Investing in Innovative Patient Care with TPG’s John Schilling

Melanie Marcus: Hold on to your hats today as we hear a masterclass in what's going on in healthcare innovation.

Our guest today is John Schilling, a partner at TPG. He serves as Co-Managing Partner of TPG Capital, the firm's U.S. and European private equity platform, where he leads the operations team and co-leads the platform healthcare investing efforts. John also leads TPG’s Life Science Innovations franchise.

John epitomizes the words “growth mindset.” His fascinating career path led him from medical school at the University of Chicago, which he loved, to a surgical residency at Johns Hopkins. Then life threw him a curveball, and he had to abandon his surgical plans. That's when his growth mindset kicked in. He spent time at McKinsey and then Abbott before landing in the private equity world of TPG.

John has an incredible view of the innovation happening across healthcare. I can't wait for you to hear him talk about these innovations and how they are truly helping patients. In fact, when asked about investing at TPG, John explains that “we always start with the patient.”

It's a pleasure to have you on our show today as a guest, John, and I'm excited for our listeners to hear about how you’re changing healthcare for the good of patients and those who care for them.

John Schilling: Great to be here. Thanks so much, Melanie.

Marcus: Today we're looking at innovation. And we're going to talk about how investing fuels the innovation that is needed to make a difference in the lives of patients and those who care for them. Now, I should say right up-front that John is very much an active player in the role of growth investing to drive innovation and change in healthcare, and he led TPG’s recent private equity investment in Surescripts.

John, I'm going to start with a big question about innovation to lay the context for this discussion, and then we'll go back and hear more about your journey and what brought you to this perspective. So, here's my first question. You've been involved with many businesses and innovations in healthcare. What do you see as the top three success factors to any business to successfully impact healthcare in a scalable way?

Schilling: To begin with, the way that we think about it here at TPG is we always start with the patient and we work back from there. I think no matter what you do, you have to have the patient at the center of whatever innovation, whatever growth you're oriented toward.

I think the second thing that is incredibly important to drive growth and innovation are the resources within a company or whatever institution you're a part of. You have to have the capacity to support both the sustained investment and the people that are required to do it.

And then probably in some respects, maybe most importantly actually, you need a culture of innovation. And I think part of what we have tried to do over time is, in partnership with the management teams that we work with, is inculcate that sense of that culture of innovation that's central to ultimately driving the growth.

Marcus: Oh, I love that. Starting with the patient seems so obvious and yet it's not always.

So, let's start where you started. Just give us a sense of where you came from. I know you have your M.D. from the University of Chicago and did a general residency in surgery at Johns Hopkins. How did that transpire?

Schilling: It is certainly the case that I have a bit of an unusual background among folks in the investing world and certainly here at TPG. I did not have the intention, obviously, of heading in this direction. I started off with the desire to be in medicine, and as you alluded to, I was actually initially in engineering. I did biomedical engineering and then subsequently went to medical school, which I absolutely loved.

I went on to do residency and surgery, as you described, at Hopkins. And that is an incredibly special place, an incredibly challenging environment. Unfortunately, midway through my residency, I ended up having some issues with my eyesight.

So I ultimately left surgery to try to figure out where to go next. And it's fair to say I sort of stumbled into McKinsey. One of my wife's friends from college, who was working at McKinsey, she said, “Well, why don't you come work here?” I ended up spending eight years at McKinsey doing med device, pharma, payers, providers—kind of all things healthcare. And my biggest client while I was there was Abbott Labs, so I got to know the leadership there well.

Eventually I left McKinsey to join Abbott to run sales and marketing for the U.S. pharmaceutical business. At the time, that was about a $10 billion business. We had about 200 products across 13 different franchises. Just an incredible company. An incredible team that built many, many leading products across multiple different areas, including Humira, which was our biggest product at the time.

Actually turns out it’s now the most successful drug in the history of the pharma industry. So I was there for several years and then 14, going on 15 years ago, came to TPG. And so today, I have a couple different roles within TPG. One is being one of the managing partners of TPG Capital, which is the “large check” private equity business that was sort of the heritage of the firm. And I also lead the Operations group, which is a group of people who provide support to our portfolio companies. So I have the good fortune to be involved in the new investments and the portfolio companies and sort of help shape the evolution of the TPG Capital business.

Marcus: Fascinating. There's so much there. I want to go back to your experience at Abbott—did you work on the Humira drug?

