payment models for patients with cardiovascular illness, and I partially thought that I was gonna be a health services researcher, for my career was not just grant funded but was also applying for grants and was writing a lot of papers, and got recruited to join devoted, and I thought it was a really neat opportunity to learn hands on about a lot of what I had been studying and thinking about from a research standpoint with the majority of my time, and so I spent almost two and a half years of devoted as an associate chief medical officer and the medical director for the health plan during the first year of its launch and did all the peer to peers for the health plan, or the vast majority of them, oversaw a lot of the Part D formulary design work, helped to build devoted medical group with a really outstanding team of clinicians and non-clinical people at devoted, and was also very involved in overseeing utilization management, designing care management and disease management programs. 

And it was for me, my first foray into being part of a for profit business and not just a for profit business but also a startup, because I joined devoted when there were about 30 employees and when I left there were about 440 or so. So the ramp in terms of not just the number of people that I was working with there but also the amount of work that we were able to do in that period of time was really incredible and for me that was eye opening in a lot of ways and exciting and energizing and kind of got me hooked a little bit on being part of earlier stage companies that are growing quickly. 

0:11:32 - David Williams
Now you mentioned MGH and Harvard Medical School, and those are places for which I see you have maintained your affiliation over time. How is that sort of waxed and waned over the years? 

0:11:43 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Well. So I maintain a clinical practice. I'm a part time preventive cardiologist. I see patients every, I have one clinic session a week and then I do three or four weeks of inpatient work as an attending on teaching services at the Mass General Hospital for the cardiology division, and the division has been fantastic about allowing me to maintain my affiliation and continue to take care of patients while also doing the work that I do outside of the MGH. And I think for me it is really really important to continue to practice for a few reasons. 

Number one I love it. It keeps me grounded, I think, in what really matters and why, reminds me every day of why it is that I'm doing what I'm doing and inspires me, and I really enjoy seeing and interacting with my patients and helping them. Number two I think it really helps me as a leader and a physician executive to be able to talk about the patients, the fact that I continue to practice, to remain up to date with the latest guidelines, to be able to interact with cardiologists around the country at that level, in addition to being able to talk to them about research and what it is like to be part of a large health system delivering cardiovascular disease care. 

0:13:19 - David Williams
I know quite a few physicians who are also in business MBAs typically and I don't have statistics on it, I'm sure I'm positive, I have a biased sample but I saw when I was in consulting at Boston Consulting Group I worked with some MBA MBAs there and actually one of the keys they said was you had to think you hung up your stethoscope. 

You're not a physician and you maybe have that background. The same way somebody else has a background in physics or history or something like that and you just need to bring that. So that's one extreme. And then I've seen also you said up to date, like keeping up to date, but like at up to date itself the people that they have. They actually want to be practicing so that they're somewhat tied in, but it's like a little bit of attention. And then I've known some other people that have been entrepreneurs and they were practicing for a while. Then they sort of said you know, we got to the point where they were just practicing so little that they didn't feel like they wouldn't want to be their patient and it sounds like you've got about the right mix. 

0:14:12 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll give you my thoughts about this because I think a lot about this and I actually at one point in time talked to you know, one of my business school mentors who was a leadership professor at HBS about this and he said to me only professionals know when they're no longer competent as professionals. And you have to be honest with yourself about when you know, about what you need to do to maintain your competence as a professional. And if you ever get to the point where you're no longer meeting that bar, you have to be honest with yourself and say you know what it's time for me to. It's no longer fair to the people who I'm serving to continue to do this. I feel very confident that you know, basically, with what is effectively 15% effort, I can maintain my clinical competence and be a kind of clinician who I would be very happy to send my parents to, and that's kind of the bar that I maintain. And I think that I actually, you know, pretty strongly disagree with physicians. 

I understand how they you know, this point of view, but I pretty strongly disagree with physicians who say that to become a physician executive you need to fully hang up your stethoscope right and give up the practice of medicine. I think we have a real dearth of strong physician leadership in this country and it is very important that we maintain a perspective on what it is like to be a physician and a practicing physician in the board rooms of healthcare delivery organizations in the United States and worldwide. 

