S2E10: Medicine Meets Business — Lessons from Matthew Swanson MD, MBA
Rahul
Welcome to Learning to Lead, a podcast about leadership, teamwork, and reimagining healthcare. This podcast is for learners, educators, and healthcare professionals interested in building leadership skills in a supportive community.
We are your hosts Rahul Anand, Maya Doyle, Peter Longley, Amber Vargas, and Brooklynn Weber.
Together we bring you conversations with emerging and established leaders, deep dives and hacks to help you become the best leader you can be.
Rahul
Our guest today is Matthew Swanson, a graduating medical student from Netter School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University. Matt began his career in Pharma at Pfizer, then switched to medical school at Quinnipiac starting in 2019. Mid-training in 2022, he took a detour to NYU Stern’s School of Business for two years to complete an MBA focusing on healthcare and finance. In 2024, he returned back to Quinnipiac to complete his final year of medical school and is now set to begin his residency in anesthesiology at Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Matt has had many interesting roles during this journey, including being a Choosing Wisely STARS leader for which he'd received a national Student Excellence award in 2022, hosting episodes of AMA's “Making the Rounds”. podcast, going on to run for AMA's Board of Trustees and medical student section leadership, re-imagining NYU's Healthcare Conference by anchoring it in public health, and many more roles in pharma, consulting, and finance. Matt, welcome to the show, we're delighted to have you here.
Matt
It's great to be here. It's a privilege. So thanks for having me.
Rahul
And with me today are Pete, Maya and Amber.
Pete
Hello.
Maya
Good morning.
Amber
Hello.
Rahul
So Matt, let's dive into this conversation by exploring your journey upfront. Tell us what brought you into healthcare and how did you find yourself in medical school?
Matt
It all started just back in high school when I was good at chemistry and I thought maybe this is something that I can do. Moved off into college and chemistry continued to be something that I excelled at. I hadn't intersected specifically with considering becoming a doctor. I was envisioning myself actually becoming a pilot or an engineer or something along those lines. I didn't think I was smart enough to become a doctor, but I was surprised myself in being pretty good at biochemistry. So I continued on in that path and probably in my third year of college I decided that, yeah, you know what? I think this is something that I want to think a little bit harder about. I was able to get a clinical research position at Boston Children's where my older sister was working in the same lab, and I did that for over a year, was able to go to the ARVO conference, be involved with posters, had my first publication, and I really found just a connection to the work that they were doing.
It was important and I love the smell of the hospital. I knew this is where I wanted to be. Yeah, I guess the biggest kind of driving force that brought me into medicine really was the loss of my mother, though it came gradually and then suddenly, so I like to describe it. She had suffered from breast cancer for the majority of my childhood growing up, and one day I was sitting in chemistry class, organic chemistry, and I got a text from my father and it was a picture of my mom. He said, I need you to come home as soon as you can. And I was at the Air Force Academy at the time and I did something no student ever does. I stood up in the middle of class and I left and went back to my squadron and I tried to find my way back home because I knew something was up, something was different. Fortunately, I was able to get home and she was being treated at Brigman Women's Hospital in the ICU and was able to see her just a day before she passed, but came kind of all the sudden. I remember being in a room in the ICU and we kind of knew how things were going to go. The situation was grave. There weren't very many options. She's already tried everything. She's been fighting this for a long time. She was tired. It was time, but I had a lot of hope. I had a lot of kind of just hope in that the doctor when they walked into the room was going to give us something to kind of let us lead the rest of our lives in the best way possible that this situation wasn't going to devastate us and ruin everything that was to come. I wanted to know, did this doctor love my mom as much as I did? Did they know that I loved my mom? Did they sleep well last night? Did they do everything and think through every option possible to make sure that we're giving my mom her best possible outcome, the best possible chance that she could have? And the doctor did that and I was really happy about that. But in the days following my mother's passing, I thought, you know what?
That's something that I can do well. I want to be able to instill that hope in my patients and not only dive deep into the books and think through all of the clinical outcomes, but love patients. I want to be able to bleed with them like their families do. And I think that's really the driving force that brought me there. So I graduated from college and I went off and worked at Pfizer. Was fortunate for that opportunity and it took a lot of people giving me a break. It seems like everything is about people giving you a break, taking you under their wings, mentorship, whatever it may be. But I found my way into Pfizer and that was more than I could have ever hoped for at that kind of situation in my life. It's a big pharmaceutical company and a great job. And I went off there and I was working on biologics, medical devices, and a little bit of market research.
