Vital Signs with Jacob Effron and Nikhil Krishnan
May 29, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min · 16 segments
Nick Reber, CEO and founder of Garner Health, joins Jacob and Nikhil to walk through what is arguably one of the most structurally underrated problems in American healthcare: that the single biggest…
Nick ReberGuestNikhil KrishnanHostJacob EffronHostdouble click to specifically like what Gartner actually does today? So I know you guys work with employers and health plans to help identify doctors that are higher quality, etc.
And then there's some payment rail changes and network changes that happen as well.
So but can you just like tell us a little bit about just like how it actually works?
So Garner, what we're really building ultimately is a new marketplace for how we think healthcare should work in the country.
We do doctor performance, we do demand and patient engagement, and we do provider improvement.
And so on the data side, what we've done is we've aggregated this enormous data set of 320 million patients and we have mostly their full healthcare journeys, mostly in claims data, although some other sets of data as well.
And we use that to analyze every doctor in the country from primary care to subspecialty cancer and who's actually delivering good health outcomes and following clinical guidelines and doing so at a reasonable cost.
And then what we do is sort of two things on top is we, one, work with employers who are paying for all of this stuff, restructure their health plans and add a layer that sits on top of their United Aetna Cigna plan that gives the right data and information and financial incentives to go see top performing doctors in the existing United Aetna Cigna network.
And then as we control, we're now controlling one or 2% of US healthcare volume and growing very, very quickly.
We are now have a separate part of our business that then works with the providers to basically improve their quality and lower their cost.
And that then sort of completes a marketplace where you have, you know, you get enough eyeballs shifting demand, then you get to work with suppliers on improving their performance and you basically create a market around that.
How many of the providers actually see their own data, and they're like, I agree with this, and we need to change it, versus how many of them are, they look at it, and they're sort of like, we don't agree with this, and we don't listen to your quality scores, blah, blah, blah, and just move on, basically.
So one, that process has gone a lot better than I thought it would, based on the little bit of experience that I had at Oscar doing this sort of stuff.
The first is that, by and large, the way that providers have been evaluated has been totally unfair.
And largely, if you get into how this stuff has worked, it's all these algorithms that were built in the 1990s.
And you go around telling all the doctors, you have high cost per patient, you have low cost per patient, you have high cost per patient.
Well, the people with the high cost per patient are obviously going to say, my people were sicker.
double click to specifically like what Gartner actually does today? So I know you guys work with employers and health plans to help identify doctors that are higher quality, etc.
And then there's some payment rail changes and network changes that happen as well.
So but can you just like tell us a little bit about just like how it actually works?
So Garner, what we're really building ultimately is a new marketplace for how we think healthcare should work in the country.
We do doctor performance, we do demand and patient engagement, and we do provider improvement.
And so on the data side, what we've done is we've aggregated this enormous data set of 320 million patients and we have mostly their full healthcare journeys, mostly in claims data, although some other sets of data as well.
And we use that to analyze every doctor in the country from primary care to subspecialty cancer and who's actually delivering good health outcomes and following clinical guidelines and doing so at a reasonable cost.
And then what we do is sort of two things on top is we, one, work with employers who are paying for all of this stuff, restructure their health plans and add a layer that sits on top of their United Aetna Cigna plan that gives the right data and information and financial incentives to go see top performing doctors in the existing United Aetna Cigna network.
And then as we control, we're now controlling one or 2% of US healthcare volume and growing very, very quickly.
We are now have a separate part of our business that then works with the providers to basically improve their quality and lower their cost.
And that then sort of completes a marketplace where you have, you know, you get enough eyeballs shifting demand, then you get to work with suppliers on improving their performance and you basically create a market around that.
How many of the providers actually see their own data, and they're like, I agree with this, and we need to change it, versus how many of them are, they look at it, and they're sort of like, we don't agree with this, and we don't listen to your quality scores, blah, blah, blah, and just move on, basically.
So one, that process has gone a lot better than I thought it would, based on the little bit of experience that I had at Oscar doing this sort of stuff.
The first is that, by and large, the way that providers have been evaluated has been totally unfair.
And largely, if you get into how this stuff has worked, it's all these algorithms that were built in the 1990s.
And you go around telling all the doctors, you have high cost per patient, you have low cost per patient, you have high cost per patient.
Well, the people with the high cost per patient are obviously going to say, my people were sicker.
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