Every clinician has opened a new tool at work and wondered who picked it. Michelle Higginson co-founded Inlightened to get that question asked before the product ships. Her platform connects vetted healthcare professionals with the startups, pharma companies, and innovators who need their input, and pays them for it.

Michelle came to healthcare from Boston startups and tech, then led service line marketing for the transplant and heart centers at Boston Children’s Hospital. She tells Dr. Adam Brown and Dr. Lara Zibners why founders build too much before talking to the people who will use the product.

They also talk about why so many women physicians say they have no consulting experience and then describe years of it, unpaid. Michelle explains what it was like to recruit doctors in 2020, how outside work gives burned-out clinicians another option, and why AI-driven fraud has made vetting a bigger part of her job. She also describes the clinicians she recruits to help train AI models, and the mistake she sees founders make most often.

Clinicians who want to join the network can sign up at getinlightened.com.

Why does almost nobody talk about how hard it can be to get pregnant?

Dr. Lara Zibners and Dr. Adam Brown are joined by Audrey Ward, a former Sunday Times writer and editor and the author of The Waiting Room: Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope on the Path to Parenthood. Audrey went through recurrent miscarriage and failed rounds of IVF before she had her two sons. For the book, she gathered stories from people aged 28 to 68 who took every possible route: IVF, egg donation, surrogacy, adoption, and choosing a life without children.

In this episode:

• Why men rarely talk about infertility, even though a large share of fertility problems start on the male side
• How clinical language like "spontaneous abortion" and "incompetent cervix" makes a hard moment worse, and what doctors can do better
• The economics of fertility care: add-ons with little evidence behind them, prepaid IVF packages, private equity, and money as the thing that decides who gets options
• Egg freezing sold as an "insurance policy"
• What to say, and what not to say, when someone tells you they're struggling to conceive
• Audrey's view on what would stabilize the system, from fertility education in schools to investigating miscarriage sooner

Content note: This episode discusses infertility, miscarriage, and pregnancy loss.

Only 6-7% of doctors feel adequately trained in menopause care, and Dr. Adam Brown and Dr. Lara Zibners argue that gap is costing the healthcare system billions.

In this episode, they unpack their new white paper, "The Business Case for Integrating Menopause Education into Medical School Curriculum," making the case that teaching menopause isn't about adding new coursework, but "completing the sentence" in courses that already exist. They dig into the real stakes: how untreated genitourinary syndrome of menopause drives hip fractures and fatal urinary sepsis and why a market touching 51% of the population has been treated as a niche "women's health" cause rather than a massive business opportunity for innovators and investors. Plus, they announce the launch of closetheknowledgegap.com, a free hub with the full white paper, audio version, shareable slides, and social graphics designed to help anyone push this conversation into their own institution.

#CloseTheKnowledgeGap