What If You Knew Where You Were in Your Health Journey?
In this episode of Success & Chaos, hosts Angela Adams, RN, and Kandice Garcia, RN, sit down with Dr. Dan Durand, radiologist, physician executive, and President & Chief Medical Officer of Prenuvo.
Their conversation explores a fundamental question: What would healthcare look like if prevention wsa the primary goal?
Dr. Durand’s career has taken him from Johns Hopkins Medical School to McKinsey & Company, and from startup innovation to health system leadership. Across each chapter, one theme has remained constant: the need for better data to guide better decisions.
That journey ultimately led him to Prenuvo, where he now helps lead a model designed around proactive health insights rather than reactive treatment.
The conversation begins with Dr. Durand’s leadership journey (01:19). He describes the decisions that shaped his path, including leaving academia for consulting and later joining health system leadership teams where he could influence care delivery at scale.
From there, they explore the vision behind Prenuvo (07:11). While many people think of the company as a full-body scanning provider, Dr. Durand describes a broader goal: creating an access point for preventative health where people can gain meaningful insight into their health without navigating the fragmented pathways that define traditional screening.
The discussion then turns to the challenge of integrating proactive medicine into a reactive system (14:43). Dr. Durand draws parallels to innovations like urgent care and telehealth, both of which faced skepticism before becoming essential parts of modern healthcare.
Another powerful moment in the episode centers on consumer demand for preventative care (23:39). As Angela Adams notes, many people are actively seeking earlier insight into their health—even traveling internationally and paying out of pocket to access advanced diagnostics.
Dr. Durand argues that this demand reflects a deeper shift: patients increasingly want visibility, agency, and access to data about their own bodies.
The conversation also explores Prenuvo’s growing role in research and data generation (27:26). With 150,000–200,000 whole-body scans completed and dozens of research publications and academic collaborations, the company is building one of the largest structured datasets in imaging-based preventative health.
Finally, the episode closes with a look at AI’s role in healthcare decision-making (32:22). As Dr. Durand explains: “People are hungry for AI — and AI is hungry for data.”
As health systems confront workforce shortages, rising consumer expectations, and rapid advances in artificial intelligence, the question is no longer whether healthcare will change.
The question is how quickly the system will adapt.
Episode Chapter Guide:
01:19 Dr. Dan Durand’s Leadership Journey
07:11 The Vision Behind Pranuvo
14:43 Integrating Proactive Medicine into a Reactive System
19:32 Leadership and Healthcare Transformation
23:39 Consumer Demand for Preventive Care
27:26 Research and Data in Preventive Health
32:22 AI and the Future of Healthcare
Full Transcript
AI-generated transcript. Accuracy may vary; please excuse any transcription errors.
Dr. Dan Durand: But we have this really bewildering system and we have an age where data is now easier to come by than providers. Data is easier to come by — objective data, whether it’s labs or scans or other types of things, EKGs, et cetera — easier to come by than providers, which are in startlingly short supply and retiring every day.
Angela Adams, RN: Welcome to Success and Chaos, a healthcare podcast where each episode is dedicated to unlocking success amidst rapid change and uncertainty. I’m Angela Adams, the CEO at Inflow Health.
Kandice Garcia, RN: And I’m Candace Garcia, the owner of Tungsten QI Partners and Quality Improvement Director for the ACR Learning Network.
Angela: We are so excited to have our guest today, Dr. Dan Durand, President and Chief Medical Officer of Prenuvo Medical Group. Dan is a physician executive and radiologist. Dan brings a unique perspective on early detection, imaging innovation, and leadership at a time when healthcare is rapidly evolving. Dan, welcome to Success in Chaos.
Dan: Thanks Angela and thanks Kandice, it’s great to be here.
Angela: Absolutely. So let’s jump right in. We got to meet Dr. Durand at a Stanford quality conference and summit and got to listen to a presentation by him. We learned a ton. First and foremost, I just wanted to ask you about your leadership journey. You’ve been in clinical care, radiology, innovation, executive roles. Tell us a few of those moments that kind of shaped your path towards where you are today as CMO of Prenuvo.