Understanding what it is like to be a doctor or a nurse practitioner or a medical assistant going into work every day is critically important for running a successful organization that is involved in taking care of patients. It's just you can't separate the two. 

0:16:21 - David Williams
Yeah, I very much endorse that view. Well, let's talk about what you're doing now and have been doing for a while, which is NovoCardia. And I wanna ask you, as a starting point, since you started the company, you know what was the need for it in the first place. I understand you needed to set up you know, start up the Crimson Care Collaborative and needed to keep the Russian scientists from causing trouble. But why do you need NovoCardia? Why do we need that? 

0:16:41 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Yeah. So cardiovascular disease is the single biggest driver of healthcare spending from a disease standpoint in this country, counts for $320 plus billion a year in direct medical spending. That is measured as a percentage of GDP, it's about 2% of GDP. There are very few, if any, other clinical specialties that can be measured at that scale in terms of being a percentage of GDP. And we are in the midst of the aging of the baby boomer generation in which we are going to have a net increase in Medicare enrollment of probably 16 to 20 million people over the next five to 10 years. And all of that means, and despite tremendous advances that we've made in caring for people with cardiovascular illness, which itself is a disease of aging 65 to 70% of the average cardiologist patients are Medicare beneficiaries All of that means that we are going to see a dramatic increase in not just the burden of cardiovascular illness at a population level but also the amount of money that we are spending on cardiovascular disease care. 

And despite all the progress we've made as a country in taking better care of patients with cardiovascular illness, preventing a lot of that illness from developing or delaying its progression or development, we still have a lot of opportunity to do better, and when I was at devoted, one of the things that I noticed was that there were a lot of specialty oriented clinical networks which were popping up, either were in existence or were popping up and were working directly with health plans and capitated primary care groups who also work with health plans to help manage quality outcomes and spending for specific diseases or organ systems. 

And many of those were multi-state networks or at least statewide networks, and devoted launched in Florida, which is when I was there in 20, when I was the medical director in 2019. And there was a very small cardiology network, but it was not nearly as impactful or large as I thought it could or should, be given the amount of cardiovascular illness that Medicare beneficiaries were experiencing and the amount of care that they needed. And so I still believe very deeply and I think the work that I've done and the success we've had is born this out that there's just a tremendous opportunity to help cardiologists and help manage care organizations who are delivering care for Medicare age beneficiaries to engage in efforts to better manage the care and the associated spending for cardiovascular illness by entering into more advanced payment models focused on the management of cardiovascular services and costs. 

0:19:55 - David Williams
Yeah, so it certainly sounds like a good reason to get into the space and, of course, as a cardiologist, a biological place to go into too. And you mentioned that there's advances, I think, both on the prevention side and management and so on. And yet I still have the sense and I was trying to find the statistics that somebody had told me about it before and maybe you'll know better, but my understanding is that there are evidence-based care guidelines for a lot of cardiology and that the percentage of people that actually get the sort of optimal care according to the guidelines is fairly low. I don't know whether that's your perspective also and, if so, what the reasons for that would be, because I could see multiple reasons. 

0:20:34 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Great question. So I think cardiovascular disease is, I think, among the most complex. It's really the specialty that we call cardiology is probably five or six different specialties rolled into one. You have general cardiologists, like me, who are kind of the quarterbacks of the cardiovascular disease specialty. You have interventional cardiologists who focus on managing coronary artery disease and also managing valvular disease increasingly, and peripheral artery disease. So you know occlusions or blockages in arteries outside of the heart and blood vessels, but in including in the neck and the legs and the arms and and the abdomen. 

You have electrophysiologists who are electricians, you have heart failure specialists, you have cardio-oncologists, you have imaging specialists. 

So we have we have people who train and spend a ton of time learning about these very complex sub-specialties within the field of cardiology to help take better care of patients. 

