How a Geriatrician Built a Global Health Tech Startup Without Leaving Medicine with Dr. Michael Fang

In this episode of Startup Physicians, Dr. Alison Curfman sits down with Dr. Michael Fang, a practicing geriatrician and serial entrepreneur, to explore how physicians can build impactful healthcare startups—without leaving clinical medicine.

Michael shares his journey from traditional medical training to founding multiple healthcare technology companies, beginning with something deceptively simple: an Excel spreadsheet tracking social factors affecting elderly patients. Long before “social determinants of health” became a buzzword, Michael identified how caregiver availability, nutrition access, and home support predicted hospital readmissions with striking accuracy.

That insight led to a startup that ultimately scaled to serve over 7 million patients internationally, helping health systems allocate resources more effectively—years before U.S. reimbursement models caught up.

Throughout the conversation, Michael breaks down why physicians are uniquely positioned to be entrepreneurs, how curiosity fuels innovation, and why you don’t need to learn to code or get an MBA to build meaningful solutions. He also explains how entrepreneurship can actually reduce burnout, offering physicians a renewed sense of agency and creativity.

Finally, Michael introduces Ryze Health, a company designed to support independent medical practices by making healthcare benefits more affordable and accessible—reinforcing his broader mission to democratize healthcare.

This episode is a must-listen for physicians who:

• See broken systems and want to fix them
• Are curious about entrepreneurship but don’t know where to start
• Want to build alongside medicine, not abandon it

Chapters

00:00 – Physician to Entrepreneur (Without Planning It)

02:51 – Seeing the System Break in Real Practice

03:35 – Predicting Readmissions With an Excel Sheet

05:56 – Social Determinants of Health Before It Had a Name

09:48 – Why Physicians Are Built for Entrepreneurship

12:30 – You Don’t Need to Code (Or Get Another Degree)

14:39 – Finding Startup Partners Outside Medicine

15:34 – Practicing Medicine While Building Companies

19:22 – Entrepreneurship as Burnout Prevention

20:10 – The Secret Weapon: Physician Curiosity

22:37 – Asking “Why” Inside Broken Systems

24:36 – Introducing Rise Healt

27:10 – Why Independent Practices Matter

29:03 – A Call to Physicians Ready to Build

Resources Mentioned

• Rise Health: RyzehealthEmpowering Independent Physicians | Ryze Health Insurance & Practice Benefits
• Startup Physicians: StartupphysiciansStartUp Physicians | Physician Entrepreneurship, Consulting & Leadership
  
  

Transcript

Alison Curfman (00:00.76)
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Startup Physicians podcast. This is your host, Dr. Alison Curfman, and I am joined today by Dr. Michael Fang, who is a geriatrician, but a serial entrepreneur and startup co-founder. Hi, Michael, thanks for joining me today.

Michael Fang (00:17.682)
Hey, Allison, great to be here.

Alison Curfman (00:20.182)
So we first connected, think at a conference, I think we were both judging a pitch competition, which was great. And I was so impressed by the current startup you're building and the previous work you've done and obviously found a lot in common. And I'd love if you could share with us a little bit about your clinical training background and how you got started as an entrepreneur.

Michael Fang (00:48.828)
Well, thank you, Allison. And remember, you were the judge. I was the emcee. So I'm not sure if you were just entertained by my crowd skills or anything. But I really appreciate you being a judge on that. And yes, we certainly share a lot in common. But thank you for having me on your show. And my background is I'm an internal medicine, geriatric medicine doctor. I always tell folks that ever since I was eight, I knew I wanted to be a doctor by the age of 12. I knew I want to take care of elderly people. So that's exactly what I did. So when folks ask, like, well,

Well, did you knew you were gonna be an entrepreneur or go into, the answer is no. My major in college was cell molecular biology. That's about as medicine as it gets, right? I didn't take a year off to go do something else. In med school, went straight into, I went straight from college into med school, straight from med school into residency, straight from residency to fellowship. Like I did not at all during those times ever thought I would be building companies.