Dan: Sure, I think the first key pathway was probably the decision to come where I wound up coming to med school at Johns Hopkins and got exposed to a lot of really interesting perspectives. Folks within radiology that are luminaries who don’t even need to be named, but folks like Stanley Siegelman who used to run the residency program, folks like Jonathan Lewin who was the chair at the time, and went on to become CEO of Emory Healthcare and a ton of other folks. And I was also getting exposed to other investigators outside of radiology, people like the Vogelstein lab, who were, for those who know, the people behind the majority of the early detection so-called liquid biopsy tests. So there was a great interest there over the last 20 or 30 years in early detection, I would say throughout the medical school.
And then the next key moment would be the decision to go into radiology. And why did I do that? I could tell you that it was because it was going to be the most data rich specialty and because I knew AI was coming, but that wasn’t the way I actually made the decision. I wasn’t smart enough to see that far in the future. I was smart enough when I was running around the wards to realize that at least during the training period, which stretches out before you in medical school for the better part of a decade, I could tell that in most of the other specialties, I was going to be doing a lot of manual work and a lot of rework and restructuring of data. Things like going and seeing what the labs were on the computer and writing them down on a piece of paper. And a lot of that just felt futile to me. And so when I was rotating at Hopkins, it was right when they were implementing PACS and I saw these areas go from looking at what they call an alternator that had a lot of different CT films on it — they’re actually reading CT on an alternator. Not everybody realizes that used to be the case. And you can imagine the amount of mental acuity it takes to follow those images across lots of images and reconstruct it entirely in your brain. I don’t know that I would have been capable of that, but when I saw them scrolling through it, I kind of said, hey, this is extremely efficient. There were some really forward-thinking people there around the structuring and unstructuring and surfacing of data to clinicians within radiology. The name John Ang comes to mind. He wrote a tool called Radisys that extracted everything from the EHR that Hopkins had written so that radiologists could surface it and you could sort of see all the relevant parts of the history at once. So I looked at radiology and I didn’t feel like it was siloed in that environment. I felt that it was connected to the rest of medicine and uniquely digital and really the first all-virtual specialty. So the decision to choose radiology was around efficiency.
And then later on, I was lucky enough that I think that panned out in a different way. The next key moment would be the decision not to remain on the traditional faculty path and join McKinsey. And every time I get asked why I did that, I give a slightly different answer, which is very befitting of anyone who’s worked for McKinsey. I knew I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be surrounded by a different type of people. And ultimately what I was looking for was entrepreneurship. But at the time, I didn’t know if I wanted to do that or policy or go back in academia with leadership skills that you can only get at a McKinsey.
And fast forward a bit, there were some other smaller decisions. The decision to go to a place called Lifebridge Health from Hopkins, where I had migrated back to after being part of a startup that went public. But ultimately the decision again to leave academia a couple of years later and to join a small health system executive team. And the reason I did it is I didn’t want to wait. I felt like I was ready for certain types of decision-making. And I also felt like a smaller, more nimble organization, even though it didn’t have the global name of a Johns Hopkins, felt like it was an extremely high quality place where I could learn. I personally learned by doing, so I wanted to be in the driver’s seat and making decisions at a service line level or health system level.
And then finally, after doing that for about a decade, the decision to come to Prenuvo to build a health system based on prevention — that’s the latest decision. And a lot of people think of us as a body scanning company, but I can tell you, I never would have come here if it was to just step back into radiology. I think the MRI scan is incredibly powerful. But what’s even more powerful is the idea of gathering massive amounts of data proactively and using that to guide the patient through their health journey.
Angela: That’s amazing. Thanks for going through that. I think a couple of things I want to click on there. Kandice and I talk about all the time — we love smaller community health organizations that are a little more nimble, a lot less red tape. You can be a doer there versus just having to deal with a lot of politics. So I love that you made that decision. And I’m sure it kind of escalated you towards your position today. But yeah, I am curious to learn — from all of that background, you made the decision to go to Prenuvo. You kind of pointed out a lot of people think of it as the full body scan. There’s a lot of opinions and emotions about it. But like, what really kind of sparked your interest about Prenuvo? You’ve told us a lot about early detection and I know that that’s a passion of yours, it’s a passion of mine, it’s a passion of Kandice’s. So let’s talk about that a little bit.
