How To Cut Costs And Errors With A Single Source Of Medical Truth

Healthcare keeps getting more expensive, yet most of us feel like we’re doing more work just to get the same care: more portals, more forms, more phone calls, and more confusing lab results. We sit down with Greg Brady the founder and CEO of Connect4Patients to dig into the root cause he’s spent decades solving in other industries: fragmented data. His claim is direct and a little startling. If we can’t assemble a complete, real-time medical record, we can’t reliably reduce errors, we can’t simplify administration, and we can’t move the system upstream toward prevention. 

We talk about what a patient-centric system actually looks like in practice: one unified “single version of the truth” for your health record that can be shared across providers, while still working with existing EMR/EHR systems. Greg explains how an AI-based network can fuse and cleanse records in a HIPAA-compliant way, then translate medical jargon into plain English so patients can understand what their numbers mean and what actions to take. That shift is bigger than convenience. It’s the foundation for catching trends early, like rising glucose before prediabetes, and for preventing dangerous mistakes, like prescriptions that conflict with other meds a patient is already taking. 

We also get into the uncomfortable incentives that keep healthcare stuck in a treatment loop: more tests, more procedures, more friction in prior authorization, and a system where insurers can delay care through manual workflows. Greg shares a view of what could change if large employers, cities, or states act as self-insured organizations and reward preventive behaviors directly, using data and personalized guidance to lower chronic disease rates over time. 

If you’ve ever wondered why healthcare feels “designed” to be hard, this conversation offers a concrete infrastructure-level answer and a practical path forward. Subscribe, share this with someone who’s tired of managing their care across multiple portals, and leave a review with the biggest healthcare friction you want fixed next.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hey everybody, Evan and Irma here with Avira Health, and we're spending more on healthcare than ever and somehow getting more complexity, not necessarily better outcomes. Uh, maybe the issue isn't uh better effort or innovations. The system was built to treat problems late instead of preventing them early. In that regard, we have a great guest today from Connect for Patients. Greg, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:28

I'm good. Good morning, Evan.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Good morning. Great to see you. Really look forward to your story and mission. And I'll hand it off to Irma.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Yeah, so um, Greg, for people who are not familiar with Connect for Patients, right there on your website, you say because understanding your health is the first step to changing it. I I I like that uh statement there. So can you tell us what problem um you're trying to solve? What made you um start this work? And anything else we need to know right off the bat about you and Connect for Patients?