or not being anything but a doctor, right? And quite frankly, I was so excited to be a geologist. And when I did graduate, become a geologist, and I thought I had achieved my life goal, right? So it's like the astronaut that made it into space. And then fortunately, once you make it into space, you realize that space is actually really scary. Things are gonna be breaking down and everything's rattling, right? So that's what I realized as I started practicing that all the things that we were sheltered from when we were training,

we didn't see in the business of medicine, in the real care of the patient. And that's when, quite frankly, was when I became interested in figuring out like, okay, well, I'm really good with my clinical skills. I'm really comfortable with me as a doctor skill. But there are issues here that is beyond how good I am on a one-on-one in a room with a patient that I need to understand better. And that's when I became more interested in the business aspect of healthcare and from there.

started to look for solutions towards those problems that I was experiencing.

Alison Curfman (02:50.976)
I think it often starts with an awareness of the problems. And I think maybe when we're students or still in training, we are so heads down in our training and development that we see the problems, but we maybe are more cognizant that, you know, this is part of the system that we're trying to learn and we don't necessarily know how to fix those problems. Or maybe we do. Sometimes we

see something that, you know, we're seeing it with fresh eyes and being like, why in the world would we do it that way? But what was the first problem that you were drawn to to create a solution for?

Michael Fang (03:34.514)
So interestingly, this was when I was practicing at Indiana University Health System. And this was when EHR was just starting to be implemented. But quite frankly, it wasn't really a humming piece of tool. And frankly, most of us still hate it right now. But back then, it was definitely not working very well. again, I was a geriatrician, and I was working in a community hospital.

It was a small community farming community. So we always had a lot of patients that were readmitted. And what happened was as a jurisdiction, our focus often is around the social factor, right? We ask a lot more like, do you have stairs at home? Like, are you able to cook for yourself? If you're an older person, do you have caretakers? Is your children like right next door? they like 17 miles away, right? On another farm, right? So I asked a lot of social history and what was funny was I started tracking those social history on a Excel spreadsheet.

And at some point I was able to predict with almost a 90 % accuracy when a patient was going to be readmitted, not based on their meds, not based on their follow-up with their doctors, but based on when their caretaker was not going to be home for more than 24 hours. Because it correlated to when your caretaker is not home. Again, we were in a farming community, lower access to healthy food, elderly people who can't cook for themselves. So what happens? TV dinner, microwave, canned foods.

Lots of salt, lots of processed things in there. They tend to have heart failure, renal insufficiency. So what happens in 24 hours after they have three meals of high salt? Water retention, right? What happens after that? ER, right? So I was able to predict literally like whenever their caretaker was going to be away for more than 24 hours and if they didn't have any prep food, they would be back in our ER with heart failure or fluid retention and so forth, right? And that was what's contributing to our CHF readmission failure rate.

So once I figure that out, I start coordinating with the case managers to make sure that on those 24 hours, we let the family know, like, hey, try to prep the meals in advance, try to maybe increase the late six by a little bit the day before that, just to kind of get them to a little drier state. And that lowered the hospital re-emission. And this was basically social determinants of health, right? But this was 15 years ago when that wasn't a term, right? So I took a spreadsheet.

Michael Fang (05:55.618)
And then later on, met a couple of gentlemen who were interested in building a software around that. We turned that into a software. Again, though, in the US, people had no idea. And there was no reimbursement around social determinants of health as an outcome. But my two partners said, well, actually, England, with their single-pair system, knew exactly what to do with data like that. So we ended up making the company to UK. I couldn't go with them because I was still practicing in the US. I had some shares.

Alison Curfman (06:18.047)
Hmm.

Michael Fang (06:24.303)
as a co-founder, and I'm quite a fetishist as a co-founder, but they took the company relocated to UK. Long story short is that that company ended up servicing 7 million patients on social determinants of health data, helping the NHS, their national health service budget, what they need to have for patients to take care of home care or food delivery or medication delivery. It's still alive today, but it's been in the European countries quite a bit. And now,

Now that we know about social determinants health, that company is going to be making its way back to the US.

