How I Doctor with Dr. Graham Walker

Dr. John Dayton is an emergency physician, Stanford innovation fellow, and co-founder of Wildfire Partners, a new healthcare seed fund built around a simple but data-backed conviction: physicians make better health tech founders than the industry has ever given them credit for.
The data is hard to ignore: more than a quarter of billion-dollar healthcare companies built in the last decade had at least one clinician co-founder. John did not just write that paper. He built a fund around it.
In this episode of How I Doctor, Dr. Graham Walker sits down with John to dig into what it actually takes to build a health tech company worth funding. They walk through John's Seven Ps framework for evaluating startups, what makes a pitch compelling versus an instant red flag, and why the barrier to entry for physician-founders has never been lower thanks to AI.
What You'll Learn in This Episode:
The Seven Ps framework John uses to evaluate every health tech company he considers funding
What kills a pitch immediately and what signals a founder has actually done their homework
Why AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for physician-founders and what that changes about building a company today
How to think about the principal-agent problem when selling into health systems
Why ambient AI tools matter more for physician burnout than the time savings data alone suggests
What John learned about scalable, practical problem solving from practicing in resource-poor clinical environments
What winning actually looks like and why it is about more than financial

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📝 For a full transcript of this episode click HERE
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Most physicians have had a referral disappear. Many have spent days tracking down a colleague just to coordinate care for a single patient.
In this episode of How I Doctor, Offcall co-founder Dr. Graham Walker sits down with Dr. Basil Kahwash, an allergist and immunologist in Columbus, Ohio, to talk about one of the most universal and underappreciated problems in medicine: the referral system is broken, and independent physicians are paying the highest price.
Basil didn't set out to become an advocate for fixing referrals. He trained at Vanderbilt, where reaching a collaborating physician was as simple as sending an Epic message or jumping on a 20-minute Zoom call with three specialists at once. Then he went into independent practice in Columbus and discovered that none of that infrastructure existed. No shared records. No easy way to reach a referring physician. No directory of local specialists. Just a fax machine, a stack of paper charts, and a phone number he hoped was still current.
The referral black hole isn't just a physician frustration. It's a patient safety problem. Basil shares the story of a pregnant patient with a rare drug allergy whose referring OB-GYN he couldn't reach for three to four days. These aren't edge cases. They're a typical Tuesday.
Graham and Basil co-authored the referral manifesto at offcall.com/manifesto, making the case that independent practice doesn't have to mean isolated practice. This episode is the conversation behind that letter: what's actually broken, what it costs physicians and patients, and what a connected network of independent physicians could change.
What You'll Learn
How patients have become the de facto middlemen in a system that has no better option
Why most referrals arrive as little more than a diagnosis code, and what even a small amount of added context would change
How the fax machine became the rate-limiting step for physician collaboration and why EHRs haven't solved the problem
Why hyperlocal physician networks exist within specialties online but not across specialties within cities, and what filling that gap could look like
What winning looks like if the referral problem gets solved: coordination fades into the background and physicians get back to patient care

Resources and Where to Find Basil and Offcall
Read the Referral Manifesto: offcall.com/manifesto
Learn about the Offcall Referral Product: offcall.com/referrals
Find Basil on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/basil-kahwash-md
Find Graham on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/graham-walker-md

🩺 Offcall is more than a platform — it’s a community. Join today!
📝 For a full transcript of this episode click HERE
🎧 Subscribe to receive new How I Doctor episodes directly in your feed here: https://episodes.fm/1767429315
👨‍⚕️Follow Dr. Graham Walker on
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/graham-walker-md/
IG https://www.instagram.com/ubergraham/
Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/drgrahamwalker.com
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TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@offcalldotcom

Most physicians know a colleague who has struggled. Many know one who didn't make it.
In this episode of How I Doctor, Offcall co-founder Dr. Graham Walker sits down with Dr. Stefanie Simmons, Chief Medical Officer of the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes' Foundation and practicing emergency physician in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for one of the most important conversations in medicine right now.
Physician mental health isn't an abstract policy issue.
It's the licensing form that places a mental health history question directly after "are you a pedophile." It's the peripartum depression Stefanie developed during her own residency that she never treated because a formal diagnosis felt like a career risk. It's Dr. Lorna Breen, chair of emergency medicine at New York Presbyterian, working 18-hour days through the first COVID wave in Manhattan, who received mental health care and told her family she was terrified it would cost her her license.
Stefanie didn't know Lorna before her death. But like every emergency physician in the country, she was one degree of separation from her. And when Lorna's family started hearing from hundreds, then thousands, of healthcare workers who said "she wasn't alone," Stefanie was one of the people who called.
Stefanie makes the case that physician mental health is a systems failure, not a personal one, and that the fix is structural. The foundation has already changed the credentialing language at more than 2,000 hospitals and across 70 state licensing boards, covering more than 3 million health workers. The Lorna Breen Healthcare Provider Protection Act was reauthorized in February 2026. The calculus is shifting. But the work is far from complete.
This episode is an honest conversation about why physicians won't seek mental health care, what it costs when they don't, and how one foundation is rebuilding the system from the inside out.
What You'll Learn
How the Dr. Lorna Breen Healthcare Provider Protection Act works, what it funds, and why its reauthorization matters for every physician
How a single question on a licensing application has kept generations of physicians from getting help, and what the foundation is replacing it with
Why physicians massively overestimate how much their colleagues will judge them for seeking mental health care, and what the data actually shows
What Stefanie's own experience with peripartum depression during residency taught her about the cost of not getting help
Why burnout is an occupational syndrome, not a personal failing
What a struggling physician can do right now, and where to find support