From Supply Chains To Health Data

Patient-Centered Care As The Fix

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Well, let me start with a little bit of my history because it'll explain why I'm kind of uniquely qualified to solve a problem that's been attempted to be solved now, I think, by the government with the recent Trump announcement, and I think it's time number six. So I started you know my career long, long time ago. Unfortunately, before PCs existed, so I'll date myself for a second. But let's just move it forward. And I uh I was uh brought in to help drive the application's business at Oracle. It had lost its uh competitive advantage and its early um head start to SAP. And when I was analyzing just the nature of what at the time didn't really have a name, later it was called ERP. The first thing that came clear to me is when you looked at the market, it was outsourcing. It was going from away from vertically integrated supply chains like IBM would make uh build the product, they would make the raw material, they would move the products themselves, they would sell the direct. And the world went to distributed systems. I've got a contract manufacturer, I have a raw material supplier, I have a logistics partner. Well, what happens when that uh shift occurs? The data you used to have is now spread out over lots of locations, right? So I decided back then that that needed a change. You need to have the ability to capture all the data in real time across all the different trading partners. Oracle's senior management uh didn't quite understand that concept. So I chose to leave and went to a company called Intellection, which was a small consulting company that had a product that built for a customer, and we productized that, changed the name to iTunes Technologies, and I was the president of worldwide operations and the CEO. It was an interesting market because supply chain didn't exist then, supply chain technology. So you know, I can easily say that I was a main driver in the creation of that market that is yield billions and billions of dollars of return. But I never forgot the original vision. The problem was is the supply chain tools had the same problem. They couldn't see their contract manufacturer, they couldn't see their suppliers, they couldn't see the logistics partners, and yet they were trying to manage a supply chain to meet a high service level for a customer. So remember the word customer. So I uh created the first inclination of what's called a network at um i2. We patented it. The patents long since lapsed in the company that acquired that uh technology. But I decided I would do it one more time and do it right. And I started a company called One Network. Now, what was different about this was that it would take the data that was fragmented and create a single version of the truth in real time, and it would then propagate that data to everybody else that needed to know it, but it would put it in their language because you know the OEM might want to see data in a certain way. The supplier needs to see the data not just from one OEM, but from all their OEM customers. So it was a complicated many-to-many problem. Well, I sold that company, it did very well. It's uh now part of Blue Yonder Corporation, which is kind of interesting because that was my prior company. Most of Blue Yonder was my prior company. Uh circles complete now. But so when I sold the company, I decided that the single biggest problem to be solved in the United States and even globally, and most importantly, the thing that I could have the most impact on the world and the in the largest way that I could come up with was to solve the medical problem. So if you think about medical and you forget about how it runs today, so I use a concept called first principles on how do you design a system that can accomplish two goals. One is reimagine the system, but also secondarily, initially allowed to work with the existing infrastructure so you can get speed and adoption while people migrate to the next generation of systems. So that's what the concept was founded on. So let's define that for a second. So the medical industry is a highly fragmented data problem. Uh, that data problem causes huge administration cost. If you look at the total cost in the healthcare space, I was watching one of your other uh podcasts, by the way, Evan. You're quite a popular, or both of you quite popular to watch. You know, a lot of people are throwing around the same number. The U.S. spent about five trillion dollars in healthcare spent. Of that five trillion dollars in healthcare spend, that's eight, eight, over 18% of GDP. That's up from 14. At the rate it's growing, it's insurmountable. The U.S. can't survive at the cost increases happening in the medical space. Well, the first and foremost thing that has to be solved is you have to have the ability to have the patient be able to help control their own life. The patient is an afterthought in our medical system. So let's think about what that means. So if the patient is an afterthought, and you look at the U.S. medical industry, it is a treatment-based environment. What that means is they fix you after you tell them they're broken. You're broken. In most other countries, they have preventative care processes in place. The U.S. is over twice the cost of any other country, yet it's one of the highest mortality rates in the world. Yet we have some of the best teaching facilities and doctors anywhere on the planet. So you think, how can you screw something up so bad? Well, we figured that out. We figured out how to screw it out. So the underlying problem that has to be solved, which will allow significant value, and I'll put a number on the table that I didn't create. There's a trillion dollars worth of savings just to do what I'm going to tell you. And that is how do you bring the patient into the system and make it patient-centric? Okay, what does that mean? First thing is all the data about the patient has to be in a single version of the truth, and that single version of the truth must be shared with all doctors that interact with that patient. Second thing is the patient needs to understand his own medical information. So have you ever sure you've read lab reports? Do you know what a bun is?

SPEAKER_02 8:34

I don't know Claude sure knows what bun is, and now I do too, because I've asked Claude.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Exactly. So you you leave your lab results and you go to Claude and you ask him one at a time, right? Or you take a real gotta use it. And it tells you, okay, so let's use that as an example. So if I want to be preventative, I must also go after the real problem in the United States, which is our food supply and our workout programs. 40% of the calories in the United States that are consumed are ultra-processed foods. There is no other country in the world like that. We enter into other people's countries and we make them bad by what we introduce. Countries don't want to buy our agriculture because they know what's in it, right? So eventually the US has to move to a preventative care system, and then you'll see a substantial reduction in cost in the medical system because the number of chronic illnesses will drop drastically. So that's the vision. That's where you're trying to get to. Okay, let's get back to how do you do it in the short term? All right, you have EMR systems everywhere, right? I mean, thousands of locations of medical records. In my particular case, I have six different doctors that belong to six different networks. What does that mean? I have six different portals. Okay. Who is going to make sense of data spread across six different portals? Right? I have two doctors that I recently went to that prescribe me two different things to the same problem. They are in conflict with each other. So data fragmentation creates medical error and administrative overcost uh overhead cost. Uh, are either one of you tired of filling out forms?

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SPEAKER_01 10:32

Oh, yeah. We're all exhausted. I think all of us in our healthcare system are. Yeah.

