Carrot co-founder Dr. Asima Ahmad on preconception health, menopause care, and the approach behind a 24% higher IVF live birth rate than average.

Episode Resources:

• Learn more about Carrot

Carrot started out helping employers offer fertility and family-building benefits. Today it supports people from the months before conception through pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, and menopause, with men's health and low testosterone care in the mix too. In this episode of HealthTech Remedy, Dr. Trevor Royce and Dr. Tim Showalter look at why employer-sponsored care fits this market so well, and why a company founded before the AI boom may be in a great spot thanks to years of real-world data.

Then they sit down with Dr. Asima Ahmad, Carrot's co-founder and chief medical officer and a practicing reproductive endocrinologist. She shares how losing an aunt in Pakistan to preventable pregnancy complications pulled her toward women's health, how a supportive fellowship director at UCSF made room for her to start a company during training, and why Carrot chose to talk about fertility rather than infertility so it could serve single parents, same-sex couples, and families on every path to parenthood.

Dr. Ahmad also digs into metabolic health, noting that only 12% of U.S. adults have ideal metabolic health, and explains how Carrot's Sprints program uses the "premester," the three to twelve months before trying to conceive, to build lasting habits around sleep, stress, nutrition, and movement. She walks through Carrot's approach to midlife care, how personalization keeps people engaged, and the Milliman-validated results behind it all, including a 24% higher IVF live birth rate than the national average, 32% fewer NICU admissions, and a 45% reduction in postpartum depression.

Curology founder Dr. David Lortscher explains why physician-founded health companies outperform and how doctors can build or join high-impact startups.

Episode Resources:

• Learn more about Curology
• “Why Doctors Win” by Dr. David Lortscher
• Connect with Dr. David Lortscher

Investors often say they won't back physician founders. Dr. David Lortscher, dermatologist, founder of Curology, and author of Why Doctors Win: The Doctors' Guide to Creating or Joining a High-Impact Startup, found the data says otherwise. Physicians founded just 17 percent of healthcare startups, yet they founded 51 percent of the most valuable healthcare companies, including Intuitive Surgical and Gilead. In this episode, Trevor Royce and Tim Showalter sit down with David to talk about what doctors bring to the table and what they still have to learn.

David takes us back to 2012, when his patients in rural New Mexico were driving two hours each way for appointments that didn't need to be in person. Rather than digitize the office visit, he rebuilt the whole care model. That meant full-time dermatologists, hundreds of keyboard shortcuts to make consults fast without losing quality, and a $20 monthly subscription that covered both care and medication. It also meant months in his kitchen teaching himself to compound acne creams that people would actually want on their faces. That work eventually became a 50,000 square foot compounding pharmacy in Pittsburgh. David is also candid about his biggest early mistake as CEO, which was underinvesting in marketing, and why doctors need to stop acting like the expert in the room once they join a startup.

The conversation then turns to the book's core framework: a great company needs a transformational product and a clear path to winning the market. David shows how that played out at Abridge, which launched a patient-facing app before building its AI scribe, and at Viz.ai, which won by building stroke detection into the clinical workflow and cut time to treatment dramatically. He also walks through a supplement idea he loved but ultimately walked away from, and shares practical ways physicians can find their way into startups, from incubators and MBAs to blogging, building apps, or taking a year to work inside a great company.

LinusBio CEO Dr. Manish Arora explains how robots and lasers turn a few strands of hair into a 30-day record of lead, arsenic, and other toxic exposures.

Episode Resources:

• Learn more about LinusBio
• Learn more about traced.life

A blood test tells you what's in your body today. But what about last Tuesday, or the week a wildfire rolled through your neighborhood? In this episode of HealthTech Remedy, radiation oncologists Dr. Trevor Royce and Dr. Tim Showalter sit down with Dr. Manish Arora, founder and CEO of LinusBio, to explore the exposome: the full record of environmental exposures we collect over a lifetime. Manish explains why medicine has leaned so heavily on genomics while largely ignoring the environment, and how a single strand of hair can fill that gap.

The idea started with a tree stump. As a PhD student, Manish noticed a damaged growth ring and wondered whether human tissue kept a similar record. It turns out hair does, logging a new layer roughly every hour. To read it, his team built robots that straighten the hair and slice it open lengthwise, then use lasers to analyze the inner core while leaving surface contamination behind. From one centimeter of hair, LinusBio can take up to 1,000 measurements across 10,000 molecular signatures. Manish shares what that data has already revealed, from a young athlete's recurring arsenic exposure at a community center to the spike in toxic metals among people affected by the Palisades fire.

The conversation also covers Traced, LinusBio's new $299 at-home test that maps 30 days of exposure across 15 elements, with plans to expand to more than 100. Manish explains why the rhythm of a biomarker like cholesterol may matter as much as its level, how the company uses AI and ideas borrowed from music theory to make sense of millions of data points, and why he wants a hair test to become as routine as a blood draw.