Kandice: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah, well everybody has a professional and a personal story. So professionally, that decade or so spent running accountable care organizations — if you look at how those organizations are judged, obviously they’re supposed to control the total cost of care. But the work that you’re supposed to do in order to achieve that, and in order to prove that you’re improving the value of care without just stripping away care, is you’re supposed to focus — much like Medicare Advantage plans do — on these quality metrics. And I would say the majority of them are population health metrics, many of which are population health screening metrics. So the only radiology metric of interest, at least when I began in the ACO program, was how many of the people who should be screened by mammography are. And I wrote a couple of papers on this sort of thing. And I was very focused on making sure these vast populations got screened. And what became very clear to me was screening means different things to different people. That the mere act of screening doesn’t necessarily guarantee you the outcomes.
And the way that we’re screening as a society, while well-intended, is sort of a byproduct of how we study things. And we study them at the NIH level in these organ system stovepipes, I would say. And particularly in an age of AI where general intelligence may start to outweigh sort of detailed SME-type intelligence, this idea that we’re going to do this organ by organ and have a separate test and a separate set of consultation and shared decision-making for each organ would lead to just a massive, circuitous nightmare of a system for patients. And everything I was trying to do in the ACO program — like hundreds of people, nothing unique about what I was doing, honestly — was trying to simplify it for patients. So what spoke to me about Prenuvo was the vision of doing this preventatively, non-invasively, without radiation, as comprehensively as possible. Not to replace in its current iteration either primary care or any of the USPSTF tests, like mammography, colonoscopy, et cetera. But to think of a future where all that gets done, or some subset of it gets done, in a single setting, if possible. So to keep the patient with their agency and their willingness to cooperate in the test.
The other thing is there are two personal stories. One personal story is just thinking about the people in my life. If I think about the older people in my life who are Medicare aged, who are female, maybe who smoked — if you think about what’s recommended for those people, it’s an annual CT scan of the chest, possibly a pap smear depending on their provider. Very few of those, if any, are going to be vaccinated based on the years that that program rolled out in terms of the HPV vaccine. Certainly mammography, biannual or annual, depending on who you talk to. And according to the latest colonoscopy guidelines, an initial screening around age 45 and then screening depending on findings and familial risk or maybe genetic risk following that.
So first of all, that’s a lot. And it’s a lot of separate appointments if you’ve ever been through those things. All of them have a slightly different profile. And there are some people that embrace the mammography. There are some people that say, hey, I don’t like the way that feels or I’m scared of the radiation. There are some people like myself — curiously, I’ve had a mammogram, not as an asymptomatic person, but I had a lump essentially. So I can speak to this. I had mine after I had a biopsy. So I was numbed up — maybe that actually made it easier. Who knows? But I have some sense of how uncomfortable it can be.
Angela: So you know how uncomfortable it is. It’s terrible.
Kandice: Yeah.
Angela: Okay, yeah, it’s not a comfortable experience.
Dan: And again, I would never tell you not to get it, but having run these programs where you see anywhere from 20 to 40% of people not participating, you can sort of convince yourself that they’re all ignorant or non-compliant or whatever. But in fact, they certainly have a point, right? If this was a really consumer-friendly test, we wouldn’t see that profile, I don’t think. And colonoscopy — I actually went, even though it’s in my family, even though I know people who have passed away from it in their 30s, my sister-in-law — it still took me about a year before I had the time and the guts to go under sedation, which is something I don’t like to do. I have a busy life. If you’ve done the colonoscopy the right way, you know it’s a couple-day process, right? And for me to know I was going to be in the same city and in the right headspace and then do the whole prep — I didn’t get that done until about four months after my 46th birthday.
