Out of Patients EP407: Ask Better Questions or Die Trying: Risa Arin
What happens when you take a jingle-obsessed Cornell grad, funnel her through agency life, add a cancer diagnosis to the family, and drop her in the middle of America’s broken healthcare mess? You get Risa Arin. Founder and CEO of XpertPatient.com (spell it right—no E), Risa didn’t pivot into patient advocacy.
She bulldozed her way in, armed with strategy decks, data, and decades of marketing experience that actually translate to helping real people not die confused.
I wanted Risa on the show because she lives at the intersection of “I’ve seen how the sausage is made” and “Let’s burn down the factory.” She sat in pharma boardrooms, saw how patient education was treated as a compliance box, and decided to build the thing that should’ve existed all along.
You’ll laugh. You’ll cringe. You’ll hear about tennis camp cornfield sprints. You’ll hear how her own mother printed out the question list from Risa’s website and brought it to the doctor. You’ll hear the difference between marketing Doritos to teenagers and helping a Stage 2 patient ask the right question that could save their life.
This one’s for anyone who’s ever been thrown into the cancer maze and handed a brochure like that’s supposed to help.
Producer
Matthew Zachary invented healthcare podcasting before podcasting was a thing. In 2007, fresh off building Stupid Cancer, he grabbed a mic, launched The Stupid Cancer Show, and started broadcasting patient stories on internet talk radio when everyone else was still writing blogs.
19 years and 2000+ episodes later, Out of Patients is still the most unfiltered healthcare show anywhere.
Matthew does not do softball interviews. Brain cancer at 21 taught him that time is finite and bullshit is expensive. He gets guests to say things they would never tell Congress. CEOs admit what is broken. Patients name what actually hurts. Scientists explain what industry does not want you to know. The conversations other shows will not touch because of sponsor concerns or political correctness.
What makes him different: he has been on both sides of the mic. Featured in documentaries. Keynoted hundreds of conferences. Published in The Hill. Now marching into Washington with a national patient constituency behind him.
But he has also been the guy puking from radiation, fighting insurance denials, and watching friends die from paperwork.
That dual perspective creates interviews you will not hear anywhere else. He knows which questions make power squirm because he has asked them from hospital beds and boardrooms both.
No pre-approved questions. No PR handlers. No seven-minute segments. Just real conversations with people brave enough to tell the truth about American healthcare.
Still the show where whistleblowers go first. Still the show … Read More
Out of Patients EP456: Fitz Happens: The Marvelous Fitz Koehler
RSS Feed 
