Rebuilding the healthcare system around people, while delivering outcomes that matters

One of the most enduring lessons I’ve learned in healthcare—from my early days as a bedside ER nurse to driving payor engagement, value-based care initiatives, and home care at Sharecare—is that people don’t access the wrong care because they don’t value their health and well-being. Our systems simply weren’t built to guide them toward the right care at the right time.

The truth is, we’ve built complexity where there should be clarity, and optimized parts of the system (benefits, care management, digital tools) without solving for the whole. The result is a fragmented experience that feels overwhelming to navigate and expensive to sustain, and we still wonder why patients show up in emergency rooms for preventable conditions. But when the system is reactive by design and reimbursement logic overrides care logic, these outcomes aren’t surprising, but inevitable.

And while improving patient experience is essential, experience without clinical impact or financial sustainability is an incomplete solution. We must build care models that deliver both empathy and outcomes, both access and accountability.

At Sharecare, we’re building exactly that: a unified system that brings together benefits navigation, clinical advocacy, in-home support, digital engagement, and real-time insights. It’s all integrated to reduce avoidable utilization, improve outcomes, and lower the total cost of care. When you align experience and cost, you don’t just improve outcomes; you de-risk the business model. That’s what moves the needle for payors, providers, and employers alike.

And it’s working. Our in-home clinical and caregiver interventions have helped reduce hospital readmissions and preserve dignity for high-risk, aging individuals—while saving tens of thousands per person in projected costs. Case in point, within the first year working with one client that has more than 120,000 covered lives, we achieved:

• $1.7 million in risk reduction savings
• $7.8 million by guiding employees to appropriate services
• $2.8 million through personalized medical support

These indicators reveal what’s possible when we pair data with compassion and design care systems that flex to the realities of people’s lives.

Transformation starts with timely, accurate data: eligibility, risk scores, claims, and clinical indicators. But it’s only meaningful when that data fuels early intervention, proactive outreach, and seamless care coordination. Our country’s healthcare system still incentivizes treatment over prevention, volume over value, and fragmentation over continuity. Until we redesign those defaults, we will keep spending more to get less.

We also need to confront a core operational truth: doctors can’t be the default solution to every need. That model is costly and unsustainable. It’s time to expand the circle of care—engaging nurses, caregivers, and digital tools far earlier in the journey.

It’s time for clinical operators, financial decision-makers, and tech leaders to stop working in silos. If we don’t collaborate, we’ll keep missing the inflection point that’s right in front of us. Healthcare doesn’t just need modernization—it needs reimagination. It needs leadership that is clinically grounded, financially fluent, and human-centered.

That’s the future I believe in, and the system we must build together.