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Few medical dramas have resonated as deeply with physicians as HBO's The Pitt.  Emergency physician Dr. Jacob Lentz, a medical consultant on the series, takes us behind the scenes of the critically acclaimed show and explains how - and why - The Pitt gets ER medicine so right.   Credit: Audio clips from The Pitt courtesy of HBO Max.

Healthcare is awash in data. A typical hospital generates 50 petabytes - a million gigabytes - of it each year. But what are we measuring, exactly? Where does that data go? Why is most of it wasted? And does what we're measuring really need to be measured? Wendy and Matt talk about modern medicine's growing obsession with big data, how data drives social behavior, and the questions we all must ask before consenting to more data gathering - from our patients or ourselves.  

For over twenty years,  Dr. Jeff Goldstein was part of a successful, thriving cardiology practice in central Illinois.  And then he wasn't.  Dr. Goldstein and his wife, Dr. Kemia Sarraf, join us to share their personal story of how a change in the structure of his practice led to him feeling blocked at every turn, overworked, and underappreciated, and what the two of them did to change it.

We talk to a lot of people. We hear a lot of stories.  But for every person who shares their story publicly, there are ten more who hold off because they're afraid of blowback.  And we get it.  Speaking up is risky.  We often think about the costs of speaking up, but what has our silence cost?  In this episode, Wendy and Matt talk about the risks of not acting, and what their experience has taught them about how to speak up - and be heard.

Leaders can be infuriating or they can learn to be inspiring.  Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist and the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School, joins us to talk about how our vision, modeling and mentorship can inspire those around us.

What do healthcare and journalism have in common?  (Hint: it has something to do with corporate interference and public trust.)  Recorded in front of a live audience in one of the oldest surviving press clubs in the country, Matt and Wendy (along with members of the audience) share stories about the breakdown in medicine and journalism, and how we're working to recapture our profession."

Two years ago, Dr. Traci Hurley lost her husband, Dr. Dan Hurley, to cancer.  Dan spent the last few years of his life battling his disease - and his insurance company.  Before he died, he set himself a goal to, in his own words, help "with the problem of insurance company physicians without expertise denying or delaying care as recommended by the patient's chosen physician." Dr. Traci Hurley joins us to share their story.

Those in healthcare - or elsewhere - facing private equity's relentless encroachment will want to listen up. Journalist Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, joins us to share her reporting on four regular Americans - working in four different fields - who fought against private equity.

The Fall of Crozer Health is a story steeped in grief, greed, and the needs for dignity and for protection. In the final installment of our special series, we unpack the rollercoaster of emotions caused by the health systems' failures, and speak to the lawmakers in Delaware County trying to build the legislative foundation needed to keep this from happening again.

Crozer was not an island, and what happened to them affects all the nearby health systems. In the fourth installment of this special series, we break down how one community's loss becomes a neighboring community's nightmare, lay out the 'private equity playbook', and explore how the financialization of medicine is everywhere - in every state - and how it affects us all.

When health systems are underwater, you might want to look up upstream to see what the trouble is. When you get there, sometimes you'll find out why those systems are falling into the water. . . and sometimes you'll find out who's pushing them.  In this episode, we're going upstream to look at how we got to the point where a health system that served more than a hundred thousand people per year suddenly closed its doors, and what went wrong along the way.     Correction to an earlier version of the podcast: Michelle Henry was the PA Attorney General at the time she made her remarks featured in this episode, not at the time of the sale, as previously suggested.  A correction has been made.

The story of private equity in healthcare is often told in numbers, spreadsheets and transcripts from bankruptcy court. But in Part 2 of our series, we hear from the people in the trenches and on the front lines of Crozer Health, a collapsed hospital system in Pennsylvania, who are living out the awful consequences of decisions made, not by clinicians in Delaware County, but by executives in California and a judge in Texas.

The Crozer Chester Medical Center in PA is closing as we speak, but the fall of Delaware County's largest hospital system has been building for years.  In interviews with the doctors, nurses, paramedics, and legislators who kept Delaware County healthy, Wendy and Matt go behind the headlines and speak to the people who are living through these changes right now.  This is the first episode in a multi-part series focusing specifically on Crozer Health.  New episodes drop each week.

We're never more aware of the need for real human interaction than when faced with an automated Patient Portal.  In this special bonus ep., Wendy and Matt share a listener voice memo about the challenges of navigating patient care through AI, and talk about how we can - and must - do better.

The 'social architecture' of an organization can make or break meaningful connections between patients and physicians, and physicians and the administration.  In Part 2 of our two part series, Allison Pugh, a research professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and author of The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World joins us to talk about how we can foster connective labor within larger organizations, what happens when that connection fails, and where AI fits in to all of it.