Alison Curfman (06:59.122)
It's like a boomerang.

Michael Fang (07:00.431)
Yes, we tend to be innovators in this country and we tend to have a slower uptake on regulations to support that innovation.

Alison Curfman (07:07.785)
Yeah.

That's really interesting. And what strikes me about it is that what you're describing is not rocket science, right? There's nothing about it that's like, man, how innovative, like give these people more support when they're all by themselves eating bad food with their heart filled. Like these are things that probably any of us could have noticed or seen patterns. We see patterns all the time. There's all these things about like, well like

Michael Fang (07:23.608)
Yeah.

Alison Curfman (07:41.392)
all of these patients that have this end up in the ER for this. I mean, we, especially I'm an emergency physician. mean, we have so much pattern recognition, but we don't usually have the power or capability or so we think to solve that. And I remember actually during fellowship, I sat down with a mentor in my program about what I wanted to do my research.

on and I said like, I wanted to do it on social determinants of health, which again, that was also, you know, more than 10 years ago. and he said, Alison, you're never going to be able to solve that problem. cause I was like, I mean, all these people end up in the ER that what they really need is another setting of care or better access to care. And I was thinking about doing like a, a survey or something around like what

Michael Fang (08:22.833)
Thank

Alison Curfman (08:35.337)
lands people in the ER what was missing from their care before. And he was like, you're just, you're gonna burn out. This is part of practicing emergency medicine. You will burn out if you feel like you need to change it because you just need to accept it. You need to accept that this is part of practicing emergency medicine and you need to put your head down and pick a disease and get to be an expert on it and publish and work your way up the academic ladder. And I was like, oh.

Michael Fang (08:35.396)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (09:04.849)
Okay, so I totally abandoned that idea. I became a international expert on Fusobacteria bacterimia, which is Lemur's disease, which I've never seen, but I've written papers on and it was not meaningful work in my opinion. But then I kind of returned back to this concept of how do we keep people out of the ER? But my point is that the...

Michael Fang (09:05.169)
Yeah.

Alison Curfman (09:33.267)
the things you were seeing, the patterns you were recognizing, and the problems that you felt like needed to be solved, they aren't rocket science. Most of us have ideas about these things in our own practice that we see every day, and you're talking about starting an Excel sheet, and that was your starting point. How did you find these partners that wanted to make it into a tech platform?

Michael Fang (09:47.813)
Yep,

Michael Fang (09:56.048)
Yeah, so I think to just kind of piggyback on what you shared there is yes, healthcare, especially for us physicians who are literally in the midst of it, you can throw a stone in any direction and hit a billion dollar problem, right? Like there's always going to be a lot of diabetics, a lot of obesity, a lot of cancer, lot of pick a problem and it's a billion dollar problem with a billion people behind it, right? Like as an issue. So that's the good news is that if you're looking for a problem to solve,

to work your, to kind of learn, to exercise your innovation mind, you're in the midst of it. You're gonna find plenty of issue to solve. And yes, it doesn't take a lot for you to figure out the problem. We've been equipped with that skillset through our training. We're extremely good at data gathering. We're extremely good at processing large volumes of random information and trying to see a pattern behind it.

we're very good at experimentation, like fast, like what they call Lean Six Sigma or Lean Development, like we do that in our brain, right? Like we go through and test this antibiotic, nope, not that one, IV fluid, nope, too much, down, right? Like we do that very, very quickly already as part of our training. In fact, I would tell most physicians that to make it to where you are, you've been selected based on those skills. If you didn't have those skills, you didn't make it.