Incentives That Reward More Treatment

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Okay, so I'm not going to tell you the secret sauce of how we did this. There's a reason why the US government has tried five times and it's never worked. But we've used AI, and what it does is it assembles all the data in a HIPAA-compliant way. It fuses the data together into a new uh single version of the truth. It cleanses the data to make sure it's accurate so where you see redundancies and differences, but it can't solve everything. So let's say, Irma, you went to the doctor and you um you know had a symptom. You went in and said you had headaches, and he said, sorry about that. Gives you a uh medication and you go home. Okay, that that symptom is still in your medical record. Who else but you knows that symptom is gone? Nobody, right? So in a patient-centric app, what do you want to do? One is have the AI not just fuse the data, but put it in multiple languages. What I mean by languages is it already speaks doctor, so it says bun. Have it speak English where the patient can understand what the heck that is, but more importantly, how does it pertain to my medical record? So let me give you a fun story example of this. So I'm using bun as an example because I got my lab results. My lab results says my bun ratio was high. First thing I did was I asked my AI system, what the heck is a bun ratio? The second thing I did is I just sold it to analyze my lab results and it looked at my bun ratio and it said it is high by normal standards. But Greg, you're on a preventative lifestyle program that's part of our solution, where you're on a high protein diet, and that high protein diet makes your bun go up, and actually, your bun ratio is right where it needs to be. My own doctor told me we have to fix this. Then I explained a situation to him. He said, Oh, well, I didn't know that. Well, of course you didn't know that. You don't have that information, right? So, you know, the ability to not just understand, you know, create the single version of the truth, get the patient involved to where they know what the the it's saying, and more importantly, it's always prescribing what to do. So let's say you're trending glucose levels, and you're not at over 100 yet, so you're not pre-diabetic, but your trend over the last three tests are heading over 100. Wouldn't it be great to know that and start a dietary and workout program to make sure you never become pre-diabetic and then become diabetic? See, none of that exists in the system today. So we fuse the data, we translate it into languages everybody can understand. It's a full AI built system from ground up. You can ask the AI system anything you want about uh your medical information. So it doesn't, yeah, I don't ask Chat GBT about a particular problem because it doesn't know my record. In fact, we have the only location where all records are located that are specific for that individual because you can't put HIPAA data into normal uh large language models. So it can use the data that's researched, but then it can apply it directly to you. Anyway, that's a long answer on who we are and and what we're gonna start.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

Oh, right. This is fascinating. Of course, uh now I understand why your background and how you got to this whole uh supply chain problem, and now applying it to uh healthcare supply chain being not of products but of data, which is basically the key, the key ingredient in this healthcare system. By the way, you know, we talk about the system being broken, and then in fact, it's working exactly as designed. It just wasn't designed around the patient. So I've heard it said, well, the system is not broken, it's fixed. Fixed to work a certain way. So I love your approach about putting the patient at the center, um, and also uh going way upstream, uh, including the food supply and the diet and the exercise to try to address this um problem of prevention. And the reason you mentioned, you know, how it works differently in other countries is also because their system is fundamentally different from ours, right? So our health insurance is attached to an employer, it's not attached to a person. So there is no incentive for the health insurance companies to really support the upstream interventions or prevention um, you know, opportunities. So talk about that. Talk about more about what you can change in the system.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

I love your I love your point you made there. So a couple things. One is, you know, the system is designed to be treatment-based. That has to change, right? If you don't get a patient involved, it'll never become preventative. But think about the data that comes out of this system. It will aggregate itself, anonymize itself, and it will determine what ingredients out in the food supply need to be removed from our food supply. Which of the medical drugs that have been launched should be pulled off to the market? Because I see way earlier that this drug is not helping the market, right? You know, clinical trials have a way of managing a clinical trial around a set of criteria. Well, there's a lot more different use cases in the world than what they tested, right? So that would happen. But then when you look at the incentive programs you're talking about, everybody's kind of incented wrong. This is all about the more I do, the more I make. The more tests I get, the more I make. You know, the more surgeries I do, the more I make. I get paid more if I do a surgery than if I don't put that person through a surgery. So the incentive programs are wrong. And let me tell you, the compounding effect of this is just embarrassing to see. So if you've got a patient who has a medical problem and it's diagnosed by the doctor and it's misdiagnosed because of medical error, primarily due to data problems, they're looking at bad information. That in turn gets that patient to file litigation. Then all of a sudden, the litigation hits their insurance companies, they raise the premiums. Then it gets back to the doctor and he says, you know what? I can't survive if this keeps happening to me. So what do they do? What we call CYA testing. Cover you, excuse my French, cover your past testing. You will test for everything, whether you need it or not. It it compounds the cost of the system, and it makes it very difficult to work in. You know, I was uh listening to your podcast and I found a brilliant uh point they made. You know, so many doctors are just wanting to leave because the system is not fun to work in. You know, we're uh our single version of the truth solves a lot more problems than I talk about, but another one it solves is how do you take a recommendation for a procedure or a test, say just an MRI, and get it to the insurance company and have them approve this. Is it not funny to you that the insurance company is making the call on whether or not the patient gets an MRI?

