Out of Patients EP453: Mission, Margin, and the Women Left Waiting with Vasanta Pundrika
WOMEN MAKE 80% OF HEALTHCARE SPENDING DECISIONS. THEY ALSO SPEND 25% MORE OF THEIR LIVES IN POORER HEALTH. THE SYSTEM FINALLY NOTICED THEY HAVE WALLETS.
🚨NEW EPISODE ALERT 🚨
Vasanta spent 20 years in healthcare investment banking before walking away to build Lotuspring, a company focused on women's health and behavioral health. She is an anthropologist at heart who learned to speak fluent Wall Street. That combination almost never survives contact with healthcare.
Here is what keeps me up at night. AI is supposed to fix everything in medicine. But AI runs on data. And the data on women's health is full of holes because men built the system and clinical trials excluded women until the 1990s. We are building the future of healthcare on a foundation that barely includes half the population.
Vasanta explained it simply. If a woman checks "Asian" on a form, AI has no idea she is South Asian. A doctor looking at her face knows. The machine does not. And when women do not feel heard, they stop talking about their symptoms. They push themselves to the back burner. More missing data. More gaps. More harm.
The system calls women's health a trillion dollar market opportunity now. Congratulations. You finally made it. Welcome to the club.
I wrote We the Patients because 30 years of surviving brain cancer taught me that the system is not broken. It was built this way. And women have been absorbing the consequences quietly at home for far too long.
Share this if you are tired of being an afterthought. Drop your horror story in the comments. Subscribe to Out of Patients wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
17 years and 400+ episodes later, Out of Patients is still the most unfiltered healthcare show anywhere.
Matthew doesn't do softball interviews. Brain cancer at 21 taught him that time is finite and bullshit is expensive. He gets guests to say things they'd never tell Congress. CEOs admit what's broken. Patients name what actually hurts. Scientists explain what industry doesn't want you to know. The conversations other shows won't touch because of sponsor concerns or political correctness.
What makes him different: He's been on both sides of the mic. Featured in documentaries, testified before Congress, keynoted hundreds of conferences.
But he's also been the guy puking from radiation, fighting insurance denials, and watching friends die from paperwork.
That dual perspective creates interviews you won't hear anywhere else. He knows which questions make power squirm because he's 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 healthcare. After 17 years, Matthew's still the guy Mark Cuban reposts when he wants to understand what patients actually think. Read More
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