And I was personally able to get two Prenuvo scans before then. But again, there are some people that are more claustrophobic and maybe like sedation or don’t have a problem with it. They might have a different profile. The point is all these tests have something that could drive people away from getting them. It’s important to have multiple options, but I think it’s also important to have the principle of — can we have a place where people get lots of these things done? And that’s what my hope is that Prenuvo becomes over time — an access point where you can get almost anything done that would be of relevance to prevention. Because these tests, with the exception maybe of colonoscopy — which is a fantastic test and one where you can intervene in what you find — many of these tests are getting closer and closer to a single blood draw or at least a single blood draw option or a point of care option. And I do think that a lot of them can come to the ambulatory environment and be done in a single access point.
Kandice: You know what I think is so interesting here is — I think we talked about this when we met — this is not just offering an MRI. This is not just even offering preventative services. This is really changing the way that we think and engage with not only our medical system, but our best practices and population health. I’m really feeling the challenge of operationalizing the way that we interact with healthcare, the way that we interact with our own care. I know there’s desire for it. The barrier to getting information from a healthcare system is so high — getting a primary care appointment, somebody placing an order, and then you get a mammogram. Like you said, you get a colonoscopy and you’re like, but what about everything else? So the barrier to getting the information is high. And then like you’re saying, right now those are the only options. Those are the only options for information. And if we even just switched what was available — I’m feeling that there is just even the shift of thinking in a new way that preventative care can be delivered, that we can take all of these things and rethink the way that we understand prevention and early detection. Tell me a little bit about some of the challenges with how you’re kind of bringing these two worlds together. Is there acceptance from reactive medicine? And how are you fitting proactive medicine into that ecosystem?
Dan: There’s increasingly, in fact, acceptance that I see. And one of the reasons you know this — put Prenuvo to the side for a second — at least two major academic medical centers have begun full-scale, publicly displayed executive health programs in the last few months. And whole body MRI is in there, but it’s not the only thing they do. The two I’m thinking about are Jefferson Health in Philadelphia and Cornell Medicine in New York. You can go online and see what they’re doing. I guess technically they’re competitors, so here I am mentioning them — I don’t care. I think it’s good to have company, especially from great places. The people I know from those places are fantastic. So it validates the market and it shows there’s something to this.
Kandice: Hahaha.
Angela: Competition validates the market. That’s great.
Dan: I think the perspective of traditional medicine comes from a time when providers were easier to come by and data was harder to come by. And the construct that’s been perpetuated around this is seen through the lens, I think, of the finances of healthcare — the government, the payers, people who for really good reason have to think about a scarcity mindset. Until they don’t. So those same people — rewind a few years — told us that urgent care was going to sort of be a huge disaster. And now it’s really one of the only things holding the healthcare system together. And almost every AMC plays in it and has training programs that point toward it.
Another thing was telehealth. I would say well-known radiologist Pat Bauzu was the first CMO of Dr. On Demand. Dr. On Demand was one of the very early, if not the earliest, direct-to-consumer telehealth plays. I think they had a partnership with Dr. Phil — they were on TV. This is about 10 to 15 years ago. And people gave them a hard time about overutilization, saying you’re going to over-diagnose people, until COVID happened. And everybody suddenly realized the amazing access it provides. And the providers then realized, many of them, hey, as much of my time as I can spend in this modality, I want to.
I would say the advancement of all sorts of testing, even pre-AI, for my generation was getting people to think more about the richness of objective data and also how limited some of the physical exam is — which then for the earlier stages of acuity makes you wonder which encounters you need to do in person and which you don’t. And the provider access crisis multiplies this and makes the business people, the health system folks, and the policy people think about it. So let’s just bring that back to today. As you referenced, if you are someone trying to figure out where your health is, the health system plus our knowledge of disease is kind of like a gigantic, very in-depth map that exists. You don’t know where you are within it. So you’re kind of like me back in the early nineties on a family vacation with a Rand McNally Atlas — great atlas, nothing against Rand McNally — but it was a binder of pages. And the thing is it can’t tell you, because it was printed months or years earlier, what’s going on that day or where you are. For that, you need GPS. You need everyone to have a supercomputer cell phone in their pocket. You need communities and apps to exist so that people get real-time information — all of which we take for granted today because the data became more ubiquitous and the standards for sharing it supported it. And it was consumerism and the iPhone and that particular device that drove that. I think you’re going to see that in healthcare. I think that’s happening. I’m not sure if it’s being driven by the technology, to be honest with you, or the access crisis.
