Russell co-founded Yuzu as a health plan before pivoting to become the infrastructure layer powering alternative health plans.

He walks through what the team learned building a plan from scratch: that technology alone doesn't differentiate, that the employers most in need aren't startups but cost-pressured blue-collar businesses, and that the real opportunity was in powering the plans already winning on price rather than competing with them.

The conversation covers how alternative health plans are beating traditional major health plans through reference-based pricing, direct primary care, and navigated cash pay, and why those plans needed an all-in-one TPA and platform to operationalize it.

Russell also discusses the $35M raise and the growing employer appetite for alternatives as healthcare costs continue to rise.

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Patrick Sheehan, VP of Value-Based Care at Withings, walks through why a connected device company sees the CMMI ACCESS opportunity differently than pure digital health players. For Withings, the device is the core cost structure, which changes the rate math entirely. Plus, their existing relationships with ACOs and health systems give them a coordination foundation that most ACCESS applicants are still figuring out.

The conversation covers how Withings became a Medicare Part B provider, what they've built on top of their connected device offering to participate in ACCESS, and why Patrick believes the program only works if participants coordinate care back to PCPs and ACOs rather than going at it alone.

Patrick also discusses patient choice as the most transformational design element of ACCESS, the fragmentation risk that comes with it, and how Withings is thinking about patient awareness and outreach as the program launches in July.

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Shiv Rao, CEO and Co-Founder of Abridge, walks through how the company is expanding beyond AI scribing following new partnerships with JAMA and NEJM. He frames the expansion around a pre-visit, during-visit, and post-visit product framework, using the context captured across the full clinical encounter to surface relevant evidence and close workflow gaps at the right moment.

The conversation covers how Abridge thinks about clinical intelligence as a reframe of clinical decision support. The old category was defined by rule-based alerts and popup fatigue. The new approach is contextual, surfacing cues grounded in medical literature without interrupting the clinical encounter. Shiv walks through a concrete cardiology example of how this works in practice.

He also discusses go-to-market strategy, why Abridge started with large health systems and IDNs, and how being embedded at that level creates the opportunity to collapse adjacent workflows like CDI and prior authorization rather than layering AI on top of them.

The conversation closes with where Shiv thinks AI impact shows up in healthcare, and why the gap between what clinicians feel and what the data shows is one of the most important problems the industry needs to solve.

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