It opened my eyes to the scale of impact possible in medicine and also to how broken the system was. I learned about how those biologics are priced and some of just the simple kind of back of the envelope calculations that are done to put these huge price tags on these drugs. And I didn't agree with it because medicine isn't like any other commodity. It's something that people are willing to give everything for when they need it, and it makes it a entirely different type of business. So I stayed there for two years, but I really wasn't satisfied and optimizing strategy or doing benchtop studies. I wanted to be closer to the patient and I was fortunate to be able to take the leap and go into medical school knowing that I needed to combine both of the lenses then to really make a difference. But that's how I found myself into this seat and fortunate for the opportunity now to go off and become a physician.
Rahul
Yeah, I've known you for four years now. I hadn't heard the full story up till now. Thanks for sharing that.
Matt
You're welcome.
Rahul
And what resonates with me is it starts with loss, a profound loss, and then from there you find your way to love doing this out of love, and I'm sure a little part of your mother lives in and touches everyone through you and the love that you carry.
Matt
Yeah, I think that's kind of my takeaways from it as well. I didn't grow up from when I was just a young kid, always aspiring to become a doctor. It wasn't that way. I come from a military family. I wanted to be a pilot just like my dad and go off and serve my country, but loss is the one that connected me to I think my true calling, my true self. It's the blessing in disguise because loss can fundamentally, it fundamentally changes us and makes us bleed a little bit. You have to build resilience in order to learn to cope with that, because more loss is to come throughout our lives, but you build that resilience and you can build yourself then into some better version of yourself, and it's this continual state of evolution. I think now looking back, it's hard to say that you're ever fortunate to have lost your mom or to have gone through this trauma. Whatever I say about it, it was a blessing in disguise for me that got me to where I am now and my mother still is with me. I find her on my shoulder every time I walk into the hospital. Every time that I go into a patient's room and I talk with them and hear their story, it's like I'm listening to my mom. It's like she's right there with me. I think that she's proud of me.
Rahul
She sure is. Yeah, I can relate to that when my dad passed away since then, I can feel the same. It's happened gradually, but I can now see a little bit of him in everyone. Same thing with my kids. I can see a little bit of them in everyone, and it helps to just connect with everyone on a human level. So it's 2019, you come and join the Netter School of Medicine and then COVID hits in 2020 and your dream experience suddenly becomes very different. You still persist through it and go into second year of medical school. Tell us how you decided then to mid medical school leave and go do an MBA.
Matt
Yeah, I had already been familiar with the issue of cost of medicine. I was still in my parents' insurance, so I hadn't experienced it personally up to that point in my first year when I was first then kicked off of that insurance, seeing the bills for myself and witnessing patients not coming up to their appointments because they couldn't afford that bill. So I thought from that beginning year that the cost of medicine is really the most urgent clinical problem we're not trained to solve, and I needed to get some more tools in my toolbox to help create solutions for it. I had been involved with the American Medical Association specifically to think about this problem. I needed to leverage the resources that were afforded to you in that institution to try to create some momentum for change. However, I was always up against a wall.
I had the medical background to think about those types of problems. But when you're coming down to the financial incentives and financial problems, you need to have a different member of your team that's an expert and has credibility in that space. So they wanted me to bring different people onto the team. While I had continued to think it's really difficult to explain the clinical repercussions to a finance person and for the finance person to explain to me when I don't know the language, the financial repercussions to create some kind of synergy for positive change and positive policy that ultimately wouldn't just get voted down by the house. I thought really the best way for me to do this is just to go out there, get the skills myself, and then take the time required in order to do this. Right. So I'd been thinking about it for at least those first two years, and I went off into my clinical year over third year and trying to now observe problems that I was seeing on the wards that I was seeing with patients throughout all of the different mandatory clerkships. I think I studied for the GE at that time as well, and it was pretty demanding to try to
Figure out how I was going to apply. But ultimately I did a lot of this kind of in the shadows in the dark because this is a new path. This isn't something that people do in medical school. You just are trying to get through it and get to the next side. But by the time that I had gotten my acceptance to NYU Stern, that's when I called in Dr. Boatwright and I kind of talked through this a little bit more with her so that she could understand my priorities, but I could also understand the priorities of the medical school, and it was only ever supportive. And if I have only one regret, it's that I would've started these conversations earlier and kind of tried to get as much feedback as I could from the people that really are the most invested in us, our teachers right here at Quinnipiac. So I went off and tried to learn what I needed to learn in order to think a little bit more about cost of medicine and why it's so expensive here in the United States.