SPEAKER_02 19:36

Well, they're practicing, they're literally practicing medicine without license.

Self-Insurance And Prevention Programs

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Yeah, but then they do this on purpose. It's a manual process to enter into the data, then they give a response back, then they have another form, you have to enter it back in again. All they're doing is delaying cash flow, right? Yep. Then it's a slow play. So the supply chain, you know, the financial supply chain hurts everybody in the system. You know, I'll tell you one trend you will see. You can uh write this down as a prediction by Greg, because we're starting to talk to people about this. You start to question what do you need the insurance company for? You've got enough volume. Any state could do this today. Most cities, all large companies can just say, you know what, that 35% margin they're making, I'm keeping it. I now have a system that I can change behavior. So imagine this. We're talking to one state right now that we're gonna do a project with, and they pay, you know, they've got uh 35,000 employees. And since this is a full lifestyle system that includes dietary, workout, and medical, and it makes sure that they all work together. A workout program that is gonna hurt my bum knee and don't put me on a high-fat diet when I've got cholesterol issues, right? So it's gonna mold everything into the perfect version you want to become, and even let you tell it what you want to become, and he'll the AI will push you there. But when you when you think about that, what they want to do, which is brilliant, is a wellness program that says, I want you to follow all of these programs. If you do, instead of you paying$500 a month yourself, I'm gonna give you half of that or all of it back. Now, if you look at it from their perspective, the faster they get to preventative, the amount of money we're talking about is far greater than a mere$500 a month, right?

SPEAKER_02 21:44

So you're talking about organizations becoming self-insured and therefore being able to design the entire program with the prevention in mind and reduce the cost overall, never mind improving the health of their population, right?

Adoption Plan And Patient Data Rights

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Yeah, my second prediction is now that I said that out in public, the uh the insurance companies will start to change their approach. They will say, we need to fix this, automate the system, be fair about it. We're taking so much money out of it. You know, the the pharmaceutical guys are gonna have the same problem. Imagine if I get millions and millions of people on this system and we're on the road of fast growth now. We'll just start selling drugs direct, ship it directly to their home, right? So, you know, the the big cost buildups are the fragmented data. A ripple cost against everything. You know, everybody goes after the drugs because it's unfair that they're sold cheaper in Europe than they are here. Well, if you start taking the middleman out, that's adding on top of all the costs of that, you need to substantially take down those costs. These are just free byproducts of getting the patient on the system himself, right? Manage his own world, reduce his own costs. Of that five billion dollars, 500 million of it we pay, right?

SPEAKER_02 23:14

So, you know, give everybody we we the patience. Is that what you're saying?

SPEAKER_00 23:19

We the patience.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

So I I love everything you're saying. I think Irma's very enthusiastic as well. It's just an amazing vision. Um, talk about getting this to the reality of our healthcare system with you know the entrenched interests, the political protection that these interests have, monopolies in many cases, including the tech stacks, including the EHRs and other sort of monopolies. What's the plan? Is it is it grassroots or can it be top-down?

How To Get The Apps

SPEAKER_00 23:50

Great roots. If you remember, I started the conversation with two criteria that I call my first principles approach. The first is rethink the the reimagine the whole solution. Okay, but you can't replace every EMR system in the world. It would take you decades. The second part of that, though, is allow that to occur, but embrace what's there and make it better. I added one more that was the hardest thing to figure out and do it without having to run a project. Okay, so let's put that in perspective. I launched the product into the open public production environment, I don't know, four or five months ago. Sold a lot of users already. I have 92% of the United States on our system today. Nobody find out how I did that, but we have 92% of the people on our system right now. Not the people, the the systems themselves. We have 92% of the hospitals, the the family doctors, the primary care providers are already on the system. Now, the other 8% is because there's small little vendors that do technology that uh just we haven't been asked for. And we're saying if you got a new one, tell us, we'll do it for free. Our goal is to have 100%. Now, the beautiful thing about if I have 100% of something, there is no vendor big or bad enough to say they're not gonna play, especially because they're in a bad situation, they they should want to play. This helps their system drastically. Their doctors will love this, right? They do love it. But the the the uh the reason it works, which I wish I had when I was supply chain, you own your own data, right? Whose decision is it that wants to say I'll I'll provide the data or I'll allow you to fuse the data? Remember, it's all HIPAA compliant information. So if the patient has the data, they have no way of stopping and and shouldn't stop it, right? So I think personally everybody will embrace this concept. They all got together and tried to solve it five times, and they did it all wrong, five times. Definition of insanity. Do the same thing five times and still not get it right, right?