And I think that we do a really good job of, as a profession, of following the guidelines. 

We don't follow them perfectly, for sure, there's a lot of opportunity to improve, but if you talk to the average cardiologist in this country and if there is an average one they are all well intentioned. They're all trying to do the best that they can do for their patients. They're all trying to think through how they apply the guidelines in specific circumstances. And so part of how I you know, one of the things that we have to recognize here is that when we, when we narrow our focus on guidelines to the point where we are saying there's a specific right and wrong in every circumstance, I think we don't create enough agency for clinical autonomy or enough room for true clinical autonomy and decision making. And the guidelines do increasingly create that opportunity, and I think it makes it difficult to say that there is one right way to practice. We know that there are a lot of things we should do and shouldn't do, but there's also a lot of gray and I think a lot of the research that that gets published highlights some of that gray. 

To be sure, there are times where people do things that they shouldn't do, but in general we are doing a much better job. I think the research from Get With the Guidelines and the ACC's NCR you know all highlight this. Real world evidence, kind of observational research, highlights that we continue to make steady improvements in how we are following the guidelines and we also continue to do a better job in identifying how we measure those gray areas. And I think that we'll see research continue to reflect that and nuanced interpretations of what comes out will increasingly be able to highlight that there may not be a specific right way to do something in a given circumstance. 

0:23:43 - David Williams
So let's talk about the kind of the contracting and value-based approach that you're describing, and, on the one hand, you were talking about an organization, I think, like what you've got, and maybe what you're doing at, devoted, where you've got these capitated primary care practices that are responsible in the, in the, in the in the broadest sense, for like all the costs and, as you mentioned, cardiology, there's a lot of costs there. So in that circumstance they're trying to figure out well, how do we, you know, keep the costs low while getting the results? And the other side of it might be a more traditional kind of healthcare system and fee for service, where they the hospital owned system may actually have primary care physicians, primarily not to make money from primary care but actually to get the patients to come in for expensive things. And, of course, you have organizations including, you know, a couple that you've mentioned here that are doing both of those things. 

0:24:35 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
So, yeah, so. 

So our role at Nova Cardia is a we've developed a care model and a contracting model and a that that we can wrap around cardiovascular care providers to help them to identify opportunities from a care model standpoint to improve quality, reduce costs of care and put in place the right types of contracting models, both with primary care groups, who are at risk, and with payers, and to then enable them right to align incentives financially with the new care model elements that they put in place, which are largely focused on better management of chronic illness and keeping people out of hospitals, moving care to lower cost sites from hospital based locations and expensive locations, moving care into the home at certain point at certain times. 

Using technology, using evidence, data not just evidence, but data at the point of care that is gathered from patients through remote monitoring tools, for example, through text messaging and other forms of patient engagement and bringing that all together to really empower clinicians to pull the levers that we think and we've identified as being needed to be pulled to drive high quality care at lower cost and then to enable financial incentive alignment around those drivers. 

And so we partner and we've, you know, merged in April of 2023 with the Cardiovascular Associates of America, which is run by Tim Atterbury, who is the former CEO of the American College of Cardiology and a very, very seasoned cardiovascular care and healthcare executive. To bring together a lot of those capabilities with a very large and well respected cardiovascular care delivery platform, we have right now over 300 cardiologists across 16 practices in eight states and the ability to launch and kind of incorporate the care model that and the contracting model that we developed at Novokardia across that platform really creates an ideal opportunity to drive the scaling of value-based care clinical and contracting models, and so that's really the vision behind the merger and Tim and I see you know kind of you know, got together over a year ago to start thinking through this, and it was just really obvious that there was a tremendous partnership opportunity here, and so, after several months of thinking this through, we decided to move forward and bring together our two organizations Great. 

0:27:50 - David Williams
Say a little bit more about site of care, because I think that's one of the things that's sort of on the obvious hand, you've got, you know, a hospital on one side and home on the other, and they're pretty different, although we have hospital at home which we can talk about. But there are some things that are newer that so you've got, I think, typically, like you know, the inpatient setting, you've got emergency department, you've got ambulatory surgery centers, you've got physician offices and so on, and more recently you're seeing things like retail stores, you know the concept of home-based hospital at home, even like community-based EMTs that are out there. 