Rahul
And then you've come back and finished your medical training now and you're having a happy ending to that story and after residency and anesthesiology. So, congratulations.
Matt
Thank you. Thank you.
Rahul
What we want to bring out from this episode for our listeners is what you learned from your experience doing an MBA that every healthcare professional should know. Not every healthcare professional has a chance to do an MBA, but they have a chance to learn the lessons from you. So tell us what are the things that you've picked up in this journey that everyone should know?
Matt
Yeah, it kind of really rewired the way that I think about problems, about solutions, about people, about institutions. I stopped asking what's the right answer? I started asking, what's the best kind of move given the trade-offs? Trade-offs to everything, there's consequences to every decision that we make good consequences and bad count consequences. So keeping in mind the trade-offs, I learned to see healthcare as a web of incentives, capital, and stakeholders, not just as a system of care. And I learned to build teams to pitch ideas and to move fast, which medicine doesn't always teach. I also kind of got to rebuild NYU's healthcare conference that you touched on, and I centered it around public health by inviting the New York City Health Commissioners for two straight years. And I think it taught me just how much people want to engage with big ideas when given the chance.
So it's not only you that's kind of serving your patient, it's an entire team of people and I think a lot of people are interested in trying to shake things up here and there to dream big and to do whatever they need to do in order to fix whatever's broken with how we're doing things right now, regardless if you're in the middle of a city at one of the best academic institutions in the world or serving in a more rural setting with your own different set of problems than might be experienced here in the northeast. But it taught me to give people the benefit of the doubt, take big risks, and I think that people will come and support your mission.
Rahul
So one of the things that I'm hearing from the path you took and what you said is do not be afraid to take risks, to have the courage to make your own path. And you certainly did that by leaving med school, middle of it and going to do an MBA and then coming back. What's the biggest fear when someone chooses to create their own path? What was your biggest fear?
Matt
There's a lot of uncertainty around it. You have a pretty safe road ahead of you. If you just do what others have done, you continue to walk that trodden path that's laid out in front of you. Everyone will always tell you just do what they've done, what kind of, I think a part of mentorship is trying to teach people the struggles that you face, they don't have to face themselves, and they've kind of found the answers that you might've found along the way as well. So in some ways it might be really challenging to break that idea that we have for ourselves. I think the biggest challenge for me is that there's also a lot of financial consequences to taking the road less traveled by. For me, it was two additional years as a student before residency, which ultimately accounts to two less years of physicians earning income, and I'll never get that back. And there's some things that you may never get back in taking risk, but the downside potential to taking big risks is also mirrored by the upside risk
And they're proportional. So if you're taking risks that you've justified to yourself in the moment and you have no regret, you're doing the best that you can, you're putting in the work, you'll capitalize on that upside risk and you'll make it work for yourself. I think that just being scared that I didn't have people that I could talk to about these types of risks because they hadn't personally taken them for themselves or they hadn't taken this path before. But you have to keep your head down, have confidence in yourself, and go for it. We're a risk averse type of institution in medicine and trying to have some tolerance for risk is what I think makes you into a great leader and also opens up an entire world of opportunity for you.
Rahul
Very true. So lesson number one, don't be afraid to take risks and create your own path.
Pete
What I've seen in my life and my experience is physicians usually go after they’re done, when they're an attending and they're like, Ooh, I need to learn more about business. Really what's driving a lot of decisions. And you're out way ahead of it, and you're like, I'm going to pause, go get, and you're taking a whole nother lens forward, which I commend you. It's a breath of fresh air and the way you're thinking is systematic. And I think that way too. I'm like, the system's broken. It's not people as you see, you can bump into a lot of people who are still thinking, let's fix this. And it's really just having that drive and the consensus where you get enough people and you hit that critical mass and change starts to happen, of course.
Rahul
Alright, so let me bring you back. What are some other things that you learned that you feel everyone should know now that you're back on the healthcare frontline?
