Abby Burns (00:02):
From Advisory Board, we're bringing you a radio advisory, your weekly download on how to untangle health care's most pressing challenges. I'm Abby Burns. Today I'm talking about what's going on in the digital health landscape. This is a segment of the market that exploded during the pandemic years. It shattered funding records and norms and it catapulted thousands of startups into your inbox, your voicemail, and of course into your list of partners. Digital healthcare investment slowed down a little bit in recent years, although still above pre-pandemic norms. And now it's creeping back up as AI enablement brings us the next and ultimately probably an even bigger storm of transformation. With such a rapid pace of change, it's really hard to take a step back and strategically consider what's going on in the digital landscape and with digital funding, what it means for incumbents and how you might need to think or act differently to either engage in or at least benefit from this next phase of innovation and investment. That was the goal of our conversation on stage at Advisor Boards Research Summit in Carlsbad, California, where I was thrilled to be joined by Megan Zweig, president and CEO of digital health enterprise strategy firm, Rock Health Advisory. Here's our conversation. Hey, Megan, thank you for being here.

Megan Zweig (01:21):
Thanks for having me. So great to see you all.

Abby Burns (01:23):
Megan, we're going to talk about a lot of things today. We're going to talk about what's happening in the digital health funding landscape, what it means for hospitals and health systems. To start, I'm wondering if you can give our audience and our listeners almost a lens through which to interpret our conversation. So the simplest form of the question is why is it important for incumbents to understand what's happening in the digital health investment landscape?

Megan Zweig (01:49):
It's a great question. Also, I do just want to say thank you so much for having me. I actually started my career at the advisory board company. Proud alum worked at Advisor Board for almost a decade and so it has been really fun to jump from living a work world where health systems and providers were very much at the epicenter of that to living my work world at Rock Health, where we are really centering digital health innovation and the startups and vendors that are really bringing this technology to life. And so when I contemplate from the venture capital point of view, like why do we want to look at those investment signals? I think it's really important to understand where capital is flowing, where investors are placing bets on technology in particular, because they're trying to make smart bets about what is going to grow, what is going to grow very quickly and both what is going to power the businesses of existing incumbents, but also where is their diffusion? Where are care delivery centers popping up that don't have the incumbents as the hub but are becoming really important access points, especially for consumers today. And so I like to think about it both from the lens of how can technology make your existing businesses, processes, staff better at what they're doing today, but also what are we evolving into next?

Abby Burns (03:10):
Yeah. I heard a couple different themes that you just said. You're talking about opportunity, right? What opportunities do we need to be tracking that can support our business? You talked about the pace of change. What we do today might be different from what we could do six months down the road. And then I also heard this element of competition or almost risk. I'm curious particularly on this last piece about how you think about the competition element of this.

Megan Zweig (03:33):
Right now there's a big bifurcation in terms of where venture funding is flowing. So I think of the trajectory of digital health in four key phases.

Abby Burns (03:44):
I love it.

Megan Zweig (03:45):
I know I got to bring in some frameworks. The first is over a decade ago, digital health was just finding its footing. There was a lot of validation that had to happen to prove that software and data was going to transform healthcare similarly to how it has transformed every other industry that we know. You had early stage companies like Omada who for the first time was proving that a diabetes prevention program could be digitized and yield the same outcomes. But at the time you had to build your own appointment scheduling, you had to bring in your own provider directory, you had to build your own telehealth interface, you had to build your own asynchronous text messaging for health coaches. It is so much easier now to build all of those things. And so I have a lot of respect for the folks that were there first, for the entrepreneurs who were like, "You know what? I think we can build something better and I'm going to do that."