But we have this really bewildering system and we have an age where data is now easier to come by than providers. Data is easier to come by — objective data, whether it’s labs or scans or other types of things, EKGs, et cetera — easier to come by than providers, which are in startlingly short supply and retiring every day. That is not my fault, that’s not your fault. There’s a lot that was, I think, a societal mistake, but it’s where we are.
And the only way I think a lot of people feel — whether it’s honestly reactive or proactive care — to fill that gap is to get better and more data, layer in some kind of decision-making apparatus, whether it’s AI or extenders or a combination of the two, and reserve the physician firepower for the sort of highest point in the licensed pyramid.
Kandice: Yeah, I could not agree more that the shortage of healthcare workers is not ending anytime soon. We keep saying the cavalry is not coming. Nobody’s coming. We have to redesign the way that we interact with each other and the way that we interact with information to do this. Can I ask you a little bit about your leadership? Because I know you’re a leader in your organization, but you’re leading a thought transformation and an operational transformation — a real shift in the way that we understand medicine. How do you actually go about doing this? What does that take?
Dan: Yeah, I feel like I’m in the third phase of my career from a leadership style perspective. In the first phase, I was sort of working these different entrepreneurial jobs and doing a lot of conventional thought leadership, putting stuff out there. In the second phase, I was busy enough that I didn’t have time for that anymore, but I still kind of posted a lot. I would say I’m at the phase right now where, outside of these conversations, I’m mostly trying to get my point across through what we built. I’m trying to build up teams that create amazing things. So it really is a question of seeing the vision, getting in with the right organization — it takes a while to get to an equilibrium amongst the leaders of an organization and the market as to what you’re going to do, knowing that the right market is ready for it and that you’re capable of bringing it — and then getting the right people to deliver it and staying out of their way. I think I’m good at the latter part. I think I’m reasonable at picking people. But what I’m really good at is creating career paths to get people to bring their most distinctive contribution to the firm, to Prenuvo.
Angela: That’s amazing. I think it’s always the hardest to be the first. Prenuvo — just like you said about urgent care — we could name 10 different things in medicine that were laughed at and said, this will never work, that are now the core of our health system today. So I think Prenuvo is visionary in what they’re doing, but it’s always — I always tell people — the hardest person to be in the room is the first. The easiest person to be in the room is the critic, because it’s so easy to criticize what somebody else is doing. I would say that most people I talk to about Prenuvo all want to go get a scan. So what does that tell you? I don’t really care what other people in medicine who are just criticizing are saying. I’m curious about the consumers around me, and the consumers around me — whether they’re from healthcare, not from healthcare, know nothing about healthcare — they all want to go get a Prenuvo scan because we all want to know what’s going on inside of our body.
Kandice: Yeah.
Angela: And to your point, consolidating all of these different kinds of tests into one visit — as a busy professional, I could go for one visit and get answers to lots of my questions — is amazing. You have people flying through Dubai to spend three days doing a full body everything. And it’s so interesting to me that the medical community is still arguing that this is not the right path. And the consumers are very clearly telling them — you might not think it’s the right path, but this is the path we’re going to go down, whether it’s in the United States or outside of the United States. We’re going to go fly and spend thousands of dollars to get the type of medicine that we want, which is preventative medicine. Some people call it wellness and longevity medicine. Some people call it functional medicine. But I know for a fact — I use it. I want to know how to prevent things. I don’t want to wait until somebody tells me, you have diabetes and now you have to take medication for the rest of your life. I want to prevent all of those things from occurring and I feel like the consumers are certainly at a place where they want that as well.
Dan: Yeah, I think this is a generation that believes that information is power. You just kind of look at the way the world has changed. It has democratized the world in some ways. This is about the information economy — not specific to Prenuvo.