Matt
Yeah, so the first is don't be afraid to create your own path. Next is you should really learn to negotiate. It's whether you are advocating for a patient, hiring a team, or renewing your contract. Negotiation is a clinical skill. I learned frameworks for how to anchor, reframe and find alignment. And I've used those skills more often than I've used the Kreb cycle. And I don't think that very many of us have used the Krebs cycle very often, but I think that we have a bias towards salespeople from our own personal experiences with them. When you walk around a shopping mall or you go to buy a car, but sales is all around negotiating, finding some kind of common area with who you're talking about and trying to make the outcome not only good for yourself but good for them as well. So learn to negotiate. It'll help you deliver better care for your patients, but also help you find better outcomes for yourself as well throughout your own personal career.
Rahul
Let's unpack that a little bit because as an infectious disease specialist, I felt every single patient I saw is a negotiation really, whether you're the primary and others are feeding back their recommendations to you or you are the consultant and now you have to influence the team to do what you think is the best thing in the patient's care. It's a key skill. So tell us what makes you think this is a key lesson? You've been back in healthcare for a year, what does this look like in practice to you? Does anything memorable come to mind from the last year where you used these skills in negotiation?
Matt
Yeah, I think that, I mean, I'm on neurology right now and patients are, they're upset whether they are in pain, they're having headaches, whether they have a demyelinating disease and now they have symptoms or they've had symptoms for a long time. They've tried all of the different medications that are out there and now they're just tired. So now I'm just another person, another medical student that they have to talk with to share their story over again. It seems like every time that they come in, all they do is just share their story over and over and over again. So the first lesson is just listening and encouraging them to be open. And we learn in medical school, one of the best ways that you can continue a conversation with a person is by staying silent. I think probably on my psychiatry rotation, that was one of the focal points to continue conversations with people, stay quiet when quiet doesn't work, use a little bit of body language with a head nod or something.
Let them open up because then you'll start to get an understanding to what their goals really are. What are their chief concerns, what is the primary complaints that they have that we can help with? So the first thing you have to understand is what really is the problem and what do they want as a solution for it? Can we help with that? Can we help close that gap and figure it out? But you also have to understand that there's going to have to be some level of compromise on both sides of the table. So whether it's me compromising and trying to get through a really long detailed history in just 15 minutes of time, or them not wanting to share their story over and over again, but willing to do so, I think then it goes off into treatment. And this is definitely another hard space, hard nut to crack.
These patients have gone through other treatments before and they haven't worked. They may have their own idea of what they need from chat GPT, from WebMD, from online resources, from other doctors, from family and friends. So I think a lot of it is listening to what they already know, what they think is going on and responding to that directly, but in a manner that doesn't make them defensive, responding to it, providing some level of evidence for why we're going to do something different or why we're going to go with what they already know is the right way to go. Listening is the biggest takeaway from negotiating. Well, yeah.
Rahul
This reminds me of the interest based bargain gaining that they teach in law school, Fisher and Yuri, getting to Yes. So number one, separate the person from the problem, which is saying that you're really listening with empathy and you're not categorizing the person just because they have a difficult problem that you can't solve. The second one is focus on interests, not positions. And then the next step is create options or invent options for mutual gain. So what are all the things on the table that we have not even discussed yet beyond this one position that is different on each side? And we don't really train healthcare professionals on negotiation. We train them on frameworks for communication, but it implies that what you have to say is the right path or that the patient will agree with. We never really train them formally in healthcare focused negotiation.
Maya
Then we respond with language like adherence and non-adherence. The work that I've always been asked to do as a social worker is patient isn't doing the thing we've told them to do, and now it's our job to negotiate or really to convince. And so instead thinking about, wait, let's really slow down. Listen, let's actually hear what's going on. I've done a lot of rare disease work and done some work with pharma as well. And when I really talk to patients, what I heard is we're not trying to be non-adherent, finding the treatment tolerable. And we keep telling our teams that it's hard to tolerate that. It makes us feel sick, it makes us feel tired, it has side effects, but if no one is listening or there's no change, what do we do? It's easier to not comply and so much of our role in healthcare is trying to convince folks that, well, here are the things, the steps you need to follow to maintain or regain a standard of health that you want. But it's often it is a negotiation. It's interesting to frame it that way.