I mean, what's this proliferation of settings? Is, you know like? How do we deal with that? 

0:28:26 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Yeah, well, I guess, before we say how do we deal with it, we should maybe, I think, because I think that's a really important question, but maybe we should ask you know, why are we seeing this proliferation of organizational efforts, right businesses to focus on trying to move care to different sites? And I think there are a few reasons. The first is patient-centered increased focus on patient-centered care delivery and a recognition that, rather than forcing patients to drive 45 minutes to go to a hospital or a big clunky, you know inflexible business apparatus where we want everybody who's employed by that apparatus to go and work, that we should actually think a little bit more about meeting patients where they are and delivering care in sites which are convenient for them. That might help with a lot of the adherence problems that we have with a lot of the you know no shows, quote-unquote that people worry about when they schedule appointments. Right, there are reasons why people don't come to appointments. It's not because they don't want to go to them, they're not reminded about them, they're inconvenient. There's no effort to speak the language that you know the patient speaks. There's no effort to provide them with information about how far in advance of the appointment they need to arrive and so they don't recognize that they, you know, need to show up 15 or 30 minutes before the appointment to do some set of paperwork or to have an electrocardiogram and EKG before seeing the physician in the case of cardiologists. So, you know, a lot of this effort is about building a more patient-centered health system and care delivery system. 

The second point, I think, is that delivering care outside of these large you know, and I'm creating, you know, a dichotomy here for a purpose, but the, you know, moving care into the community in general allows for care to be delivered at a lower cost. Right, we know that care delivered procedure delivered in ambulatory surgery center is less expensive to our system than the same procedure delivered on a hospital campus, even if it's in the outpatient setting. Medicare reimburses, pays less for it and the costs of delivering that service are lower. So you have convenience cost as being two important drivers. 

And then the third, which is really the catalyst, is the fact that Medicare, our country's largest payer, has made it abundantly clear where it would like payment models to be by 2030. And it has said we want all Medicare, traditional Medicare beneficiaries meaning Medicare beneficiaries not in Medicare advantage to be in some form of accountable care relationship with a physician on the ground. And that means that if Medicare achieves this goal, every one of the 30 to 50 million traditional Medicare beneficiaries is going to have a physician who is, at least in part financially accountable for the costs of the services that that patient is receiving. And this is an effort which began 15 years ago or more and has, you know, really accelerated with the ACO movement and the growth in ACO enrollment through Medicare there are now 12 plus million ACO Medicare beneficiaries who are in accountable care organizations and also with the growth of Medicare advantage, which is privatized Medicare or managed Medicare, which has really focused on partnering with and sharing financial accountability with clinicians on the ground. And you know they now account for over half of all Medicare beneficiaries who are enrolled in privatized Medicare. 

So that payment catalyst is really what's galvanizing a lot of the interest among entrepreneurs, businesses that are investing in the development of these new products, including care delivery resources like EMTs and home based care models, and even retail stores which, yeah, are focused on convenience and access. And I should say that there's one more which is just access right. So we have an access problem in this country. We don't have enough primary care physicians. Some people say we have too many cardiologists. I think the data would suggest that we actually don't have enough. But whether you believe that we have 20,000 too few or 100,000 too few physicians in this country, I think there's general agreement that we have too few physicians in this country for the number of you know. 

0:33:25 - David Williams
I think there's been good things to do, accessing, like yourself, and their amount of progress actually on value based care more than I would have guessed over the past five years or so, and I saw a graph recently that was showing that, like the Medicare, spend per beneficiaries is actually stabilized. 

