Ignition by RocketTools
Healthcare is getting optimized by AI. But optimized for whom? Ignition by RocketTools breaks down the systems, incentives, and technology reshaping how care gets approved, denied, and paid for — with data, not hype.
Episodes
25 episodes
How One Reused Password Cost Change Healthcare $2.5 Billion (Healthcare Security, Part 1)
In February 2024, hackers walked into the largest healthcare clearinghouse in America through a Citrix portal that didn't have multi-factor authentication. They used credentials stolen from a previous breach — someone, somewhere, had reused the...
The Target Story Isn't About Coupons. It's About Healthcare AI.
Twelve years ago, a Target statistician built a model that could predict pregnancy from 25 shopping items. The story usually gets told as a privacy parable. I'm telling it differently — as a preview of how healthcare AI is going to work for the...
The 9-Person Insurance Company and the Real Line in AI-First Healthcare
Y Combinator has a name for it: burn tokens, not headcount. A health insurance company called Decent runs with nine people total. Twofold does revenue cycle management with three. Deep Cura Health handles patient scheduling, prior auth...
Are the Blues AI-Ready? Blue Cross vs. the Optum Platform Race
In March 2026, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association published research blaming hospitals' AI billing tools for $2.3 billion in added healthcare costs. It was a grievance — not a strategy. And it stands in sharp contrast to 1981, when the same...
The Hospital Cost Crisis: How Washington Banned Cheaper Care
You've been told American healthcare is expensive because of greedy insurers, pharma profits, or the cost of innovation. That story is incomplete to the point of being misleading.The largest single driver of US healthcare spending isn't...
Is Your Local Hospital Doing Exactly What Musk Says OpenAI Did?
There's a billionaire fight happening in an Oakland federal courtroom right now. The headlines are calling it Elon Musk versus Sam Altman—tech titans, AI drama, billions at stake. But here's what almost nobody is telling you: if Elon wins this ...
21st Century Cures, 20th Century Accounting: Why a $3M Gene Therapy Just Broke Insurance
A 6-month-old named KJ Muldoon just received the first personalized CRISPR gene therapy ever made — designed, manufactured, and administered for his exact mutation in six months. Nature named him to the Top 10 People Who Shaped Sc...
Med Students Are Choosing the Wrong AI Specialty
If you're a medical student picking a specialty in 2026, you're being asked to bet a decade and $300,000 in debt on a market nobody is teaching you to read.This episode is the framework I wish someone had given me — plus the data nobody...
Nobody In The MultiPlan Lawsuit Is The Good Guy
Last week the Texas Medical Association joined a federal antitrust lawsuit against MultiPlan — recently rebranded as Claritev. The story being told is doctors versus insurers, an unlawful cartel, $19B in alleged underpayments. It's a clean stor...
The Stop-Loss Crisis: Why Your Safety Net May Have a $4 Million Hole
49% of plan sponsors reported claims exceeding $1 million last year — double the rate from the year before. And stop-loss carriers are responding not by covering you better, but by finding creative ways to limit their exposure to the most expen...
Karpathy's $0.35 AI vs. Your Benefits Broker's 20 Hours
Andrej Karpathy just released AutoResearch — a 630-line Python tool that lets AI agents run hundreds of experiments overnight on a 35-cent GPU rental. In one test, 35 autonomous agents completed 333 experiments while everyone slept and found 20...
How to Build an AI Startup with Other People's Money
The AI labs are selling you $10,000 a month in computing power for $600. They're doing it at massive losses. And they have very specific reasons you should understand.In this episode, I break down the $670B subsidy era fueling healthcare...
Amazon Just Put a Doctor in Your Shopping Cart
Amazon launched an AI health agent inside the Amazon Shopping app — the same app where you order paper towels. It books appointments, manages prescriptions, explains lab results, and connects you to real doctors. Prime members get five free vir...
Hacking DNA: What Anthropic's Mythos Model Means for Medicine
Anthropic just announced Claude Mythos Preview — an AI model so capable at finding software vulnerabilities that they won't release it publicly. Instead, they launched Project Glasswing with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others, com...
The Injection Economy: When AI Whispers in Your Ear
Meta acquired Moltbook. OpenAI put ads in ChatGPT. Microsoft found 31 companies actively poisoning what AI assistants recommend. Everyone's calling it AI-native marketing — but what they're really describing is an influence mechanism with no...
Why Healthcare AI Keeps Failing — It's Not the AI, It's the Integration
What's really happening with AI in healthcare? The common story is that health systems just need to find the right tool — the best ambient scribe, the smartest chatbot. But the reality is more complicated.In this episode, I break down wh...
Tele-Doom: Why AI Is Rewriting the Future of Telehealth
The telehealth boom was supposed to revolutionize healthcare forever—but what went wrong? In this episode, Dan McCoy unpacks the dramatic fall of industry giants like Teladoc and Amwell, revealing how their high-profile bets on nationwide distr...
The Network Arbitrage Game: How Employers Are Overpaying for Healthcare
Most employers think they're getting a deal on healthcare. They're not. The exposed rate data tells a different story — one where the same knee replacement costs wildly different amounts depending on which hospital and which network you're in, ...
When AI Knows the Diagnosis But Misses the Action
Mount Sinai just published the first independent safety evaluation of ChatGPT Health — and the findings should change how you think about AI in healthcare.Published in Nature Medicine, researchers ran 960 patient interactions across 21 m...
The 15% Trap: How a Single Number Broke Healthcare Pricing
Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drug Company sells a cancer drug for $47 a month. That same drug often costs well over $2,000 at your pharmacy. Both include a 15% markup. The markup is the same — the price is dozens of times higher, and nobody's asking ...
What AI Prior Authorization Actually Looks Like — And Why It Will Demand More From Providers, Not Less
Everyone's pitching AI as the solution to prior authorization. And they're right — the technology is about to solve it. Ambient scribes capturing every detail. Clinical decision support guiding every order. Automated systems submitting p...
Are Tokens the New RVU? Why Healthcare's Measurement System Is About to Break
What if the way we measure a doctor's productivity is completely wrong?Software companies have already abandoned "lines of code" as a productivity metric — they now budget in tokens, the fundamental unit of AI work. Some developers spend...
AI, Healthcare Privacy, and the Pentagon: Why HIPAA Can't Protect You Anymore
The Pentagon just labeled Anthropic — the company behind Claude AI — a national security supply chain risk. Not because they're a foreign adversary. Because they refused to remove two guardrails: no mass surveillance of Americans and no autonom...
Your Rural Clinic Is a Hacker's Easiest Target
The common story about healthcare cybersecurity is that big hospital systems are the targets. The reality is more complicated. Rural America is ground zero — and the math is brutal.The Change Healthcare attack knocked out 50% of all U.S....
$60M to Replace Benefits Brokers. The Disruption Is Here.
Gyde just raised $60 million to build the first AI-native insurance brokerage. Not a tool for brokers — a replacement for the brokerage model itself. Led by Lightspeed, backed by Optum Ventures, founded by a 10-year Oscar Health veteran....