Alison Curfman (11:04.325)
Yeah

Michael Fang (11:20.113)
If you couldn't process information quickly, if you couldn't tolerate large volumes of information, mean, you remember residency and like you learned a different skill set every month. Like one month, or you met school, one month you were delivering babies and the next month you're doing plastic surgery and trying to close wounds and the next month you're trying to learn how to do colonoscopy. Like you were, the next month after that you were managing dialysis and the month after that you were in an event in ICU. We learn very, very fast. So if you couldn't learn.

quickly and you couldn't tolerate mass amounts of information and you couldn't recognize patterns and figure out, you know, A, tests are assessment and planning, right? Like if you didn't, if you couldn't do that, you didn't make it as a physician. And those are the same skillsets that make successful entrepreneurs, very literally. Okay. But going back to your question about like, well, so how do you, how do you, how do you, you know, find the folks? So that's the, the other important thing is that yes, you are, you are very vertically

trained as a physician in that skill set. You don't need to go learn other skill sets because that's the one skill set that other people can have. I always say like, know, MD is one of the few degrees you can't get online still, right? So you have a skill set that nobody else can actually get unless they literally went through med school and residency and fellowship and training. So a lot of doctors might be like, Mike, you did this on Excel spreadsheet, but then did you build the software? I'm like, no, sell molecular biology. Yeah, sell molecular biology.

Alison Curfman (12:29.054)
True

Alison Curfman (12:42.651)
Yeah, did you know how to code it? And it's like, no, there's a million people that can code it.

Michael Fang (12:47.043)
Yeah. And they're like, did you go get a master's in informatics? like, as soon as I graduated, we had our first child. I was busy working. I did not go get a master's in informatics. There was no time. I still had a debt. I wasn't going to add another master's six-figure debt to that. So the other thing that I would say that we're also good as physicians, and again, recognize this, is that

Alison Curfman (13:02.47)
Yeah.

Michael Fang (13:13.935)
We as physicians don't try to pretend we know everything. And in fact, I know sometimes people accuse us of that, but actually we don't. think about in your specialty, you, like especially for ER, right? Like, you know how to call for consults, right? You're not going to pretend you know. Exactly. Like half the time I tell doctors, like, what were we trained in? We weren't trained to recognize diseases. We're just trained to recognize what's normal, right? Like, and then when it's not normal, we go, okay, well, that's no longer normal. Something's going on. Now we may not know what that is.

Alison Curfman (13:26.287)
Know what you know and know what you don't know.

Michael Fang (13:42.46)
but we know how to seek answers. And part of that is pulling in other experts, right? So same thing when I started entrepreneurship or when I started to want to build that software, it wasn't because I was like, I want to build the software. It was like, well, I don't know how to build a software, but I know how to look for help. So this is where I went on LinkedIn. And yes, instead of going to a medical conference, I went to a tech conference. Now I felt very out of water. of my first tech conference looked around.

I couldn't recognize anybody because obviously no doctors ever really show up to those. But you just use your people skills and just make connections. And once I made some connections from a couple of conferences, they were able to introduce me to other developers. And that's where eventually I found my two partners who did have software development skill. together, we were able to build this platform that ended up being, like I said, in England.

Alison Curfman (14:38.139)
That's so cool. And it's also interesting that it found its roots overseas and then now is coming back to the U S I, I think it's interesting how sometimes other countries, payment systems or payer systems make them more amenable to certain models. know, back when I was doing the initial complex Pittsburgh, we were, I was also working with a group in Australia and it was like,

Michael Fang (14:54.865)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (15:05.733)
very easy to implement there because of their single payer system. But it was incredibly challenging to implement here until I had the support of a firm and the capital to take full risk. yeah, that must have been a really interesting and cool experience founding a company that then really took off overseas. What did you do after that?

Michael Fang (15:33.286)
I was still practicing full time. So I actually practice full time as a geriatrician, either in a large hospital systems or in my own private practice group until literally the middle of pandemic. one thing I'll tell doctors when they say like, well, do you have to give up clinical practice to go do this? I'm like, well, I didn't. And again, if you found a problem and you know how to distill the problem down its root cause analysis, you find out the root cause and you say, well, this is what would be the solution to solve this root cause. Then you go gather the team.