SPEAKER_02 26:27

So this is all very exciting. Uh, as a patient myself, as a patient advocate, um how do I get involved? How do I get access to this uh offering? How does a company take advantage of this? I know you have um your app that is targeted for providers, also, not just patients and patient advocates and families. So, how do people get involved? Is this something they can start using? Is it still too too early?

What Gets Built On Top Next

SPEAKER_00 26:57

No, no, no, no. We want everybody on the system as soon as they just go down to go to the app store on either Google or Apple and download it. Now, there's there's three apps today. The first is the healthcare network, that is the secret sauce of how the AI system fuses, cleanses, everything. Now, there are capabilities in that for the user to cleanse further the data. On top of that, so it will work standalone. On top of that, you got the patient-centric app. It's got a full-blown AI system built into it. And then it's got the lifestyle app, which is the preventative care uh capabilities. And then we're even going to allow third parties to build other apps on top of the network. But the those three apps are available in production right now, and we're out hitting the hitting the streets with it.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Brilliant. Um, what are you excited about as this rolls out over the next weeks, months, quarters? What's on your mind and what can this ultimately become, even beyond the amazing vision you've described uh today?

A Simple Test For Drug Conflicts

SPEAKER_00 28:11

It's it's unbelievable to me that once you get a single version of the truth of record, and you can even incorporate, you know, um other data, your health, your your lifestyle data, workout programs, dietary programs, etc. You'll need that, but you if you have all of that. My usual competitor is that's too good to be true. Everybody else is trying to work. So I said, Okay, fine, turn it on, use it, pay me in seven days if you like it. Um, but they always come up with an idea I hadn't thought of. So I'll give you the perfect example. This smart young guy said, you know, there's a real problem in the world for in vitro fertilization and alternative ways to have babies. And they have no way of matching these um embryos and sperms and eggs, uh, and finding a surrogate if they want it, and to manage that process. There's no systemized way of doing that. I took it a step further and said, what about uh orphans? If you can get around the regulations in the United States, there are orphan children all over the world, and there's plenty of parents all over the world looking for children, and there's no way to bring them out. And they would need all the medical information of these to pull it off. So we now all of a sudden plan on building a solution for that. You know, the the solution to tie the the payment side in and automate that and force the the uh the insurance companies. I'd like to say that was my idea, but a couple of hospitals say do that. That's major right now for me, right? So when you finally get uh you know the the real-time version of the truth, you can build so many apps on top of that. But then more importantly, what is amazing, and what Trump's asking for in his recent uh program, Make America Healthy Again, he wants the data. He wants to know what happened right now with these fat loss drugs, you know, to understand from an aggregate basis, just like the pharma guys do, how can I leverage this data and get better pharmaceuticals, get bad ones off the market faster, you know, plan for you know any disasters as before. So I think the but to answer your question, we're at the tip of the iceberg of what we can do just by adding this into the existing infrastructure of the medical tech bond.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

Well, on that note, uh we're all rooting for you. We all plan, at least here on this call, plan to sign up and uh introduce this to our doctors and providers and hopefully get them on board. And everyone, reach out and uh go to the website, get the app. I hadn't realized you were so far along and uh onwards and upwards here's to uh healthier country and society.

Closing And Where To Follow

SPEAKER_00 31:24

You know, one last thing I'll leave you with that'll be a fun thing for you to do with your doc. When you walk in with the app, can you show it to him? You got some prescription he wants to do? Have him say the prescription and then ask the AI will this be impact any or have negative impact on any other prescription I have. Oh wow, doctor has to figure out every permutation of every drug. He I got prescribed a a sleep med, and it affect was affected by four of the drugs I was taking. He had no idea.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 31:57

That's the medical error problem that they're dealing with. With that, I'll uh I'll let you wrap.

SPEAKER_01 32:03

Huge opportunity. That that sounds amazing. I'm gonna try that. And um, thank you for what you do.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

All right, well, I uh thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak about it.

SPEAKER_01 32:13

Yeah, and thanks everyone for listening, watching, uh sharing this episode. Also, check out our new TV show, techimpact.tv on Bloomberg Television and Fox Business. Greg, you'd be a great guest there as well in our conversation. Take care.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

All right, thank you guys. Thanks, everyone.

SPEAKER_01 32:31

Bye bye.