EP441: Tables Get Turned. This Is Me Interviewed by Abby Burns From Radio Advisory About What Is Value

The tables get turned this episode: it's Stacey Richter being interviewed, by Abby Burns of Advisory Board's Radio Advisory podcast, recorded live at the Raising the Value Bar Summit. Abby asks Stacey why she started the show, how she personally defines value, and why value is genuinely in the eye of the beholder — especially in an industry where, as Stacey puts it, one person eats the dinner, someone else orders it, and a third person pays for it.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why value in healthcare is so hard to pin down when the patient, the orderer, and the payer are often three different parties with three different definitions of a win

✅ The origin story behind Relentless Health Value: a primary care practice that cut total cost of care by 17% and got acquired and dissolved by a health system anyway, and the $100 million spend increase that followed

✅ Daniel Kuzmanovich's four tensions in measuring healthcare value: short-term versus long-term, individual patients versus populations, output versus outcome, and proven versus experimental approaches

✅ Why driving change in healthcare isn't the hard part — sustaining it is, and why so many value wins quietly unwind after the person who drove them moves on

✅ Why Stacey believes it's important to understand which of these tensions you personally sit on, and how misalignment across them is what actually drains value out of good ideas

WHY THIS MATTERS

Value in healthcare doesn't fail to materialize because good ideas are scarce; it fails because the person eating the dinner, the person ordering it, and the person paying for it are misaligned on what winning even looks like. Understanding Daniel Kuzmanovich's four tensions — timeline, whose value, what kind of value, and how proven it needs to be — gives stakeholders a shared vocabulary for diagnosing exactly where those misalignments are happening. And the case study underlying this whole show, a practice that objectively lowered cost of care and got shut down for it anyway, is a reminder that sustaining value requires more than just achieving it once.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Encore! EP391 with Scott Conard, MD: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

EP438 with John Lee, MD: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

EP400 with Stacey Richter (solo, manifesto Part 2): Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

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00:00 Introduction.

03:33 Stacey's journey and mission.

04:16 The story of Scott Conard, MD (Encore! EP391).

09:28 Why it's important not just to drive change but to sustain it.

12:23 Heart Failure: A Case Study in Value.

14:13 EP438 with John Lee, MD.

15:07 Why patient positive value often fails instead of succeeds.

18:07 How financial toxicity has become clinical toxicity in healthcare.

19:44 How cultural norms have evolved into healthcare challenges.

23:38 The story of Mike Tuggy, MD, in Washington.

25:13 Looking at the four tensions in measuring value as continuums.

25:37 Why timeline is important in creative value in healthcare.

28:34 What are the four ways to measure value in healthcare?

29:27 How do payers and providers collaborate to align on value metrics?

31:26 Why will proven versus experimental treatments become more important in the next few years?

34:54 Stacey's manifesto (EP400) and values for personal integrity in healthcare.

38:55 Stacey's parting advice.