Schilling: Yeah. I mean, obviously that was the flagship product for Abbott. And I was partnered with a number of colleagues in helping grow that. It's an extraordinary product. I mean, now, I don't know how many indications, a dozen indications or more. But one of the very special products in the history of the industry. Obviously, that has spawned a whole array of other biologics since then.

Marcus: What are some of the challenges in bringing a product to market that you learned there?

Schilling: By the time I joined Abbott, fortunately Humira was actually on the market, but we had naturally invested in many, many products at the time. We probably, I would guess, had an R&D budget at that point of about $3 billion a year. It's grown pretty substantially since then.

The things that we constantly thought about when we were evaluating which new products to invest in, it always started with—to go back to this first point I was making about the patient—it always started with the unmet medical needs. So, what were the things in the market that were necessary ultimately to support the patients who had a meaningful need? And so the questions we always ask began there, like: Was there a meaningful need? How would the product that we were developing support that? Was it a meaningful breakthrough? That was always one of the key questions.

And ultimately, whether you're developing a drug or device or anything else, you have to have something that is a meaningful improvement relative to the current therapy. And so that was always the standard we applied there. And candidly, that's the same standard we apply here at TPG. One of the things I didn't mention that we are very actively involved in, we have a life sciences fund that one other partner and I lead that's strictly focused on—it's called Life Sciences Innovations—like true medical innovations, things that constitute breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer patients, patients with immunologic diseases, certain rare diseases, select metabolic diseases. But the core thing that we're always looking at is: Does it constitute a meaningful innovation, and will it materially affect the lives of the patients that we're treating?

Marcus: Oh, that's super interesting.

So, some of these drugs are truly miracle drugs. I mean, they're life-changing, life-saving drugs. So, the Life Sciences Innovations fund is actually pinpointing specific innovations that need investment.

Schilling: Exactly. Yeah. We're investing in an array of companies. Probably the biggest cohort of companies are actually cancer therapies. And some of the most common therapies that we're investing in there today relate to things like bispecific antibodies, so antibodies that can effectively target two things at the same time. And without getting into all the specifics, that can have a very profound effect on certain cancer patients. They've been incredibly effective in the early applications.

We're doing things with different immunologic therapies we've made. One of my favorite investments in the history of my time at TPG was a company called AskBio, which is a gene therapy company.

These are therapies that are just massively affecting the lives of patients. I mean, in the case of AskBio, they had initially developed therapies for diseases like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, where you were taking young boys who were struggling to walk upstairs and you give them a single shot and a month later they can run up the stairs.

We're treating now today Parkinson's disease patients and congestive heart failure patients in ways that none of us thought were even possible 10 or 15 years ago.

Marcus: That is truly putting the patient first.

Let's talk a bit more about TPG. And I know the focus is global, but your primary focus seems to be on American healthcare.

What about American healthcare excites or interests you or maybe surprises you?

Schilling: Well, I guess to start with, the sheer scale of the US healthcare system is pretty notable. In fact, the US healthcare system is over $4 trillion today. In fact, it's bigger, I think, than every single country other than China in terms of GDP. And so it's just a massive, massive system.

If you ask different people that are engaged in the healthcare system about how much waste exists in the system, I suspect you would get pretty divergent answers. But what I would tell you is my own answer to that is about 50% of what we do is pure waste. And so it's incredibly important, I think, to really zero in on that and look for opportunities to wring that waste out.

And the beauty of the seat that all of us at TPG are in today, and in partnership with the Surescripts team, is that if you're able to wring that waste out and you're able to improve the quality of care at the same time, extraordinary things happen. What we're really focused on is looking for ways to create alignment between the physicians, the patients, the payers—everybody in the ecosystem.

When you do that well, what you end up seeing is improved quality of care at a much lower cost. And so that is what's the common thread across all of our investments, it's that it's driving better outcomes at a lower cost.

Marcus: That certainly is aligned with our purpose here at Surescripts.

We did a little research and saw a LinkedIn post from you last year where you talked about the benefits of putting the physician at the center of decision making, and that really resonated with me. So where do you see successes in putting the physician at the center of decision making?

Schilling: Yeah, it's a very good question. Ultimately, I guess there are basically three parties who can make judgements about a patient's care. Obviously, the patient themself is central to that. The physician or the payer. And the challenge of course, is that if you think about the three different parties, the patients often don't have either the independence or the insight to be able to make really informed judgements about their own care. They need to do that in part with the physician, but it's difficult for them to do that independently.

The payers, on the other hand, are too remote, right? I mean, they have data, they can see trends across populations, but it's very difficult and I think very few patients, if any, would want the payers to be making direct medical judgements on their behalf.