To to help you build a solution towards that. So no you don't have to give up a full-time clinical practice I didn't and again I was still trying to be a good good husband and good father at the same time right and doing all that So I was practicing full-time and I tell a lot of physicians like in fact Having that stable job that stable salary as a physician allows you to be a little bit more brave as an entrepreneur, right? You and I both know Alison like sometimes when you're a startup you're pitching for

$10,000 and I'm like, we could make $10,000 just by doing seven night shifts, right? Like so, so you actually have the ability through your career to fund little things until you figure out what it is you want to do or realize that, you know what, I really don't want to do this. Also good, right? And, and, but you have the ability through your clinical salary to experiment with building little things, which instead of.

Alison Curfman (16:50.563)
You will always be employable as a doctor.

Michael Fang (16:53.689)
Exactly. And you don't have to waste your time pitching for small amounts of money, right? Like you have that capital. I also want to remind our colleagues who are listening that you have other doctor friends, right? So some of my earlier startups, if I created a solution, some of my physician friends are like, I'll put in $5,000 on that. So you could raise money from your own network without, that's actually really powerful. I know a lot of startup founders who are not from the medical world, right? That have to raise money and it's, and you could literally spend,

50 % of your time as an entrepreneur just trying to find money. And that's really, right, that's where they burn out and they feel disheartened and so forth. So as a physician, you actually get a quick pass on that on the early phase of your career. But I was still practicing. once I had a taste of the entrepreneur world, I was kind of hooked in that I feel I found my niche, right? I wasn't...

I wasn't like a researcher, right? I did some research. I thought about a PhD and I realized I wasn't really that smart enough or patient enough to go through years of research to figure something out. Right. and, I, I also realized that I do like teams. I like networking with people, right? Like I didn't want to, I didn't want to be, so I'm like, like said, internal medicine. I will not radiologist where I'm sitting in a room and just reading through like cases of cases by myself. Right. Like, and, and I'm a prostitute doctors who do that. Right. But.

I realized that I really liked interacting with folks to solve a problem. So entrepreneurship offered an additional outlet for my energy as a doctor. Yes, during the day I was solving patient problems, but in the evenings I was able to solve more like healthcare problems and dealing with a different set of folks, which was very reenergizing. In fact, I think I didn't burn out because of that, right? So during the daytime, yes, I'm interacting with all the clinical folks, nurses, doctors, other things like that.

At night, I get to work with developers. I get to work with software designers. I get to work with policy makers. I get to work with lawyers. interacting with those folks, realized, gave me a lot of, I get to learn off of them. And it was new stuff, different from what I heard more and the time during the day. And that allowed me to have extra energy and an extra kind of passion for what I'm trying to solve. So as you're exploring, right?

Michael Fang (19:21.229)
as a physician, you're thinking about entrepreneurship and you find that kind of interaction with other types of experts in other industries really energizes you, then I would say, then that one will help you keep going as a doctor and two will help you learn more and help you be not burn out as quickly, right? As a physician. I'll just, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Alison Curfman (19:41.109)
Yeah, and I, I was just going to say, I think it adds a little bit of just interest to your day-to-day when you're working on things that aren't always, you know, the same. mean, not that things are always the same in medicine, but there are, you know, you get to a point after you're practicing for 10 years or so that you're, seeing a lot of the same stuff. You're dealing with a lot of the same problems and you're maybe interested in doing something that is not so predictable.

Michael Fang (19:51.429)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Fang (20:09.124)
Yeah. I think the other thing I'll just kind of let doctors know, again, I really, if you ask me, I always say like, I really feel every doctor, if you graduated, you have all the right skillsets and personality to be a very successful entrepreneur. So I talked about data and organization, but there's another very, very key thing that we physicians have that really is a secret ingredient to successful entrepreneurship. And that is our level of curiosity. Now, yes, you're right. As we...

went through our career and we become more, you know, kind of buried under the reality of our career. Like your mentor who said, don't worry about that. You burn out, right? We even have our own doctors, our own coaches, our own physicians, our own family sometimes, right? That says, don't think about that. But if you think back to when you wanted to be a doctor in med school, you were so excited about the things you could learn. You were excited about getting your hands on

that patient, you were excited, like we fought to do central lines, right? Like maybe there was one student that's like, I really don't want to touch this, but they would fight for some other procedures that they want to do, right? Like we fought to do, to cause we were naturally curious. And again, if you weren't naturally curious, you wouldn't make it as a physician, right? So what I would say is we, we, again, after years, we may have been beaten down to, to lose that curiosity a little bit, or we might have burned out a little bit and lost that curiosity, but I would say revitalize that.

