11/25/2025

The Outsider’s Advantage

Fresh eyes often beat deep experience

In 2016, when I was getting Vital off the ground, I knew nothing about healthcare. One of the ways I educated myself was by shadowing my co-founder and brother-in-law, Dr. Justin Schrager, who worked nights in the ER at a university hospital. Before my first overnight, I asked him whether I should wear my favorite shirt or if I’d end up with blood on it. I had a TV-inspired vision of chaos: arterial spurts, trauma bays, emergency drama.

Instead, I saw patients hunched in chairs, miserable with colds and stomach bugs. They were in pain, but forced to wait hours because staff were calmly prioritizing more severe cases. What felt like an emergency to patients was routine triage to the clinicians. It was clear to me that I knew absolutely nothing about healthcare.

But that ignorance turned out to be an asset, not a liability.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Chief Executive.