And so really that leaves the doctor because not only do they have this incredibly special relationship, I mean there really is nothing like that. So they're seeding a lot of that influence and authority and trust to the physician. And so they're in a great position to make that judgment because obviously they know the patient's needs, they know the medicine and they can make an informed decision. Now, what's happened unfortunately in the U.S. healthcare system, and one of the things that has driven so much of the waste in the U.S. healthcare system, is that their perverse incentives that have, in many situations, actually driven over-utilization and excessive care. And a big part of what we're trying to do, and constantly thinking about, is how do we align those incentives between the patient, the physician and the payer—get them all aligned. Because what we see ultimately, is when those interests are aligned and when the physician has the data—when they have the resources and the capabilities to make informed judgements in that way, when they play the role effectively as the quarterback of the patient's care—they do extremely well. You see that quality go up. You see the cost go down.

Marcus: Right. I mean, healthcare's all about relationships, right?

What do you see as major priorities in the work still to be done in this area?

Schilling: Well, if you look across the overall US healthcare system, the overwhelming majority of care that's provided today is still on a fee-for-service basis. And so, going back to this point about misaligned incentives, unfortunately the incentive to drive care, and in many cases actually to drive high-cost care, still exists.

I think a big part of what we would like to see over time is a greater alignment more broadly. Now, that takes a lot of work to get there because in order to drive that alignment, part of what you need is you need to have physicians who are directly exposed to the outcomes of those patients, where they have something more than an emotional tie to the patients. They need an economic tie to those patients and the outcomes of those patients as a pool. And they also need the capabilities and resources that are necessary to successfully execute that. And the reality is that there are relatively few practices today where that's true. Now, that's growing steadily over time. And there are programs like Medicare Advantage that I think have successfully aligned those interests and there are systems like Kaiser or Intermountain Health or a number of others that I think have successfully aligned a lot of those interests. But we need more of that over time.

And a big part of what we've tried to orient around, we had an investment actually several years ago in a practice called Kelsey-Seybold down in Houston that did exactly that. And in that case, what was really special was that, in fact, they had a dedicated Medicare Advantage plan. They were able to deliver incredibly high-quality care at a very low cost. In fact, if you look at their plan—at the time we invested, this was 2019, there were about 720 Medicare Advantage plans in the United States at that time. There were only three that had five Medicare Stars for five consecutive years, and Kelsey was one of those three. So this was an incredibly high-quality practice. But what was really interesting was that the care that they were providing was being delivered at about one third lower cost than other competitors in the Houston market.

So think about that. They've got some of the highest quality care in the United States at a price that's about one third lower than everybody else in the Houston market. That's exactly what we like to orient around and what we want to drive.

Marcus: That is such a great example of value-based care working, right?

What you're talking about is value-based care and we've been trying to get this to go at scale across the US for quite a while. What do you see happening that will make this finally take hold and go at scale?

Schilling: I don't think there's any specific catalyst that's going to drive it just yet. I think that this is one of these things that's a multi-decade journey. It will take a long time because you do need movement of different practices. You need the alignment of the payer and the physician and the patient. And so this will take a long time.

But where it's happening, those practices are winning. They're doing well, and the patients are doing great. And so when you have that alignment, little by little by little, I would expect over time to see those types of practices perform better and ultimately win in the market. And that'll catalyze the progress there.

Marcus: I can't go through a podcast without mentioning artificial intelligence. Not now anyway. So, where does AI fit in this picture?

Schilling: Yeah, it's a good question. So AI is, I think it's fair to say that for virtually every CEO, every board, every company, this is like one of the hottest topics just across the board at this point.

And at least as we look at AI here at TPG, we believe it's going to be one of these mega trends that will just have the potential to massively affect virtually every single business. And so we've invested a fair bit internally on our own capabilities, but also importantly in the capabilities to support our portfolio companies.

I think it's pretty clear that the early adoption and the early applications of AI are going to be applied to processes that people perform over and over. I'll give you a few examples of the types of things that we're doing now. And some of these I think, obviously will directly affect patient care. Some of them are just efficiency improvements.

But just focusing on healthcare for a moment, as an example, we own a company called Nextech, which is a company that's focused on electronic medical records. And they have a base of technology today that uses ambient listening. And a big part of what they're able to do is release the physician from the computer.

I'm sure all of us at different times have been to a physician and we often have the experience where the doctor is facing the computer, typing a note while they're interviewing the patient. It's just a terrible patient experience. It's the wrong model.