Always within it, there is this question about equity and it’s an important question to deal with upfront. So you referenced that there are many models where people need to fly to do this in some parts of the world. There are price tags that are many multiples of what we offer at Prenuvo. We view ourselves in the continuum of this as really one of the greatest democratizing forces bringing this out. There are other people that do similar things, sometimes for less money. All I can say is we are constantly trying to make sure that we balance the quality around what we’re trying to do with market access. And we’re also conducting studies. We’re conducting a massive health equity study in the Boston market called Project Hercules, where we are subsidizing a significant portion of the UK and Boston for those that qualify. And those efforts will continue. We also have a consumer program that’s not a study — although there are some separate studies that are similar going on — where we offer a discount to first responders and firefighters who face elevated cancer risk. The initial signal within the 9/11 cohort had a high cancer risk. It was later discovered that this is a broad risk shared amongst almost all firefighter populations. And then also many other veteran populations, particularly if they were near things called burn pits, which were used to dispose of waste in certain parts of the world during various conflicts in the 20th and 21st century.
Equity is an important part of it and it’s in our crosshairs as a big thing that we need to continue to value and think through. You can’t advance anything in a direct-to-consumer market without having some threshold of whether someone can afford it or not, because ultimately they will be paying for it personally.
But the other thing that people don’t think about is when you remove a third-party payer from an equation — and in the office I’m standing in, we have this great relationship that occurs here — it’s all about the patient. They are our one and only customer. If we cease to delight patients, we cease to exist very shortly afterwards. There is nothing in our whole mindset that is modeled towards prior authorization or these other things that are now being, I think, rightly vilified throughout society. We don’t have any of that. And that creates this great bond and focus on what matters to people, what matters to patients and consumers.
When patients come in healthy, they come in in charge — we call them consumers or members. And it’s not so much an economic thing — it’s actually about agency. I think of someone more as a patient when they’re a little more vulnerable, honestly.
Angela: No, that’s incredible. I love what you guys are doing. As a wrap-up question — you had told us that you guys are also doing a ton of academic research and putting a lot of information and data that has not been previously available in the hands of researchers. Talk a little bit about that, because I think that’s a really amazing thing that’s happening and that you guys have put a lot of priority on.
Dan: Yes, we’ve done somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 whole body scans. Every one of those scans has been reviewed in an extremely structured way using something that is akin to a home inspection list for the human body. So I think it’s the most comprehensive and largest structural report in radiology. And we’ll pretty soon have 200,000 of those to go along with really, really great images. And then also we have a medical intake forum that we have on a subset of these patients.
So for those in whom we have the appropriate permissions, we have a massive data set of over 100,000. We’ve already used it to produce something on the order of 40 or 50 abstracts — don’t quote me — I think five or so peer-reviewed articles with a lot of others in press, at least one of which was in one of the Nature publications. And somewhere between 20 and 30 active university relationships. Our longest-standing collaboration has been with Dr. Cyrus Raggi, who is a neuroradiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a visionary and pioneer when it comes to sort of global whole-body impact on brain health specifically. With him, we’ve done a ton of research. We’ve been able to validate findings and hypotheses about how different parts of body composition and general health relate to neural health. And we’ve been able to find new things that were unexpected.
An example of this: during this year’s RSNA, I think the most widely cited paper by the press was a paper based on our data set showing that increasing muscle mass and decreasing visceral fat independently both predict long-term cerebral volumes, which correlates as a well-accepted metric for long-term cerebral function — essentially long-term cognitive function. It isn’t guaranteed when you maintain brain volumes, but it is necessary, if not necessarily sufficient. But this is a big result when you can prove it over so many people. And it’s particularly relevant today when you have a lot of people like myself — I’m actually one of these people — who are electively on a GLP specifically for visceral fat and overall familial risk of dementia. Not something you could see without an MRI in me, but something that is higher than it should be. And the decision to go after visceral fat — which is pretty tough to do without a GLP, because there aren’t a lot of ways you can target it without massive reduction of overall fat — also carries with it the risk of losing muscle mass. So you have to balance these things. And as we get into these more nuanced therapeutic areas in asymptomatic individuals, studies like this are really important for people to understand what they’re getting themselves into. So I have elected to do a low-dose approach and really focus on protein intake and maintaining muscle mass.
