Health:Further’s David Shifrin invited me on ‘The Future of Health’ podcast to talk about the BirdDog experiment and Nashville’s health care industry from an observer’s perspective.
Episode summary, June 19, 2018: Holly Fletcher founded BirdDog earlier this year to bring “slow news” to health care, tech and economic issues in Tennessee. The goal is to provide deep reporting on issues that affect the state, including some – like healthcare – that ripple out to the rest of the country.
With Nashville as a national hub for the healthcare industry, the response of Tennessee health systems to policies and trends have an effect elsewhere.
In this conversation, we talk about Fletcher’s approach to covering the news (lots of data), the trends people are talking about (transparency and balanced billing), the things making healthcare companies nervous (again, transparency and balanced billing), challenges to making long-term progress in those areas, and holding policy makers accountable by asking hard questions.