Rural communities often face a grim choice: drive three hours for a specialist or wait nine months. This massive barrier to specialty care is one of the biggest drivers of health inequity.

What if a primary care provider could get a specialist consult and a clear next step for their patient in a matter of seconds, right there in the exam room? Reza Sanai, a cardiologist and founder of Picasso MD, is on The Tech Glow Up to detail the curbside consult platform that’s transforming specialty access.

Picasso MD’s three-pronged approach is designed to reinforce the primary care office, the most critical space in the world, by eliminating a significant percentage of unnecessary referrals and optimizing care. Reza explains that the technology is designed for physician adoption: three clicks, and a provider is live-chatting with a specialist in an average of 17 seconds.

This ensures a patient walks out with an answer, not a phone number and a nine-month wait. The philosophy driving the company is simple: connect with your community and practice value-based care.

By making specialists more accessible, Picasso MD is not only improving patient outcomes but is also optimizing the patient before their in-person visit, which is a key value proposition for the entire healthcare system.

Episode Highlights

• Techquity Definition: Tech equity in healthcare means technology that drives better access, personalized care, and inclusion of marginalized populations.
• Specialty Access Gap: The Picasso MD platform was created to bridge the 9- to 12-month wait times often seen for specialty care in rural and underserved communities.
• Physician-Designed Workflow: The platform is engineered for speed, allowing a PCP to connect with a specialist in under 20 seconds for real-time clinical decision support during a normal 15-minute patient visit.
• Referral Optimization: A sophisticated algorithm prioritizes provider favorites and local networks for referrals before relying on the platform's network, ensuring local care is always first.
• Patient Navigation: The company believes the next major wave of health innovation is helping patients navigate their path from an initial AI/LLM inquiry to thoughtful, value-oriented specialist throughputs.

Reza’s origin story, rooted in giving out his mobile number to colleagues to build trust and cut down on unnecessary ER visits, proves that scaling impact begins with prioritizing the provider and patient experience.

Watch the full video on YouTube, and please like and subscribe to The Tech Glow Up!

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

The healthcare industry is hungry for AI standards, governance, and certification, making the need for genuinely trustworthy tech more urgent than ever. CEOs Dr. Tim O’Connell of emtelligent and Oren Nissim of Brook Health return to the show to cut through the hype and share where the industry is actually going and what applications are delivering real results today.

We dive deep into the next big applications for AI—from saving a doctor half their time on consult chart review to tackling the isolation and loneliness epidemic of chronic illness—and how to ensure this technology remains effective and responsible for everyone in the care loop.

Episode Key Moment Highlights:

• AI-Assisted Chart Review: AI-powered chart review software is already cutting a clinician's patient review times by half, dramatically speeding up decision-making for solo practices reviewing 40-page consult requests [00:01:03].
• Data Extraction Accuracy: After 10 years in business, emtelligent is seeing spectacular, state-of-the-art results for the accuracy of coding complex, unstructured medical data into clear, organized information [00:05:00].
• Loneliness Gap: For older patients with chronic conditions, having a reliable AI conversation partner 24/7 genuinely helps bridge the isolation and loneliness gap caused by their illness [00:10:05].
• Regulatory Confidence: Policy and government intervention, including increased reimbursement and new access models, are currently pushing the industry toward safe digital health in a positive direction, which Tim and Oren are encouraged by [00:14:04].

This conversation is a bold, enthusiastic look at how we build the next generation of safe digital health—one that uses effective, governed technology to genuinely support caregivers and empower patients to confidently manage their chronic conditions and navigate complex lifestyle changes at home.

Watch the full episode on YouTube and please like and subscribe to The Tech Glow Up!

About Oren Nissim:

Oren Nissim is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Brook Health, a pioneering healthcare technology company dedicated to transforming chronic disease management through AI-driven, always-on remote care.

Brook’s platform blends advanced artificial intelligence with compassionate human clinical support to help individuals better manage chronic conditions, improve health outcomes, and extend access to personalized care beyond traditional clinical settings.

About Tim O'Connell:

Dr. Tim O’Connell is a practicing radiologist in Vancouver and cofounded emtelligent in 2016. He has served as vice chair of medical informatics in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Radiology since 2017.

Prior to his clinical and entrepreneurial careers, Dr. O’Connell worked as an IT professional for Nortel Networks and Bell, where he was director of engineering for the Bank of Montreal account.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Live from The VIVE Event, powered by HLTH and CHIME: The average cancer patient makes 500 decisions during their treatment journey, often in rushed, 10-minute appointments, feeling lost without a map. Samira Daswani, CEO of Manta Cares, turned her own frustration with a broken system into a mission to build a platform that puts the patient first, full stop.

On this episode of The Tech Glow Up, live from the Vive Event, Samira shares how she's redefining the healthcare industry by creating an "objective fourth pillar" that drives patient incentives, starting with breast and lung cancer.

Samira's unique approach blends human-centered design with rigorous research, starting with a paper planner based on over a hundred peer-reviewed papers to help patients manage their 63 appointments in the first year.

Now, her AI partner, Hope, provides contextually relevant, personalized support, mapping out the 500 decisions so patients have confidence they are getting the right care. For Samira, if you lose sight of the patient story, there's no point in building the product, even while acknowledging the need for business growth and scale.

Episode Key Highlights:

• [00:06:06] Paper Planner Success: How a paper product based on clinical research still serves a population of patients aged 70+ who find digital tools difficult
• [00:07:24] AI Partner Hope: The use of Hope AI to detect and help grade symptoms like pain or nausea using the P-R-O-C-D-C-A standard to ensure patients know when to call their doctor.
• [00:11:54] Patient-Driven Gravity: Samira's goal is to create a place for patients so powerful that the economic gravity of the system (payers, providers) is forced to realign to patient needs.
• [00:12:40] Financial Toxicity: Why removing the high likelihood of cancer patients going bankrupt is the one blocker Samira would erase with a magic wand.
• [00:19:39] The Patient from Hell: The philosophy behind the name of Samira's other podcast, arguing that a patient must go against the system's "cohort" structure as an imperative for survival.

By prioritizing the patient's needs and leveraging purpose-built, narrow AI tools—like Hope, which handles 90% of its use cases around treatment decision-making—Manta Cares is forcing a necessary Glow Up in healthcare. It's a fundamental shift away from simply being "patient-centered" to being truly "patient-first," creating a better system for everyone.

Watch and subscribe to the full episode on YouTube and hit that like button to help other people find these essential conversations.

Samira Daswani is the founder and CEO of Manta Cares, the most comprehensive platform for cancer patients, care partners, and clinicians. A stage 2B breast
cancer survivor diagnosed at 30, Samira transformed her firsthand experience of the fragmented and chaotic cancer experience into a mission to revolutionize cancer care.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.