Most value-based care conversations start with the numbers. Dr. Darren Malinoski starts somewhere else: with how people feel. In the debut episode of Proof of Care, Dr. Brian Silverstein, Chief Population Health Officer at Innovaccer, sits down with Malinoski, a trauma surgeon turned Chief Clinical Transformation Officer, to trace an unusual career and the philosophy behind it.

Malinoski’s insight, refined over 15 years, is that data makes change credible but stories make it happen. He shares how an organ donor mother’s story about her late son’s heart reframed his understanding of what moves clinicians, how he scaled hospital-at-home during the pandemic (with his own mother as one of the first patients), and how a no-tech fix to the patient-transfer conversation lifted consent rates from the 40 to 50% range to 78% in a single month. Along the way he connects it all to the quintuple aim: outcomes, cost, equity, patient experience, and the often-forgotten wellness of the care team itself.

It’s a fitting first episode for a show built on a simple conviction Innovaccer shares: the goal of better healthcare operations is not to replace the people who deliver care, but to free them. When the administrative work that shouldn’t require a human is handled, clinicians get their time and attention back for the work only they can do.

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