(04:35):
Then shift into the pandemic, we all know what happened then. We had to turn on telemedicine, we had to turn on remote patient monitoring, we had to turn on virtual clinical trials essentially overnight. And I think we actually saw that the system had a greater tolerance for change and for the adoption of technology than maybe we had previously thought. At the same time though ... And this is getting to your competitive point, you had global investors, non-healthcare investors who saw that opportunity, came into the space, invested a ton of capital and honestly, a lot of those startups were raising at valuations that they ultimately couldn't grow into fully. So after the pandemic, you had a bit of a contraction with a lot of these organizations because in person care came back in a very big way. And so you had this correction period that a lot of these companies had to navigate. What we're seeing now in this fourth wave, which I think AI is very much underpinning, we're seeing a healthy amount of capital going into companies, but it's really bifurcated in terms of the haves and the have nots. So about 40% of venture capital invested in digital health last year went to those companies that were raising mega deals. So those are deals over a hundred million dollars. That is a ton of capital invested in a handful of companies.

Abby Burns (05:54):
How does that compare to the mid-pandemic boom when tons of capital was flooding the market, a lot of less mature startups entering the scene?

Megan Zweig (06:05):
Mega deals were few and far between, I would say before 2020. I think we would've been surprised if there were more than 10 in any given year. Last year it was dozens, right?

Abby Burns (06:14):
Wow.

Megan Zweig (06:14):
And it wasn't just the number of companies raising mega deals, it was also the pace at which they were doing so. So companies like OpenEvidence, companies like Hippocratic AI, Commure, Abridge, they're raising not just mega rounds, but multiple mega rounds within 12, 18 months. The big thing that has changed is that these are really AI native organizations and investors are essentially making the bet that instead of in a SaaS based era that when we have AI technology and agentic technology, they're believing that we can compress sales cycles, we can integrate faster, we can implement faster and get to the outcomes and ROI that we want more quickly. That's a big bet. But I think when you look at some of the numbers out there in terms of the adoption of ambient documentation and of physicians using various medical reference tools, you are starting to see clinicians wanting to adopt more of these technologies.

Abby Burns (07:15):
We started talking about some of the use cases that are really driving a lot of the investment activity and I want to come back there in a moment, but first I want to sit with this idea of the investor side. I am wondering how the funders look different today compared to a few years ago and what that might signal as we look forward.

Megan Zweig (07:33):
Yeah. I think that there were a lot of big global investors that were really pushing up investment in '21 and '22. They're not really participating in the investment market right now. And so I think it's a good thing that you have a lot of healthcare investors who've been investing for over a decade at this point. They're deploying a lot of capital. You have generalist funds like General Catalyst, like Andreessen Horowitz who are very, very active in the healthcare space and have built teams. We do see that when those organizations participate in rounds, the average deal sizes tend to be higher, which is not a particularly novel finding. They are incredibly well capitalized. The other thing that I'll say about investors like private equity, sometimes operating a bit more like a venture capital fund would investing earlier, you definitely see corporate VCs that continue to play an active role, but I would say their ambition is typically more strategic than simply monetary.

Abby Burns (08:32):
Yeah. And it's interesting that it's almost a more experienced investor class that we see today compared to a few years ago, which could increase the confidence then in deploying such large quantities of capital.

Megan Zweig (08:43):
Yeah. When you think about investors who are a bit more novices, I think you can get carried away with AI very easily and I think a lot of investors have. But when we talk to entrepreneurs and startups who are raising right now, investors are asking really consistent questions. It's not, what are you doing with AI? It's still, what problem are you trying to solve for? Why should I bet on you instead of the hundred of other digital health companies who are knocking on my door? And so I don't want to suggest that there's an AI washing that investors are looking past. I think that they are slowing down doing the diligence and trying to really figure out what is the moat that people are building and it's increasingly not going to be AI because that is being transformed and commoditized so quickly right now.

Abby Burns (09:30):
Yes. Okay. That's really interesting. So what are the use cases for or where is funding going if you had to thematically lay it out, what constitutes an investible thesis in the middle of 2026?