And you know as much as some of the other policy decisions we've made have have resulted in larger deficits. That would have been even much, much worse if things had gone on the track that there was, and I think you know in the past that there had always been this situation for a long time where, like an ambulatory surgery center, it might be less expensive than a hospital, but a lot of the reasons that they were set up was, hey, the hospital was just had, you know, some things they make money on, some things they lose money on, and if I could rip out the ones that they make money on, like you know, so certain parts of cardiology, orthopedics and so on, it's great for the investor and great for those that are that are running it, but not so good overall. This, I think, is a better, a better setup that we're seeing now. 

0:34:21 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Yeah. 

0:34:22 - David Williams
I am. 

0:34:26 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Yeah, and I think that was a fascinating. I saw I think you're referring to a New York Times which was published a few weeks ago and that was a fascinating article and I think does, I think, the general. I'm generalizing here, but I think the reason number one for that stabilization of Medicare spending over the last decade amongst you know, most people who have some background knowledge about value based care is is the increased focus on value based care payment models and keeping people out of the hospital when they don't need to be there, choosing better clinical tools, better tests or the more appropriate tests, better interventions, more appropriate interventions for, for for patients, and delivering care in a way that is accessible, timely, right meets, meets the tripling, and, and so it's really, I think, heartening and exciting to see that we have made such substantial progress. 

0:35:38 - David Williams
So I'm going to ask you to step away from cardiology for a second and ask you an unfair question, and we'll see how you handle it, which is something else that's going on here in Boston, which is that Dana Farber and the Brigham are parting ways and Dana Farber is is connecting with BI Leahy and they're building a new inpatient cancer hospital, and I wonder what your take is on that. 

0:36:03 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
You know, I'm a, I'm a. 

I don't have any insider knowledge about this. 

I don't I don't have really any kind of nuanced understanding of of the dynamics that are at play here. 

What I guess, what I can say, is that cancer is cancer is something that requires really specialized in patient care to treat. 

And so when I think about whether or not that patients will be best served in a place where they have a general hospital or a specialized cancer hospital, what I'm what I think about is, you know, ensuring that you not just you don't just have access to those really expert oncologists, but also that you have access to all of the other elements of the inpatient healthcare ecosystem that are so important for delivering world-class care to patients with cancer who require care in the hospital. And so I think, you know, we should feel confident that the Dana Farber is partnering with another multi-specialty, very well-respected healthcare system in building this specialized hospital and that they're going to be able to deliver great care for patients. And that really is what, in my mind, matters most is that you know the people who rely upon the clinicians in this in this city, who are among the best trained and most experienced in the world, continue to be able to access the care that they need, and I think we can you know pretty pretty well rest assured that that will continue to happen. 

0:37:55 - David Williams
So my final question is a little less rough than that one, but, nicely put, I don't think you made any new enemies on that. 

0:38:01 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Thank you. Good, that was my goal, yes. 

0:38:06 - David Williams
So my question is if you've read any good books lately, if you have time with all that you're doing anything you would recommend. 

0:38:12 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Yeah, so I'm in the middle of reading a book called the Winter Soldier which is about is by Daniel Mason. He's a medical student in Vienna in 1914 who gets sent to the front lines in World War I after having completed, I guess, part of medical school. You know the medical school was very different back then. The knowledge base that we've accrued over the last century is just astounding and I think that's one of the more amazing things for me kind of revelations or reminders about as I read this book. But it's just a really fascinating historical fiction book. It kind of gives you a sense of what life was like as a, not just as a clinician in that time, but also how uncertain and how in many ways medieval the practice of healthcare was. So it makes me really glad to be living in the time that I'm living in and to have been able to train at the place that I trained at and have all the tools that I have right now. 

0:39:30 - David Williams
Great Well, Dr Dan Blumenthal, thank you so much for joining me today as a guest on the Health Biz podcast. 

0:39:36 - Dr. Dan Blumenthal
Thank you so much for having me, David. It was really a pleasure. 

0:39:40 - David Williams
You've been listening to the Health Biz podcast with me, david Williams, president of Health Business Group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in healthcare, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite service. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There's more good stuff to come and you won't want to miss an episode. If your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in healthcare, check out our website, healthbusinessgroupcom. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page