My Next Learning Curve: Democratizing Healthcare

How My Ailing Knees Opened My Eyes to a New Opportunity

Since launching Outsmart the Learning Curve in December, I've been tackling what might be America's steepest learning curve: our fragmented, opaque, and ridiculously expensive healthcare system.

What I've discovered is a new approach that could help patients wrestle control of their medical journey from the healthcare system by empowering people with their own information. Information that is rightfully theirs but nearly impossible to acquire and often difficult to understand — a way of democratizing healthcare.

Book Launch Highlights

First, I want to thank every one of you who supported the book development and launch. The response has been incredible.

• Outsmart the Learning Curve reached #1 New Release in Amazon’s Business & Motivation category over Christmas 2024

• The audiobook version launched this month. Yes, I narrated it!

• We secured a Chinese language rights deal (简体中文 in 2026!)

• And I was honored to receive this incredible endorsement:

"Brilliantly captures how regular people transform obstacles into extraordinary outcomes. A compelling, insightful guide to accelerating your growth."

–Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable

What’s Next: Solving Healthcare?

While celebrating this milestone, I found myself facing a different type of learning curve that millions of Americans struggle with daily: navigating our complex healthcare system.

After 45 years of pickup basketball, both knees staged a revolt. And the healthcare system left me with an ultimatum between full knee replacement (don’t image search that) or continuing to inadequately ease my suffering with physical therapy, ibuprofen, and rest.

Despite spending a lot of time with Dr. Google and AI chatbots, I found myself lost in a maze of medical terminology and conflicting recommendations. Further, my healthcare team was highly constrained by 1) time, 2) their speciality, and 3) the healthcare system itself.

Why “The System” Fails Patients

The U.S. healthcare system is complicated and often ineffective in part because it’s controlled by large, inflexible entities like insurance companies, the FDA, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare providers. While they are all trying to do good things, their siloed structure, bureaucratic red tape, and, sadly, a profit motive, often get in the way of providing great healthcare. Individual doctors and nurses are often heroic, but because of the controlling entities, most spend no more than 15 minutes on a patient, and few are able to see your whole health picture because of so much specialization and the fragmented nature of healthcare providers’ data systems.

It is the helpless patient who is often most motivated to solve their problem.

Patients and their advocates often do have more of a whole health picture but need help remembering it, communicating it, and exploring it on their own. Patients themselves are often victims of the system and advocating for themselves takes energy…a lot of energy. Patients are often swimming upstream and lack the knowledge or stamina to challenge the system. They're at the mercy of “The System.”

Healthcare Information Gap

Part of the reason understanding and advocating for your own health journey is so difficult is that healthcare has arguably the largest information gap between any service and its customers.

Patients often don't know enough to ask the right questions or evaluate their options. This is made worse by the fact that the patient’s own data can sometimes inadvertently be held from them. When the information is provided, it uses cryptic language that keeps patients from truly understanding their own problems.

There’s essentially a language barrier between the medical world and its patients. If the patient doesn’t ask for clarifications and/or the doctor is too busy, the patient really can’t understand or help solve their own problem.

In addition, medical records are often scattered across multiple providers, which makes it nearly impossible for patients to maintain their comprehensive health history. It’s unlikely that any single doctor can access all this data, which is often critical.

Google and AI Chatbots Aren’t Good Enough

As I mentioned above, I used Google and AI chatbots to navigate alternatives for fixing my knees when cortisone shots wore out after six weeks. At first, the internet and AI were giving me the same generic advice I heard from my doctors. Why? Because:

• Google 1) gives you links to pages most likely to be clicked, not necessarily the best or latest information, and 2) Google doesn’t have the context of my personal medical history. You get generalized info.

• AI Chatbots can be fed more context, but it’s pretty near impossible to feed it ALL the context.

But I was desperate, so I started uploading all my MRIs, clinical notes, medications, and more into Anthropic’s Claude. To be fair, extracting all my data out of four different patient portals, squeezing it into a size that is acceptable to AI models, and uploading it in an AI-readable form was a ton of work — work that most people would not or could not do.

Once my health records were uploaded, I was able to question the AI more broadly and deeply about my options as well as explore alternatives that my doctors rolled their eyes at. I eventually found a treatment and provider that worked — on Friday I ran for the first time in six months!

Solving Healthcare from the Patient Perspective

This whole experience made me think that while solving our healthcare gridlock from the inside is an intractable problem, arming consumers with tools to help them navigate this complex system could be revolutionary.

I want to democratize healthcare.

Next week I’ll share more about the tool I’m building that empowers patients to navigate the healthcare system more easily.

In the meantime, what’s the most baffling healthcare moment you’ve faced? Comment below.