Megan Zweig (09:44):
Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about what's happening transformation wise from the consumer lens because we are seeing a lot of capital that is being deployed in startups that are helping with care coordination, care orchestration that are plugging into LLMs as the front door for care seeking behavior. So you can think about all the big LLMs, whether it is Claude, GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, name your favorite. They all essentially have been building out healthcare specific LLMs that are consumer facing that they have launched for the most part earlier this year.

Abby Burns (10:28):
Yeah, this is basically happening in real time.

Megan Zweig (10:30):
Yes. Absolutely. So in December we surveyed 8,000 US adults about their use of these LLMs for healthcare use cases. Over a third of adults said that they've used an AI chatbot, perhaps not surprisingly for healthcare information or to support their health in some way. I'm sure that number is higher at this point. And when you think about the LLMs as the front door, they are now creating connections and partnerships into other parts of the care ecosystem. So one thing that they're really trying to do is bring more context into those discussions so that they're using company like BeWell, for example, has some partnerships with some of these LLMs as well as an organization called HealthX. They are plugging in with the longitudinal patient record so that that context is available when you're querying. They're also connecting into longevity plays like Function Health. So you're integrating diagnostic testing, lab testing. They're integrating with Whoop, with Oura, with Fitbit, with Apple Watch, et cetera. I'm sure I miss someone. Samsung. To bring all of that wearable and connected device data again into that experience that that person is having.

(11:41):
Not to mention that they're connecting into experiences like Weight Watchers, et cetera, that are getting you closer into a care experience. It's not so dissimilar to how wearable companies very recently ... You may have seen Whoop and Oura both announced that they are enabling clinical experiences on their platforms. So they have struck up partnerships such that, for example, in the Whoop app, you are going to be able to see a clinician, to have a physician telehealth visit. I believe some of the messaging is asynchronous and you can see that the provider who you would be talking to is going to have all of that context data that you're getting from your wearable watch, which is not an expectation that a patient can have when they're going into the traditional delivery system at this point, but it's certainly something that they're starting to bring into that visit. And so it's really interesting to see how this could potentially be a disintermediating factor to primary care and to the referral streams that hospitals and health systems rely upon and it'll be really incumbent on the folks in the room, folks at providers to really think about where do I start plugging into these digital ecosystems that are really attracting patients and where there's just a tremendous amount of engagement.

(12:57):
We see that people are using LLMs if they are using them typically multiple times a week. This is not a one and done episodic kind of thing and those searches increase when someone is pregnant, when someone is having some kind of episode of care. And so we can talk a ton about is it trusted, is it safe? Is it getting people to the right setting of care when it's needed? But those front doors are open and people are going through them and it is being built faster, I would say, than what is happening on the provider side.

Abby Burns (13:28):
Yeah. That encompasses both the diffusion of influence, right? There is greater influence over care decisions, but then what you're getting at also is there's actually potentially the disruption of where you're receiving your care.

Megan Zweig (13:39):
Yes. It's really interesting. I was chatting with a health plan the other day who was very interested in talking to those LLM players because they're like, "We already run telemedicine in all 50 states. We are credentialed to do that. We already take on that risk. We know that those LLMs don't want to take on that risk. Why don't we plug in? Why can't we be that off-ramp into telemedicine and care delivery when that person is seeking that?" So I do think that we're going to see a bit of this race to integration and partnership. And I like to use the example of the Android versus iOS operating systems where you have all of these apps that were built for those respective operating systems and then you become captive as a user. I almost wonder if that analogy is useful for thinking about the different LLMs and then the ecosystems that are being built on top. I did not charge it, but I am usually wearing an Oura ring and I was using Claude and I asked, "Can I integrate my Oura data?" And it said, "No, there's no integration." But Oura does integrate with some of the other LLMs.

(14:47):
And so I think there's this really interesting question of where will patient loyalty drive utilization and the experience? Will all of the connected device wearable companies ultimately integrate with all of these LLMs? Will that be true for the different telemedicine digital health offerings or are you going to see more walled garden ecosystems pop up somewhat similar to what we saw with iOS versus Android?