So what we're trying to do is take advantage of technology to sort of uncouple the physician from the computer, take advantage of that ambient listening, record the notes. And what's happened is the patient experience has gotten better, and incidentally, the physician experience has gotten much better. And the reason for that is that their documentation and work after hours has gone down by about a third—so a dramatic improvement.

Or take another example, like Pediatric Associates, we're now using predictive modeling to predict which patients are most likely to return to the emergency room. So we're trying to identify these very high-risk patients and intervene early. And in fact, the early indications here suggests that we're going to be able to reduce those ER visits by about 50% just by early intervention or an early tagging of those high-risk patients.

Marcus: We've talked about value-based care, we've talked about AI, we've talked about those things.

Are there other big changes that are top of mind for you in healthcare in 2025?

Schilling: I mentioned this idea about risk-bearing primary care and providers. We've made a number of investments in that area. I think that's an incredibly important one.

Another one that's very important is site of care optimization. This is one of these trends that has and will last for many, many years, but getting patients to the right venue of care. And let me give you a couple of examples of that.

We made an investment back in 2017 in a company called Kindred, which we partnered with Humana on. We ultimately split Kindred into two pieces. One called Kindred at Home, that was the home health and hospice business. And the second was what was called Kindred Healthcare. That was the long-term acute care and inpatient rehab business. And the reason we were interested in this, and the reason Humana was also interested in Kindred, was that home health, when done right, is an incredibly valuable service to the industry.

In fact, when you compare the cost for inpatient care, which is where patients often end up sitting if they can't get access to home health, it can be 10 to 20 times more expensive per day than home health. Not only that, but actually the quality of care is often worse. When patients are stuck in a hospital, they have a risk of nosocomial infections and a whole array of other complications associated with being in a hospital.

And so that was an excellent investment for us, a great outcome for Humana and just one illustration. And we're doing the same thing actually right now in partnership with Cencora, where we've made an investment in a company called OneOncology, which again, is helping shift patients out of the hospital and into an outpatient setting for their oncology care.

And the reason that we think this is an important trend, in some ways very similar to the theme behind Kindred, is that if you're an oncology patient, first of all, the therapy can be the exact same drug, exact same doctor. It can be two to three times higher if given in a hospital as it is when it's delivered in an outpatient setting. There's no good reason for that. It's just a subsidy from outpatient to hospitals. And so that's one.

The second thing is, again, if you're an oncology patient, oftentimes people are immune suppressed. The last place you want to be is in a hospital. And so part of what we're trying to do is pull these patients into the outpatient setting where they're getting better care.

And obviously, I mean, all of us have been to hospitals versus outpatient settings. The patient experience is massively better. So you get lower cost, a better quality outcome, and a much better patient experience if you do that. And I think our philosophy is, “Let's get the patients to the right venue of care. When you do that, good things happen.”

Marcus: It strikes me as you're talking, you have such a fascinating seat at the center of innovation in healthcare, just an amazing view of it and stories and so forth.

So, if we come back to the top three success factors you started out with, starting with the patient, really making sure we have the resources and the culture of innovation to impact healthcare. What's the sharpest and boldest success story from your work in healthcare technology so far?

Schilling: Let me start with a provider one, and the story is not fully told here yet, but one of the ones that we're really excited about right now on the provider side—and I can come back to innovative therapies after that—but on the provider side, I think one of the companies that we're most excited about now is a company called Monogram Health.

This was a company founded by a guy named Mike Uchrin, who we worked with in a prior period. And what Monogram does basically is they are focused on innovating in the therapy of patients with chronic kidney disease or end-stage renal disease. And what they're really trying to do is get the patients treated in the right way.

And what they're largely doing is they've created standard clinical protocols. They've aligned the interest—like we talked about before—of the payers, the patients, and the physicians, all in the right way. And they're driving great evidence-based medicine into the system. And I'll give you one statistic just to illustrate the point.

When a patient is diagnosed initially with chronic kidney disease and specifically end-stage renal disease, when they're initially brought into therapy, the three-month mortality rate is about 8%. Think about that. So you have an 8% risk of death in the first three months. We're able to reduce that mortality rate from about 8% to approximately 1% today. So just an absolutely dramatic reduction in the risk of mortality in the first three months of therapy.

So that's one illustration in terms of innovation. It's a fundamentally different model. It's fundamentally orienting toward the appropriate clinical care. It's getting rid of all the incentives to drive people toward dialysis, which in many cases is not the appropriate therapy, and it’s biasing them toward the evidence-based therapy.