Rahul
And it also reminds me of the part two of negotiation, which is the follow-up after the first deal has been made, which is I think so critical in healthcare where if we've chosen one path, maybe it's path A or path B from whatever we've discussed, how does that follow up in the next few days or weeks or months? So that if path A does not work out, we've negotiated that now we're going to go to path B and we're both invested now in making sure that whatever path we chose together is going to be the best and work out.
Matt
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.
Rahul
The other thing, I think any patient or if we're talking about education industry, any student, the biggest thing that matters to them is are we all on the same team? Are you on my side? Because really it's the healthcare professional at the bedside who has the patient's back, and I think that's the first and starting point for even a conversation to begin. One more thing that came up when we were chatting before this episode was how you keep in touch and connect with the people in your life, and that's a lesson that got amplified in your business school training. So talk about that.
Matt
Yeah, so recognizing the power of networking, it's something that's been important to me even from the beginning of medical school. But at Stern I saw how relationships move ideas forward faster than resumes ever could than anything that we have in our background in medicine. I think we need to stop thinking of networking as transactional and start seeing it as coalition building. I've been able to collaborate with leaders across tech, policy, care, delivery, but really the only reason I was able to do that was because I wasn't afraid to ask for a conversation. So it's about those coffee chats, those informal settings where you can just kind of both build trust with each other around talking about your values or things that are important to you, your background. Because ultimately everyone offers something that we might not, everyone's an expert in something and you run up against a lot of problems and issues and questions in healthcare.
It's nice to have a phone book of people that you can call up for a curbside at any time of the day, regardless if it's a financial question that's a patient might be up against legal opinion about something quick or probably more frequently a medical question. I think speaking back to this neurology clinic I'm in right now, I see the provider there whenever he's up against a question, he has a phone book of people that he can call and it comes through taking advantage of all of the diverse settings that he's trained in. He has connections all over the country that are all now experts in all of these different very niche areas of neurology that he can call people up and ask the question. It makes things faster for the patient and ultimately then delivers a higher quality of care for them and better satisfaction because they don't want to be bumping around and having delays and delays going to consults or follow-up appointments.
They want to know what they need to do right now. And leveraging the power of a strong network can allow us to do that. But then also just personally, so there's a lot of different opportunities that I think are difficult to envision for ourselves when we're in medicine. Unless you're considering alternative paths just immediately, unless you're doing different degree programs, unless you're talking to as many people as you can and you might feel as though eventually in your career you get burnt out, that there might not be an exit for you because you're too far along that this is the only thing that you could ever do and that's not the case. And a strong network reminds you of that. There is always a need for a medical doctor, a clinician, any person, and a whole range of different industries. So reminding yourself of that so that if ever you feel burnt out or you can't go on that there is always something else that you can be doing and you can find satisfaction in that as well. There's always hope there. Burnout being one of the biggest forces in this country right now. And also globally, people have to remind themselves of that, that there are other options for you. Another reason why it's good to build a strong network.
Rahul
Yeah, I think of a network now as traditionally, it used to be that you are employed and supervisor, maybe it's your program director or your department chair or chief are the ones guiding you through your career. But now I think of your personal board of directors. These are the 3, 4, 5, 6 people who are really close to you over the long term and know you well and can guide you through difficult times. And then there's the circle outside it, which is all the people you care about and care about you. Maybe it's from past interactions or from your present position. And this becomes your network of caring
Maya
In listening to what you're talking about and the networking and the mentorship pieces. And I was rereading from our prior guest from Josh, what he writes about sponsorship instead of mentorship. And that idea that for each of us, what's done for us also, hopefully we are doing for others in our networks, but always providing those connections and those links to kind of the next thing, or this might be the person to talk to. And even we were doing it here today when we were informally chatting and what students know, other people and other faculty and oh, this person might help you. All of those little connections are ways that we do that. And then I guess as we rise and unquote rank, we have more power to do that mentorship piece. There's a gap, a power differential there. Whereas sponsorship, anyone can do it. I can say, Matt, you know what? You've been talking about this. I know so-and-so at Deaconess, I can give you some connections to go and talk to. I actually do know people in neurology.
Matt
I love that networking right
Maya
Now. I was born there too, and there's a whole other story there about me in Boston and Deaconess, but thinking about how we bridge those gaps and also this speaks back to relationship and the value of human relationship that is not going to be replaced, could be helped maybe by technology, but isn't going to be replaced by that.