Abby Burns (15:14):
Will everything ultimately become interoperable, the question that we've been asking forever. When we're thinking of what's a defensible investible thesis in 2026, consumer wearables seems like a very strong one or direct to consumer, I guess I'll call it the broader category. Are there other use cases that you're tracking?

Megan Zweig (15:34):
Yeah. Right now I think that tech enabled services are having a moment again. I definitely think that there was a point where investors were more interested in SaaS, pure SaaS. Let's not bring labor services into it. I think it's easy to say, "Well, the margins are better on SaaS, et cetera." But I think we all know when it comes to healthcare, integrating pure technology into the people and processes is actually quite difficult. Change management is quite hard and we actually see a lot of tech enabled services organizations who want to own the outcome rather than just saying, "Here's the software, you figure it out."

(16:13):
So I think a couple of examples of that last year, 2025, we had couple of digital health IPOs that were really emblematic of this. So you guys are probably familiar. Omada, the chronic disease management company, they went out and Hinge Health in the MSK space. And so I think that they were really important proof points for the sector to say, "Okay, we had this thesis of this is far beyond telemedicine 1.0. This is truly tech-enabled services, virtual care delivery. You have connected devices. You have algorithms that are monitoring that patient generated data. You have health coaches who can intervene asynchronously. You have appropriate escalation protocols to clinicians and ultimately you are managing outcomes for this population of patients. And to your point, there is the interoperability connectivity to the traditional provider to make sure that they're in the loop on how their patients are doing. And so I think it was really cool that Omada and Hinge very much proved out that thesis and proved it out along a number of different condition management vectors.

Abby Burns (17:17):
And to your point of there were almost proof points, they had pretty successful IPOs.

Megan Zweig (17:21):
Yeah. They did. And I think that all public companies are on a journey for growth and growth and growth, but I think that they both have been really thoughtful about how do they get to greater sustainability and how do they, again, run at the right markets where they can drive outcomes that frankly plans and employers really care about. So I think their playbook of tech-enabled services has been now passed down to the next generation of digital health companies who are trying to make it happen. You look at Noom, there's a lot of companies like Midi and the menopausal care space who are crafting experiences that I think patients haven't necessarily come to expect from the healthcare system where they are getting coaching and care and advice in a more personalized way on an ongoing basis between visits. And that's something that I think health systems really value too, right? Midi has entered into partnerships with Mount Sinai, for example, because they want to expand their capacity. They're an extension of the care team and they are referring patients back when appropriate.

Abby Burns (18:17):
Yeah. Essentially looking from the health system vantage point, how can we enhance our patient centricity? Well, here's some partners that do it really well, where is there opportunity for overlap?

(19:12):
Let me ask a question that I think drives a lot of anxiety or mental load for leaders who need to be making investment decisions. If we look at the 13,000 or so startups that flooded the market in the early 2020s, a lot of them are no longer on the scene. I'm interested in sort of the staying power of the startups that are on the market now, especially as the pace of change of the technology, to your point about tech-enabled services, the pace of change of the technology that's powering these solutions is changing so rapidly. How do you think about that or how should leaders think about that as they are looking at how do we think about our investment portfolio?

Megan Zweig (19:55):
Yeah. That's a really good question and I think every investor right now is asking, "Is Epic going to eat your lunch?" That's an inevitable question. And I think it's interesting because a lot of companies have made themselves more integrated, easier to adopt, find value from because they have intentionally integrated with Epic amidst all the other EHRs. Other folks are saying, "Well, no, we're not getting close to clinical workflow, non-clinical workflow, things that Epic is going to build."