Marcus: And it sounds like it's taking out the incredible variation in care as well.

Schilling: Absolutely.

Marcus: Standardizing protocols, right?

Schilling: Exactly. So you have more standardized therapies, evidence-based protocols, elimination of the economic incentives to tilt people toward frankly, the wrong therapies in certain cases.

Marcus: As you were telling the story, I thought, well, why doesn't everybody do that? And so that makes sense.

Schilling: People are taking it up at an incredibly fast rate.

Marcus: Right. And I think you were going to talk about innovative therapies, another example?

Schilling: I think largely through our life sciences team, we've made investments in a whole array of really interesting therapies.

I alluded to AskBio earlier. That I think is an incredibly special company. And the reason that I say that is that at AskBio, both historically when we owned the company and now today under Bayer’s leadership, they're treating patients that really had no hope. And they were taking patients, in many cases with relatively rare diseases, some now more common diseases, but in many situations, patients with rare diseases who had no possibility of a normal life and treating them with gene therapies effectively that replaced defective genes. And in very, very short order, you can see an absolutely profound effect. It's still relatively early in the history of these treatments, but I think that the opportunities are tremendous.

The other area, like I alluded to, is cancer care. Actually, one of the companies that we recently took public, a company called Bicara is basically using bispecific antibodies for the treatment of head and neck cancers. And what I will tell you is that the early indications are that we are seeing dramatic, dramatic improvements in both the overall response rate and basically the reduction in mortality in these patients.

And so what we're taking in that case are these highly innovative bispecific antibodies and treating a disease, in this case metastatic head and neck cancers that are incredibly difficult to treat and seeing dramatic improvements in clinical outcomes. Those are the types of things I think that we're really excited about and I think we'll see more of in the time ahead.

The way that we think about it internally is that from a scientific standpoint, this I think is going to be viewed in retrospect as one of the golden ages of our pharmaceuticals because there are incredible innovations that have occurred in gene therapy and cell therapy and molecular biology that have opened up the possibility to develop an array of new therapies that just weren't conceivable even 10 or 15 years ago.

And so a big part of what we're trying to invest behind are companies that are developing those therapies for patients who, again, have very material unmet medical needs.

Marcus: So let's turn to technology and data and analytics for now with the rise of telehealth, EHRs, electronic health records.

What is next in healthcare IT and data and analytics, and what makes you excited about this area?

Schilling: We talked a little bit about AI. I mean, there are huge opportunities before you even get there, just to modernize the way that we manage the basics, the processes, the systems within any practice or corporation in the healthcare space.

If you just take a look at the industry as a whole, our spending in IT among healthcare companies is dramatically lower than what you see in banking and consumer. So the first thing that we need to do is just modernize, and obviously that's happening with electronic medical records. That's a big focus. I mean, we've invested behind companies like Nextech and then most recently, Melanie, with Surescripts. I mean the early mission of the company was to allow for and to build effectively electronic prescribing, which is now ubiquitous. I mean, the overwhelming—almost all scripts at this point are written electronically.

And again, the cost goes down massively. The quality is assured. You don't have difficulty reading physician's handwriting. When they're just basic things that now work with electronic prescribing and those same principles can be applied really across the entire industry. So I guess I would say it's a target-rich environment. I mean, there's almost no area that you look in where you can't find interesting areas to innovate and to bring technology to bear in healthcare.

Marcus: Let's talk about trust in healthcare. I know a profile of your colleague, Katherine Wood, she talks about trust as underpinning the partnership culture at TPG. We emphasize trust as a key component of really orchestrating a health intelligence network.

So what's your take on trust in healthcare investments?

Schilling: I mean, for us, I think it's probably not surprising for me to say that that sort of underpins everything that we do in healthcare. There's no more important principle than one of trust. It actually starts even before any patient meets any doctor.

It's about the institution and the institution of medicine. And the nature of, I think as an institution, how people appreciate and understand and have grown to trust that people are going to do things in their interest. And we have that same philosophy when we approach any new investment or any partnership, because we view this as a multi-shot game, it's not a one-shot game.

What we're trying to do is be a great partner to all the companies that we work with, but also, as I mentioned, to the people more broadly in the ecosystem. And we work not only in our interests, but we have their interests at heart at the same time. And when you do that, that creates, with this repeated game, many opportunities over time.

Marcus: Yeah. This is just heartwarming. You start with the patient. And you base everything in healthcare on trust.