Matt
Of course, it's an important reminder as well. We can all be sponsors, so we can always look for avenues to help others. Sometimes you always have this, some people especially in medicine, have imposter syndrome. It can't be me. I'm not ready yet. I'm not the right fit, I'm not the right background to help them. Please speak up. We're always afforded the opportunity to be a sponsor for someone. Just remembering that going forward, putting it out there, helping them, I'm sure that they'll appreciate it and pay it forward themselves.
Rahul
Yeah, with great power comes great responsibility. So any listener, if you're in a position of power, it's your responsibility to open doors for others, sponsor others.
Amber
Matt, thank you for sharing. Thank you for being here. Everything that you've said has resonated with me in so many ways. A little bit about me that I'm going into emergency medicine, that I also sit on the board of directors for a national organization, the Latino Medical Student Association. So a lot of the things you said about risk taking with decisions when you're representing a company or an organization that really hit home, a lot of things that we do are involved with policy and advocacy and being a change maker in terms of vulnerable patient populations. So I guess the question for you, I mean, I'm also interested in getting an MBA in the future, and I wish I had done it in between medical school because now you have this unique perspective moving forward, right? You already have the background and you're learning every step of the way now moving forward with this lens. So I think that's amazing that you were able to accomplish that in medical school. For students who have not gotten their MBA or have not had some professional training in terms of policy or change making or financial literacy, any of these things, how do you recommend we educate ourselves?
Matt
Yeah, no, I think it's a great question and I want to say it loud and clear. I don't think that an MBA is for everyone. And you can build that toolbox for yourself without going through a formal education, without taking those two years off to do it. I think there's a multitude of resources out there to learn more about personal finance, and there's people that want to help you as well, whether it be the white coat investor or whether it be watching lectures on YouTube. So for example, Dr. Anand, we talked about a famous evaluation professor at NYU Stern before I began. His name's Professor ETH Odin and they call him the Dean of evaluation. He makes all of his lectures publicly available on YouTube and real time, not only the lectures, but then also the exams and projects that the students are working on. And he also has a group chat that everyone throughout that semester can join. And it's a large commitment, but if you're trying to get to the level of an MBA student in understanding finance,
For example, one of the top finance schools in the world, you watch those YouTube lectures, and I love that it's publicly available in that way as well. So learning finance, it can be a difficult learning curve, but once you get over it and you learn the jargon that everyone else uses, then you can talk confidently about it and people will believe you and unfortunately they'll believe you whether you're right or wrong about what you're saying. And that's, I guess the one caveat. So a reminder to everyone, when people are talking to you about finance, more than likely they're acting as if they know a lot more than they really do about things.
Rahul
I've heard there's more fairytales written in Excel than inward.
Matt
That's right. But honestly, you should begin getting involved with leadership as soon as you possibly can. So when I started medical school, I didn't have any of this background yet, but I thought that I wanted to get experiences for myself that range both locally, nationally, and globally. So I always use that type of framework when thinking about leadership. So what can I be doing at my medical school or at my hospital now as a resident? What can I be doing nationally in these organizations? And then are there any global opportunities for me to get involved? Because there's different pain points that you'll witness and you'll experience in looking through all these different lenses, but then it also changes the story and your flexibility in approaching those problems moving forward. And an MBA really is supposed to teach you about case studies about problems that leaders have faced in a whole range of different industries and how they work through those problems.
In a long case study published by Harvard Business School. So you can buy those case studies for yourself as well, or you can go out there and you can personally experience it and make the case studies yourself. I think you can think about these voluntary leadership organizations. You can also think about starting your own business and being empowered to do that. When you find a problem and you validate that problem amongst the people that it's most influenced by the people that will be your customers, you might have enough of what you need in order to build something successful. So in my first year of medical school with a few of my medical student peers, I tried to create my own business and it was called Comet Health Ventures. And because at the MetCom at Mountain Range here, and it was around trying to create a digital health passport just because we are in the heat of COVID. Unfortunately, a few months into building that nature, published an article, the Top 10 reasons why basically this specific idea wouldn't work, how it will drive inequity across both our population here in the United States and globally. So we stopped everything, but we learned a lot of lessons from that. And moving forward, I went to pitch competitions with more Quin PX students and tried different ideas. I went to Singapore and I tried to create a business that was similar to Doximity because the pain point that I found there was that doctors felt siloed.