(20:28):
I think it'll be really interesting to watch in the next few years what happens when you have Epic rolling out new ambient documentation capabilities, all sorts of agentic capabilities and you have a lot of health systems, I'm sure some in the room who decided to go with probably what they considered to be best in breed or the vendor that their clinicians they liked the most, that they trusted the most, et cetera. And it is definitely not lost on me that I've chatted with a number of health systems who may have gone with a particular vendor and are now kind of scratching their heads saying, "Are we going to pull that out because Epic is able to fulfill our needs right now?" I think there are some really big swings being made that some of these companies are really trying to become the system of record, which is what these EHRs are. But when you think about building something that is AI native that has voice baked in as core capability, is it possible? Maybe it's possible that some of these companies come out on top and I think that speaks to that sense of competition, real competition companies are feeling right now.

(21:38):
That it's not just, "Oh, we're competing against other startups and vendors that are like me." It is now we are very much competing with the core infrastructure of hospitals. I either need to figure out how we are integrating with it, how are we adding value alongside it or if we're going to not replace the whole thing necessarily right now, but if we are going to be chosen over the existing capabilities, like how to prove that I truly am best in breed and I'm enabling the health system to do something that is truly differentiating. If you are hinging your innovation solely on your EHR, that's not going to feel particularly innovative. For your clinicians, for your patients, it's going to provide a ton of absolutely essential core infrastructure that is needed for clinical care and operations. But if you're trying to differentiate on patient access on experience, then you can't just do what everybody else is doing.

(22:39):
A lot of these startups see enough demand that folks want to try something different and want to try to get into where the care journey is beginning and extending far outside of the walls of the hospital. So you need some players that are going to make some big bets, but I think that's really exciting. I also think there's a lot of room where the incumbents, EHRs aren't necessarily playing.

Abby Burns (23:00):
Yeah. I'm curious about this from the incumbent perspective. When you're working with health systems in particular who are debating this Epic first best in breed debate, are there archetypes of systems that you think should be thinking differently on that question?

Megan Zweig (23:15):
I think that we see more appetite for, I'll call it big I innovation. I've never used that term before, but I'll use it right now, which I'll view as not just we are a customer and you're a vendor, but more appetite for co-development, commercialization, venture creation, we do see that more from the larger systems, the academics. Because they feel and rightly so, they have data, they have clinical expertise, they have workflow expertise, they have scientific expertise that they can really bring to bear and help build something that's not just going to be useful for them, but potentially useful for the ecosystem. Somebody said in jest the other day, and I'm really forgetting who it was, which is maybe for the best, but they essentially said, "Health systems love building for other health systems and they hate buying from other health systems." And I was just like, "Oh goodness." If you are building with the intention of commercializing something, you have to be really thoughtful that you're not just overbuilding for your own challenges, but you are truly validating to see if that is something that can work at scale in the market and where there is demand.

(24:24):
Sometimes there can be this notion of, we have this intractable problem and we solved it for ourselves and now we are going to solve it for everybody else and company creation, entrepreneurship, it's just not that easy. And so I do think it's really amazing that there are so many organizations right now and not just single organizations, but organizations who are banding together.

Abby Burns (24:46):
Yeah, consortium.

Megan Zweig (24:48):
Exactly. To make some pretty smart bets on validating vendor solutions, co-developing potential solutions, spinning companies out. You can't necessarily lose sight of it takes a really, really great entrepreneurial team to make those things go. They require ownership and equity and they require a lot of diligence that this is something where there is actual pull, actual demand from the market on. So to go back to the core of your question, I think a lot of that is at the larger academics, larger health systems who have a bit more cash to spare. But I will say that even at regional smaller health systems, it's not too uncommon to hear of folks investing off their balance sheets. Maybe they don't have a separate corporate venture capital group, but maybe they're making some bets. I think though that in those instances, it's so important for them to think about, how do I make this solution work for me, but how do I not overtax that startup team so much that they're actually going to have a hard time scaling and selling to others? Because if that team is only working on my issue and curating something that is so bespoke for my workflows, they're actually going to be dead in the water when it comes to figuring out how do they scale that solution to other health systems.