So now it's time for one of my favorite parts of the podcast. It's when we look at the world through truly rose-colored glasses and we leave with inspiration. If you could snap your fingers and have one major issue in healthcare solved overnight, what would it be?

Schilling: That's a good question. The ones that you would immediately sort of gravitate toward, I mean certainly I would, would be things like pediatric cancers and things like that. When I think back to my time in medicine, I mean the things that were most taxing emotionally.

Having said that, we're working on a lot of those things.

Marcus: World peace and cure cancer.

Schilling: Yeah. That is truly very rose-colored glasses as you described. I think if we're more practical though, the thing that I think is manageable and where I think we actually can have a meaningful effect. It goes back to what we talked about initially, I think. Which is this alignment problem. If we can get the proper alignment between the patient, the physician and the payer, I think really good things can happen. And I think that you'll end up with better allocation of resources, more capacity to do things, less waste in the system, and ultimately much better clinical outcomes.

And so I think when you step away from the purely hopeful aspiration and, and try to take it to a practical aspiration, I think that's probably the thing that I would push most toward is finding ways to drive that alignment on the provider side between the payers and the providers and the patients. And if you get that right, I think really good things will happen.

Marcus: What's really interesting, as you say the thing to snap your fingers and it would be fixed, is that almost every interview on this podcast for now four seasons, has come back around in some way, shape or form to collaboration.

Not necessarily all-around alignment of incentives, some, but certainly cross-segment collaboration, cross-industry, cross some form of collaboration as being required and hopeful. So, alignment is just the next step of aligning incentives as well.

Schilling: I mean, in the end, these are really, really hard problems. So to solve them, to your point, you need people collaborating and you need alignment to make that happen. If you have disparate economic incentives or other incentives, things either don't happen or they happen at a much lower pace than they should, and so when you align those incentives appropriately, just generally speaking, good things happen.

Marcus: Right. Well, what gives you the most hope and inspiration that healthcare can indeed, truly heal itself?

Schilling: Yeah. Well, I guess the reality is that we've made a lot of progress. I mean, if you look at what happens in the U.S. in particular with people that really have access to a lot of resources, they have really good outcomes generally. And so what gives me hope is that we have the capabilities, we have the technology, we have many of the tools that we need to help people live longer, healthier lives. And I think the healthier component is a huge element.

What I think we have is a challenge, probably something we haven't spoken as much about is access. And unfortunately in particular in the US, more so frankly than in most other developed countries, we have a massive access problem. And so you end up with these incredible extremes, these incredible disparities in outcomes in many situations actually, especially in recent years, that are actually diverging even more so than they have in the past.

And so while I think the problems are really hard and in certain pockets actually getting harder, what gives me hope is that we can do it. We've demonstrated it in certain cohorts, but we have to figure out ways to broaden that.

And that's the challenge I think, that over and above the alignment challenge we just talked about, I think is the access challenge. And if we can tackle that appropriately and bring to bear the capabilities and resources that we have, then I think you will see a very dramatic improvement in health span and lifespan and just the quality of life for many, many people.

Marcus: Right. Great, great point and callout.

Well, this has been an incredibly inspirational conversation. I truly think our listeners will find inspiration in hearing the many glimpses of things that are actually going really well and innovations that are working that will make healthcare better and patient care better. So, thank you so much for spending time with us, John.

Schilling: No, it's a pleasure. Thanks for doing this.

Marcus: How can we innovate in healthcare? Wait a minute. That's not exactly the question I want to ask. The better question is, how can we innovate in healthcare with the patient and the physician at the front and center of it all? As you heard in this episode, that's the question we're asking, and it's the question we'll continue to ask throughout the podcast this season. It's about innovation, yes, but innovation for the good of patients and those who care for them.

As for our guest, John's answer to how we innovate comes down to collaboration. In his work as an investor, John is always looking for opportunities to build enduring partnerships in healthcare. And that takes trust, which as he says, underpins everything we do.

But that's not all. How we innovate comes down to alignment between the patient, physician and payer. Not only will alignment help allocate resources and cut waste, but it will most importantly help improve clinical outcomes. These are really hard problems, John says, to solve them, you need people collaborating. And you need alignment to make that happen. That's what John focused on in this episode, and the stories he told are exactly why we do this podcast. To uncover the amazing innovation happening in healthcare and to shine a light on what it takes to make these bright spots a reality. A reality of higher quality care at a lower cost.

And on that note, thank you for joining us today, John.