Why Healthcare's Future Lives Where Doctors Aren't Looking

I got into a philosophical discussion recently about whether everyone has equal worth no matter what they do. As someone who likes to measure things, I ended up defending money as our best metric to measure productive output in society. Not perfect, not the only one—just the best we have to measure how much someone has done to give other people things they want. (Non-profits exist to cover the externalities that are needed in society for social value but do not have economic value.)

That conversation stuck with me. I landed on using Physics to guide me. I claimed that almost everyone has equal potential value, but people differ in their actualized value. The actions you take, or do not take, determine the delta between actualized and potential. Think kinetic versus potential energy.

This got me thinking about the difference between potential value and actualized value in terms of labor.

Think about it this way: Elon Musk has pretty much maximized his actualized value. You and I? We've actualized more than a lot of people, sure. But we probably still have a ton of potential left on the table.

Then I realized something about the job of a physician: physicians are in the business of restoring potential value. Someone gets sick or injured, we patch them up and restore what they're capable of. But we do absolutely nothing to help them actually actualize that potential. That all happens outside the clinic.

And nobody's helping with that part. That's a gap.

The Gap Nobody's Talking About

Here's what's happening right now in healthcare, and most doctors are pretending it isn't:

On one side: Consumers are obsessed with health data. Wearables everywhere. WHOOP, Oura Ring, Apple Watch. People tracking sleep, HRV, glucose, steps, strain. Supplements are mainstream now. Longevity isn't fringe anymore—it's what everyone's talking about. Patients are generating mountains of data about their bodies and desperately want someone qualified to help them understand it.

On the other side: Physicians are leaving traditional practice in droves for Direct Primary Care. Why? Because they want actual ownership over how they treat patients. They're tired of insurance companies dictating care through billing codes. At the same time, they're closing their eyes and ears to clear consumer demand in wearables, longevity, supplements, whole body MRIs etc.

So here's the absurd part: patients have all this data they want analyzed. DPC doctors have the time and autonomy to analyze it. But it's still not happening.

Why? Because there's no ICD-10 code for "assessed WHOOP data from patient." Insurance doesn't pay for it in traditional settings, so traditional doctors ignore it. (Fun fact, did you know a full Review of Systems isn't actually required anymore in a patient note? We just keep doing it because insurance used to want it!) And DPC doctors haven't figured out how to systematically integrate all this new patient data.

But imagine if they did. Imagine WHOOP partnering with a DPC clinic: pay a premium tier membership and you get physician analysis of your wearable data included. Your doctor actually reviews your sleep architecture, your recovery scores, your strain patterns. Not as a gimmick—as real preventative medicine.

That could exist today. It doesn't.

The Industry Doctors Love to Ignore

Let me hit you with a number: the global supplements industry is worth $200 billion and growing at 8% annually.

For context, the entire global music industry is $20 billion.

Supplements are 10x bigger than music. And growing faster.

As physicians, our response to this has been to dismiss the entire thing as pseudoscience. Overdiagnosis. The worried well wasting money. We close our eyes and plug our ears and insist it's all nonsense.

But when an industry is that massive and growing that fast, maybe "it's all nonsense" isn't the full picture. Maybe there's actual value being delivered—or at least, value that could be delivered if someone with medical training approached it professionally, methodically, with aligned incentives instead of just selling snake oil.

The demand is real. Patients don't care that we're skeptical. They're spending the money anyway. Commerce happens online now. Health optimization happens online. Life happens online. And physicians have retreated to exam rooms, insisting everything outside is bad medicine.

We're missing the entire conversation. And worse, we're letting unqualified people lead it.

Building Healthcare's Apple

My long-term vision is this: build the Apple of healthcare.

Not in the sense of making gadgets. In the sense of integration. Products, software, and services that work seamlessly together to deliver exceptional patient care. The Ritz-Carlton of healthcare—a chain of clinics where hospitality isn't an afterthought, it's the foundation.

You don't build that overnight. You need to build the atom before the molecule, the molecule before the compound.

The compound is that chain of integrated clinics with exceptional end-to-end care. But the atom? That needs to start with something consumers already want. And whether doctors like it or not, right now that's supplements, sleep products, and wearables.

So here's the plan: start by learning to sell luxury health products. Not commodity stuff—luxury. Premium supplements at $80. Sleep masks at $100. High margins because that's what makes the unit economics work. You can't build a real business selling $20 products online when Meta Ads cost $30+ per click. At least, I can't.

The interesting challenge isn't manufacturing. It's figuring out how to make someone want to pay $80 for something that costs $15 to produce. That's all storytelling. Education. Brand building. Creating something people want to be part of, not just buy from. I'm thinking something along the lines of how James Dyson would attach little index cards sharing the story behind Dyson, when it first launched in stores. This helped buyers feel they were a part of a story, not just a consumer.

The Evolution: Products → Software → Clinics

Once you have the consumer products working, here's how it builds:

Phase 1: Premium products. Meet customers where they already are. Build brand credibility. Generate cash flow. Learn how to acquire customers profitably online.

Phase 2: Software layer. At this point you already have a list of thousands of patients across the country. But you can tap into an easy adjacent market by offering a new upsell; I've noticed a lot of the patients I get to meet in school keep health journals—little notebooks tracking symptoms, medications, habits, sleep, mood. What if we made a beautiful physical journal as a product? Then a year or two later, we introduce an AI tool: photograph your journal pages and upload your entire health history into a private digital vault. Regardless in the end, you now have converted DTC consumer health customers into a patient panel. And you even managed to load it up with real consenting patient data!

Suddenly you've built the early version of an EMR without calling it that. You have patients in a digital ecosystem you control. You have longitudinal data. You have real relationships. Best of all, you keep big-bad wolf Epic away.

Phase 3: Clinical services. Now you build the actual clinics and can start offering nationwide Telehealth as well. You already have brand recognition. You have patient relationships. You have data infrastructure. You create a licensed clinic model that integrates everything—the products, the software, the hospitality-driven care.

Products → software → services. Atom → molecule → compound.

Why This Actually Matters

Healthcare is broken, but not because doctors don't care. It's broken because the incentive structures are completely misaligned. Insurance reimbursement dictates what's medically possible. Patients are optimizing their health everywhere except with their doctors because we've made it clear we're not interested in that conversation.

But we should be interested. We're the ones with actual medical training. We have clinical judgment. We can distinguish signal from noise. We should be the trusted guides in a landscape that's become overwhelming and often predatory.

Instead, we've ceded that entire space to people selling $200 multivitamins with no medical oversight.

The future of healthcare isn't just telehealth and AI diagnostics. It's meeting patients where they're already trying to optimize their health and bringing real medical expertise into those spaces. It's building systems with aligned incentives where doctors can actually practice good medicine without fighting insurance companies for every decision.

Someone's going to build the Apple of healthcare. I thought it would be Kaiser, then I thought it'd be One Medical, then I thought it'd be Function Health. They all kept failing for one main reason. It should probably be people who understand medicine. But the people who understand medicine get lured into ivory towers, and we end up going in circles.

So in reality, it'll probably be young physician-builders who understand DTC e-commerce, storytelling, and brand building; which is probably like less than 100 people across the whole U.S. right now.

More soon.