There are a lot of things that you don't even have to spend time like I did to build a spreadsheet and find me. Like, have you ever been curious, like just around, like just be more curious about your work, right? So for example, when you give a medication, are you curious about how that medication got into the hospital? Like how was it bought? Like where did it come from? Right? If you had this reimbursable, if someone says, we need to do this. You need to write it like this so we can get a higher reimbursement. Have you ever been curious as to

why that reimbursement is this way, right? Other than just like, well, you don't have to be more specific. man, like we can complain about it or you can be really curious and say, well, why is it that if I wrote my note this way that you would get better reimbursement? How was that determined? Which payer makes that decision? And how would they know? Right? Like if I wrote this, how would they know? How do they keep track of it? Right? And there's a lot of things. If you revitalize your curiosity about your own work environment, you will start to see opportunities to learn everywhere. And this is where I would say,

Michael Fang (22:36.748)
it's possible for you to even talk to folks. Even if you're a big hospital system, I mean, my IT team hated me because I was always down there like, hey, how come we can't have this button over here? And they don't just go, because Epic doesn't let it. I just go, no, but why not? And they would have to explain, well, they use this software to code it this way, so it takes them four months if they want to recode it. I'm like, OK. Or if I put this data over here, why does it take four weeks before I can see the data?

Alison Curfman (23:02.314)
It's like having a three year old following you around going, why, why, why?

Michael Fang (23:05.718)
Yeah, why is that? Like, why is that? And I think if you can revitalize that, you will, one, find more joy in the environment that you're in. right? And you'll also start to see more opportunities, perhaps an opportunity where you do want to invest a little bit more of your time and effort and even money to put together a potential solution and a potential business right behind all of

Alison Curfman (23:30.114)
think that the way physicians tend to get curious about things, I think they tend to have like a little bit of a chip on their shoulder about billing and coding and documentation and supplies and all that stuff. It's like not really like, ooh, this is so interesting. But the reason it gets interesting and why people get really curious about it is when it creates some sort of a problem that affects their patients and they start tracing it backwards or tracing it down that like, oh, well, because this happened, this happens. And oh, because

Michael Fang (23:54.895)
that.

Alison Curfman (24:00.034)
this is the situation, like this patient is not getting X, Y or Z. And how do I overcome this? How do I solve this problem for them? And I think that those are the things that really motivate us. Like I've never been like, ooh, billing and coding, that's so interesting. But then as soon as you get into, know, value-based contracting and we, you know, for us to be able to provide this amazing service for these high needs kids, we really have to understand the billing codes or, you know, something like that.

Then it becomes a problem you're trying to solve that has a reason behind it, which I think really motivates a lot of physicians. I want to make sure to leave a couple minutes to talk about what you've been building most recently. Can you tell us a little bit about Ryze?

Michael Fang (24:35.045)
Yes.

Michael Fang (24:47.78)
Yeah. So, if I had to look back in my life, and say what has been the driving factor for me as a physician, and then later on as an entrepreneur is, towards democratization of healthcare or that's three, guess, democratizing healthcare. that really is what I wanted to do. Right. So, when I got into using data is to try to figure out, well, using data work and I focus, right. Our resources from too many folks.

