Rethinking the System, One Conversation at a Time

Rick Rawson is a former senior healthcare executive with 40 years experience leading healthcare systems. In this episode, he explains why cutting costs and chasing transactions made hospitals weaker—and how a community-first, mission-driven strategy tripled revenue, rebuilt trust, and grew access across rural towns.

World leader in shared decision‑making Dr. Glyn Elwyn (Dartmouth) joins Judson to unpack co‑production in healthcare: what it looks like in real visits, why simple tools like Option Grid change choices, and how SDM can protect clinicians from burnout and moral injury while improving outcomes and patient trust. Glyn traces his path from rural Wales—through a lab explosion, an arts degree, and a “back‑door” into medicine—to building the field’s most used measures (Observer OPTION‑5, CollaboRATE) and pushing health systems to become true learning health systems. We also explore ambient listening, elective surgery utilization, primary‑care access, and what leaders (and payers) can do tomorrow.

The U.S. healthcare system has no shortage of resources, talent, or ambition. Yet for patients and families, it too often delivers fragmentation, frustration, and suffering. Few leaders have both lived that failure personally and reshaped the system - as Maureen Bisognano has.

Instead of chasing prestige, Dr. Alleman chose family medicine to reinvent care. He launched Antioch Med in Wichita, Kansas, where patients pay a monthly membership—priced like a Costco subscription—for full physician access, deeply discounted labs and medications, and care not defined by billing codes.

Göran Henriks served as the Chief Executive for Learning & Innovation in Jönköping, Sweden, for nearly 30 years and is globally recognized for pioneering co-production and radical customization in healthcare delivery. He advises governments, health systems, and academic institutions around the world, and if you’re wrestling with cost, quality, or burnout, he has already solved versions of your problems at population scale.

Discover the story behind the health‑care system that Harvard, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and two U.S. Baldrige Awards all cite as living proof that American medicine can reinvent itself—even in one of the most rugged, under‑resourced corners of the map.

Whether you are a CFO staring at the “Big Beautiful Bill,” a medical director navigating Gen‑Z workforce expectations, or a policy student hunting for a dissertation topic, Dr. Saha’s blend of data, field stories, and blunt truth‑telling will challenge—and equip—you to act.

I worked for a number of years as a senior hospital executive for Adventist Health, a $5 billion system in the western US. Our guest in this episode, Scott Reiner, was the CEO of that system until, at the peak of his career, he walked away to launch a pair of social ventures working to reframe the approach to healthcare in rural southern Africa. In his time at Adventist Health, Scott completely changed the way that I think about healthcare, and I had always wanted to have a chance to sit down with him and hear his take on his journey and on healthcare in general. I hope that you find our conversation as interesting and inspiring as I did.