Rebuilding Primary Care with Rushika Fernandopulle

Healthcare pioneer Rushika Fernandopulle joins us to discuss his new venture Liza and why this is the perfect moment to build new primary care models from the bottom up. Rushika argues that “shareholder value” has usurped the needs of patients in US healthcare, and that fundamental rethinking, not optimizing or tweaking at the edges, is needed.

Rushika shares the ‘build principles’ for Liza:

• Backload constraints - don’t frontload them. First show that a new approach works, then figure out the business model
• Take cues from conscious capitalism: the purpose of a business is to create good in the world, not to optimize shareholder value
• Figure out the right thing to do, not a business that fits how healthcare is broken

Rushika argues that AI invites us to rethink healthcare based on abundance, not scarcity:

“We've built our whole economy, all our processes with this assumption of scarcity, that there were a scarce number of human brains who could do things, right? Doctors, teachers, et cetera. And now all of a sudden that assumption has gone away. So we need to rethink from scratch how we build these systems. So that's what we're trying to do at Liza. Like, what if we started from scratch?”

Relevant Links

More information on LIZA Health

The book Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey et al

Podcast episode where Tim Ferris and Jerry Colonna talk about sabbaticals

Article by Sara Riggare about living with Parkinson's and her image of blue and red dots

About Our Guest

Rushika Fernandopulle is a practicing physician who is the CEO of Liza Health, a startup building a new AI-enabled platform for Primary Care. He was the co-founder and CEO of Iora Health, an early innovator in Primary Care redesign which was acquired by Amazon in 2023. Prior to this, Rushika was the first Executive Director of the Harvard Interfaculty Program for Health Systems Improvement and Managing Director of the Clinical Initiatives Center at the Advisory Board Company. He is a member of the Schweitzer, Ashoka, Aspen, and Salzburg Global Fellowships, on faculty at Harvard Medical School. He serves on the boards of the Asian American Foundation, Families USA, and Premera Blue Cross, and is a member of the Lancet Commission for Person Centered Care. He earned his A.B., M.D., and M.P.P. from Harvard University, and completed his clinical training at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Source

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