Abby Burns (26:08):
And I think it's important as part of this conversation, one of the things I want to get your take on is what it actually means and looks like to be a good partner to startups from a health system perspective. Before we go there, though I do want to sit on the health system strategy side of the house because I think, and you alluded to this, health systems are under a lot of pressure from patients, from their boards, from prospective staff to demonstrate that they are actively investing and thinking about how to position themselves for an AI enabled future or really an AI enabled present. And the digital health co-creation I think holds a lot of allure there of if we can incubate solutions internally, we are part of the change that's not happening to us that shows a level of sophistication that maybe attracts investors, partners, what have you. Not all organizations are going to be equally well set up to act as incubators. How do you think about readiness to play that role?

Megan Zweig (27:05):
It's really hard. It's really hard to go it alone. I think that's why to your exact point, there's a lot of these consortiums that are popping up and not just consortiums of health systems, but also bringing in a third party who has done company creation before to guide that. It's an art and a science, but a lot of science to how do you launch a business and how do you validate that it's going to work and how do you bring in the right talent? So I think that it's very attractive right now because of the margin pressure that you all are feeling to think, "Okay, if we need to find new revenue, diversify revenue, why don't we leverage some of our internal assets and figure out how we commercialize that? And it's something has been done in devices, molecules, et cetera. And digital health, it's just a little bit of a different beast. It's a muscle. A lot of health systems haven't necessarily put to work, but a lot are starting to and starting to together and with partners. And I think that's the important thing is making sure that you have folks alongside you who have really done this before and also who can help you carve out a space in the organization that is allowed to move quickly, fail relatively fast, and kind of do that in a way that is arm's length removed from the pace of the traditional system.

Abby Burns (28:24):
Yep. Close enough that the investment is aligned with the system strategy and the system vision far enough away that some of the cultural inertia that gets in the way of faster progress is maybe not as prohibitive.

Megan Zweig (28:37):
Yeah, I think that's fair.

Abby Burns (28:39):
I want to turn to the partnership conversation specifically as this interest is heating up around partnering with digital health companies, and we can even say startups. What does it look like to be an effective partner? Because I think there are some different things that health systems need to think about when partnering with startups that they might when partnering, for example, with another health system.

Megan Zweig (29:00):
Yeah. And I'm going to say this, but I'm going to say this with love, which is that I think health systems sometimes can have a lot of hubris and rightly so. You all represent such a big potentially transformative opportunity for these small organizations working with you all. I was chatting with a new chief innovation officer the other day who was getting pressure from his CEO to reign in some startup partnership and he asked me, "Do you think they would go for a regional exclusivity clause?" And absolutely not. And if they do, you shouldn't work with them. A startup, a vendor is not going to handcuff themselves and limit their reach and their market in order to work with a single player. Especially this was like a small regional health system in an incredibly competitive market. And if they did, that would be the sign that this was not the horse that you wanted to back in this race.

Abby Burns (30:00):
Oh, interesting.

Megan Zweig (30:01):
I think that would be a sign of a less sophisticated founder or startup if they were willing to accept those terms, which really were going to cut them off at the knees in terms of being able to build in that particular market. So I think it's stupid simple. I always use a dating analogy. You have to be a good partner, you have to communicate effectively, you have to have shared goals, you want to start slow. We've partnered with Sutter Health in the past. They've always talked about this crawl, walk, run analogy, which I know they used with their ambient documentation rollout. You start with intentional centers that are excited for adoption where you have those champions. They're going to be loud and give a lot of feedback on training, on workflow, et cetera. And then by the time it was ready to roll out, there was a huge list of folks that wanted, in this case, like the Ambient documentation to be rolled out. Again, that pull that we're starting to se from clinicians. And so I don't know that there's any special sauce apart from treat others how you would want to be treated if you too were a bit more of the David rather than the Goliath.

Abby Burns (31:04):
Yeah. The golden rule never fails.

Megan Zweig (31:06):
Yeah.