I knew that they had also felt siloed here in the United States. So Nate Ross from Doximity built Doximity back in 2010 to solve it, and I think it works pretty well. And now they're public and doing great. The issue remains in Southeast Asia and then in business school thinking through PBMs, how can we make costs? How can we reduce the cost of medicine in the United States? Is there a way for us to cut out PBMs? So I started a company called Med Block, and it was specifically around trying to cut out PBMs, and it's a long, long range in order to try to build that out, but it's going to take an expansive network in order to build the relationships to find solutions for these misaligned incentives. But we're working towards it, and blockchain allows us to do that by cutting out middlemen specifically, and then finally fund my cure. And that's my kind of latest project that I'm working on now. So how can we provide alternative sources of capital for people building and researching curative therapeutics specifically for rare diseases? We need to create solutions. So think outside of the box, build, build, build, build. You can. You know what the problems are, so just go do it. You don't need to have an MBA to do it.
Rahul
Thank you. That's wonderful. Well, one of the things I am taking away from this conversation is to find what you're passionate about and then have the courage to take risks.
Pete
I'm taking away never to give up hope. I've let the system beat me down a little bit, got a little jaded, and I mean, both of you are a breath of fresh air. And I don't know when you sleep, Matt, you got so many things going on in middle of med school, you decided to go to get an MBA, I'm in awe. I'm just like, wow. But it also inspires me.
Maya
I really appreciated, you said something early on about how getting the MBA changed your lens, and I think just that reminder that we always need to be open to that possibility. I mean, I feel like all the leadership work that this team has done in the last three years has changed my lens in both academia and in healthcare. And I think whatever professional silo we are in or discipline silo, we're in the ability to say, wait a minute, what else can I learn if I look at this from a different direction? And the incentive piece you mentioned about healthcare, that's going to keep spinning in my head for a while. So thank you for planting that particular seed because now I can again think about how that functions both with patients, but also in our larger systems.
Matt
Yeah, I think that you bring up an important point. So something that was really on my mind throughout my entire life is that I'm living with blinders on how am I going to attack those blinders, break down barriers and boundaries between people or my ideas about things. And I think that we all need to continue that fight, whether it be, whether it mean continuing education, doing other types of things, new experiences or traveling, talking to as many people as you can, putting yourself out there, taking risks and putting yourself into uncomfortable situations because growth comes from that. The blinders open up and you can see the world more clearly. I just want to see the world more clearly.
Maya
Well, it's also why diversity and inclusion matter, right?
Matt
Exactly.
Maya
Because getting in perspectives from everyone around you.
Matt
Of course, of course.
Amber
I think one of the take home points for me is I've been working on how do I separate personal from work moving forward? I am like, okay, my family is here, my patients are here, and I have them in two separate boxes. But I think it's been really inspiring to hear how you have been vulnerable in overlapping those two things and really seeing your family through your patients and embracing that. And so that's something that I'm really going to take with me moving forward from this conversation.
Matt
I appreciate that. I think one takeaway from the MBA is that I know healthcare is not like any other type of business or any other type of industry, and it can make you, it's not easy, but it can make you a better provider, a better listener, a better person for your patients. If you're able to blur those lines a bit, if you can really demonstrate that you love them, you love your family, and patients need that sometimes, and what do I know? But, eventually, hopefully, learn that a little bit more as we go.
Maya
We all need that, sometimes.
Rahul
Thank you for that, Matt. What a great conversation this has been. I've learned a lot from it, and I know our listeners will learn a lot too. Thank you so much for being here with us.
Matt
Thank you so much for having me.
Rahul
For anyone who wants to stay connected with Matt, you can find him on LinkedIn and Twitter at Matthew J. Swanson, our listeners, we'd love to hear from all of you as well, what resonated most with you. Share with us, let us know. Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, take care and keep leading and learning.
Brooke
Thank you for listening to our show. Learning to Lead is a production of the Quinnipiac University podcast studio, in partnership with the Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.
Creators of this show are Rahul Anand, Maya Doyle, Peter Longley, Amber Vargas and Brooklynn Weber.
The student producer is Brooklynn Weber, and the executive producer is David DesRoches.
Connect with us on social media @LearningToLeadPod or email us at LearningToLeadPod@quinnipiac.edu.