I also created a platform that during COVID where we had five nurse practitioners evaluate 1.7 million cases of infection over course of two years. So how do we use technology to allow us to be more efficient, to augment what we do? Now, after my last company and after the pandemic, I really noticed that a lot of physicians were, like you said, burning out. And we also hear a lot of these things like the individual independent doctor is

or independent practices are dying and they're all being bought up by private equities and hospitals, which by the way, I would tell you that's because there's a financial reason behind that, not because that's the natural path of why they would be here, right? So there was a financial reason of that. We won't go into that today, but there's absolutely, every data has shown that when you have independent doctors in private practices, they deliver better care. Literally their outcome is better, okay?

the cost of their delivery is lower than bigger entities, right? That's just the way it is. So for me, when I look back and say, if my drive, if my inner why is democratizing healthcare, and that means making things affordable, accessible, and available, those are the three A's when it comes to democratizing healthcare, then independent doctors and independent medical practices is a crucial piece of my mission.

Right, to, and I want to, certainly there's nothing wrong. We all train in big academic centers. They exist for a reason. And many of us may feel more comfortable working for a big corporation or a bigger group or a hospital system. Nothing wrong with that. But the option should always be there. That if we said, you know what, it's been, I practiced for a big corporate for 10 years before I go, you know what, I want to start my own private practice. And that process should be as easy as possible. Right? So that's when I founded Rides because I said, well,

Michael Fang (27:09.868)
to what we've been discussed, a lot of times when we've been practicing in large healthcare systems, we don't really understand how to build our own business, right? So we, as you are coming out to build your own practice, you might realize, I don't really know much about billing, actually. In fact, I don't even know much about accounting or how do I get better health insurance for our employees. And that was actually where Ryze started, was me talking to a lot of independent doctors. And we all said,

You know what, as small business owners, we have really crappy health plans for ourselves, right? And we're the most medically educated professionals in the country. And we don't try to use the ER, right? We recognize our symptoms. We probably self-medicate more than we should, right, around things. So we're not the biggest users of health plans, but yet we have some of the most expensive health plans, not because we're high-risk patients.

but because we are small businesses, right? This is where the curiosity of learning why things are like, why is it that we have the most expensive health insurance when hospitals have the cheaper health insurance? It's because of size of your business. So we founded Ryze so that we can create our own health plan for independent doctors in a way that other industries have, for example, as independent restaurant owners or as a

Alison Curfman (28:15.486)
Yeah.

Michael Fang (28:31.216)
trucking company, right? They band together and created their own health plans as a profession. And when I looked around, I didn't see that for physicians. And that's where Ryze came out of was the desire to at least take care of one thing, right? Like just one thing, how can I make taking care of ourselves, our families and our employees in terms of our own health insurance, make that affordable and make that available for small independent doctors.

Alison Curfman (28:55.177)
That's incredible. And for those of you who are listening, it's ryzehealth.com, right? R-Y-Z-E health.com. And I know it's growing really quickly and I know that you and I both share this vision and mission of really supporting other physicians. I think that the work that you've done so far has been really inspiring and I'm sure that the ability to

Michael Fang (29:03.856)
That's right.

Michael Fang (29:22.448)
Thank you.

Alison Curfman (29:24.639)
provide better access to healthcare for even some of our own is a really incredible mission. And I think that your journey has been very interesting. I think it's inspiring to people who maybe haven't done a lot of their own tech development or MBA or other things to recognize that the problems that you see every day

can be solved by us. We can be part of the solution. I want to share that one of my goals is to really create a lot of pathways for physicians to be able to enter this space as either advisors or consultants or founders through this podcast and other resources. So I would highly encourage anyone who's interested in developing more of these skills to check out StartupPhysicians.com.

But altogether, Michael, just really want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your story.

Michael Fang (30:24.688)
Thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure and very inspired by you as well, Allison. I always tell folks, like, I wish I had a mentor like you or the program that you offered, right, to teach doctors how to even start in all of this. Back then, I just stumbled through things. I think it's wonderful you have that program. And yeah, I would really appreciate, I would really encourage other physicians to check out your program as well, because it saves them a lot of the trial and errors that I have to, I had to go through. But thank you again for having me.

Alison Curfman (30:51.549)
Thank you so much. All right guys, see you next time.