Abby Burns (31:08):
When you think about the different types of enterprise clients that you work with, hospital health systems, life science, whether it's payers, are there differences in what they're interested in or what they're looking for in their digital health and innovation or investment activity?

Megan Zweig (31:25):
Yeah. I'd say on the pharma side, we're definitely seeing a lot of interest in those direct to patient channels. It's pretty crazy, but it's only recent that Lilly stood up Lilly Direct, that Pfizer stood up Pfizer for all. There are these brand new direct to patient access channels where these pharma companies are reaching patients and they are directly competing with the hims and rows of the world who are also offering a telemedicine plus prescription plus potentially refer patient into a digital coaching, nutrition, fitness, wellness offering depending on what they're looking for. And so I think they're trying to be really thoughtful about what does a seamless experience look like. And it's not too dissimilar from what we're seeing honestly on the LLM side where you just see this huge collapse from seeking information behavior to action.

(32:18):
When we survey people and those people who, again, are the third of Americans right now who are using AI chatbots for health information and doing so very regularly, they are taking action and follow up with something like 18% of people said that they changed their medication because of information that they found on the LLMs. A much larger portion of that said they went to go see a provider and even larger portion of that said they went to another resource. So people are not just looking at information from the LLMs but are validating that, but the time is being collapsed from someone seeking information, wondering if something is going on to taking an action because of it and being connected into this digital health ecosystem to have something done about it.

(32:58):
And so if you're a pharma company, you're also thinking about how are we facilitating those experiences in a more robust way. And honestly, GLP-1s, there's such high demand for that that it is changing how patients are thinking about accessing care. So that's like their wedge in. So then now they can build out experiences if you have COVID or you have a migraine, other things.

Abby Burns (33:22):
Megan, as we wind down our time, a two-pronged question for you. What do you think health system and plan and incumbent leaders should be looking at in the digital health investment world for the rest of 2026? Pretty short time span will keep it super actionable. And then as we look a little bit further out?

Megan Zweig (33:42):
I do think in the short term a lot is being thrown at health systems to absorb. I do think that it's this careful balance of how do you make sure that you are not falling behind the things that are increasingly going to become table stakes in terms of the workflow being easier to use, more voice enabled, more automated, et cetera, but not losing sight of the bigger innovation plays that I actually think your teams will be incredibly excited about. Whether that's extending your behavioral health network through the right partners, whether it's extending ... I mentioned menopausal care. Whether it's competing more on a great experience for pregnant women and families with new kids. I do think that there's a lot of building in digital health that is really specialized for particular people and populations that can be done because often digital health companies are serving people nationwide and so they can carve out and build something that's for a smaller sliver of population, which health systems don't necessarily have the luxury of doing.

(34:43):
You all have to serve everyone in your communities. And so I think sometimes these partnerships can actually give you a wedge into how to better serve particular parts of the population. Longer term, I mean, God, who knows, people keep telling me not to make predictions about AI because it's just moving so fast that whatever we say now is not going to be true. So I think it's just have smart, empathetic people around you who are very resilient to change. I know it's all a little bit scary, but surround yourself with the folks who can lean into how do we do this responsibly and how can we do it in a way that puts consumers at the center a bit more.

Abby Burns (35:23):
Well, Megan, thank you so much.

Megan Zweig (35:24):
Thank you so much for having me. Thanks everyone.

Abby Burns (35:47):
New episodes drop every Tuesday. If you like Radio Advisory, please share it with your networks, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating and a review. Radio Advisory is a production of Advisory Board. This episode was produced by Rae Woods, Chloe Bakst, Atticus Raasch, and me, Abby Burns. The episode was edited by Katy Anderson with technical support provided by Dan Tayag, Chris Phelps, and Joe Shrum. Additional support was provided by Leanne Elston, Erin Collins, and Dominique Del Gaudio. Special thanks to the team from Allied Productions. We'll see you next week.