By the way, this result doesn’t mean that if you go on growth hormone and get huge, you’re going to be the smartest person. That’s not what the result means. But for me personally — I’m just one person illustrating it — there is a massive interest in body composition and metabolic health right now because of things we can do, both conventionally with GLPs, which are now fairly conventional, and then the more unconventional — the peptides and other approaches. So I think our publications and the types of data we’re putting out there are eye-opening and interesting. And if there are investigators listening to this, what I want to do is increasingly take this data and put it in the hands of the brightest people — which, candidly, aren’t necessarily me or the people who work at Prenuvo. It’s the people who work at the AMCs and maybe other types of organizations. So we have 28 — I think 28 was the last thing I heard — university collaborations ongoing, and what I want is for us to have 100. I want us to be almost like a UK Biobank-type approach for whole body MRI.
Angela: You heard it here, guys — call for researchers! No, that’s amazing. Well, as we wrap up — our audience is mostly health system executives, technology leaders, and quality folks. So we always like to ask: what’s something you’ve read, a book, a podcast — give us something that has really given you an aha moment.
Kandice: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah, you know, right now, in 2026, I would say my aha moment hasn’t been from a book. And it hasn’t been from a single podcast. It’s been with patients I’ve spoken to who are using the new AI capabilities directed at healthcare. So specifically after JP Morgan, a number of my connections went and tried for themselves the medical versions of Claude and ChatGPT. And they got really, really interesting results. And all of this comes with a disclaimer that these companies give, which is appropriate — this is not medical advice. But these are doctors themselves, most of them, or people deep in healthcare.
Angela: I have as well.
Dan: And they uploaded all their medical stuff, or a huge portion of it, and saw what it spit back. And the other thing that was going on at the same time, from 2025, is Eric Topol wrote — here’s the written piece of this — it was a well-cited New York Times article, or Wall Street Journal, I forget. Eric Topol and Dr. Raj Bukhar up at Harvard, who is a very well-known AI researcher, have been finding that for the first time ever, over these past few months to years, if you look at AI by itself, it actually outperforms AI plus human, which outperforms human by itself. A very controversial result, really hard to validate and prove, but it’s out there and many people are endorsing it.
And when you look at those things, one of the criticisms of the AI algorithm that was outperforming in these various diagnostic tests was that it’s fairly resource-intensive. And when I drilled down on that, it was something about how it actually ordered more scans, which I thought was interesting. The folks that are sending their stuff to these AI algorithms today also came back and said, you know, it doesn’t really care about 90% of the stuff I give it. It doesn’t care about the EHR note. It really focuses on the objective data. It doesn’t care too much about what the doctors say — it really wants to decide on its own and it wants to ask for more of that type of data. And I found it fascinating. I think that in 2026, what I’m thinking about is that people are hungry for AI and AI is hungry for data. So people are going to be even hungrier for data about themselves — about things they don’t know, about things that could be known.
So I don’t think it’s new news — we’ve been saying this forever — but it could actually go to a different level. There was this last thing I’ll say: I used to have a presentation where I quoted the idea that 50% of all health and human data was collected in the last 18 months. There was almost like Moore’s Law — maybe it was 24 months — but there was this thing where you could go from the beginning of human history all the way up to 2019 and there was X amount of data, and that same amount of data would have been gathered in 2020 and 2021. So now I’ve got to think that’s going to be even more pronounced. It’s going to be like every year that data doubles.
And the providers stay the same per capita — going down. Like it all leads us back to the same place. The more you move toward it, the more the goal of having all the data synthesized moves away, unless you embrace some other model — whether it’s organic intelligence that’s not a physician, like an extender, or artificial intelligence.
Angela: We could do a whole podcast just on those closing remarks. So thank you so much for being on, Dr. Durand. What a good time we’ve had and thank you for answering all of our questions. Kandice, do you want to take us out?
Kandice: I’ll take us out. So thank you, Dan, and thank you audience for joining us on Success and Chaos. Please be sure to like, follow, and share today’s episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And a special thank you to the Inflow Health team for their production support.