If You or a Colleague Need Help
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988 / 988lifeline.org
Physician Support Line: free, confidential, anonymous, staffed by psychiatrists / 1 (888) 409-0141 / physiciansupportline.com
Emotional PPE Project: free anonymous mental health care for clinicians / emotionalppe.com
All For Mental Health resource hub: drlornabreen.org/all-for-mental-health

Resources and Where to Find Stefanie and the Foundation
Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes' Foundation: drlornabreen.org
Take Action: drlornabreen.org/take-action
All In Wellbeing First for Healthcare Coalition: drlornabreen.org/all-in
Find Stefanie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefsimmons/
Follow the Foundation on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drlornabreenheroesfoundation/

🩺 Offcall is more than a platform — it’s a community. Join today!
📝 For a full transcript of this episode click HERE
🎧 Subscribe to receive new How I Doctor episodes directly in your feed here: https://episodes.fm/1767429315
👨‍⚕️Follow Dr. Graham Walker on
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/graham-walker-md/
IG https://www.instagram.com/ubergraham/
Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/drgrahamwalker.com
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TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@offcalldotcom

The Pitt just wrapped its most talked-about season yet - and two ER doctors who lived the real version have thoughts.
In this episode of How I Doctor, Dr. Graham Walker sits down with Dr. Jeremy Faust, emergency physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Editor-in-Chief of MedPage Today, to have an honest, insider conversation about what The Pitt actually gets right, what it's doing to the culture around medicine, and why it's hitting clinicians so differently than everyone else.
This isn't a review. It's a reckoning. Graham and Jeremy explore physician grief, the mythology of burnout, the generational trauma baked into medical training, and why every ER doctor they know secretly identifies with Santos. Along the way, they explore what it means that a TV show is doing more to help Americans understand social determinants of health, end-of-life care, and the emotional weight of this job than almost anything the healthcare system has produced on its own.
For doctors who have felt seen by this show, and for those who can't bring themselves to watch it yet, this is the conversation worth having.
What You'll Learn
Why the most accurate thing about The Pitt isn't the medicine, it's the ethos.
What the show is actually changing about how patients approach end-of-life conversations.
Why ER doctors defend Santos when nobody else will, and what that reveals about the profession.
How medical training perpetuates cycles of trauma
Why the term "burnout" may be the wrong frame entirely for what's happening to emergency physicians right now.

🔗 Resources & Further Reading
Jeremy Faust, MD — Inside Medicine Substack: https://insidemedicine.substack.com
Jeremy Faust on MedPage Today: https://www.medpagetoday.com/people/jf6550/jeremy-faust
Jeremy Faust on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremysamuelfaust/
Jeremy Faust on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@jeremysamuelfaust
The Pitt on Max: https://www.max.com/shows/the-pitt

🩺 Offcall is more than a platform — it’s a community. Join today!
📝 For a full transcript of this episode click HERE
🎧 Subscribe to receive new How I Doctor episodes directly in your feed here: https://episodes.fm/1767429315
👨‍⚕️Follow Dr. Graham Walker on
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IG https://www.instagram.com/ubergraham/
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Most physicians understand that documentation is important. Very few understand the systems that determine what that documentation actually means for how they're paid, measured, and judged.
Dr. Travis Bias does because he's spent years operating on both sides of that divide.
In this episode of How I Doctor, Offcall co-founder Dr. Graham Walker sits down with Dr. Travis Bias, Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health Information Systems at Solventum, and one of the few clinicians who has led AI strategy for a company whose tools are already inside 80% of U.S. hospitals. The conversation covers the hidden infrastructure behind hospital quality scores, risk adjustment, and clinical documentation. And what most physicians don't realize about how those systems are shaping their professional reputation every day.
Travis also brings a perspective most health tech voices lack: two years teaching medicine in Kenya and Uganda, where finite resources and physical exam skills are the standard of care. It's a vantage point that sharpens his thinking on everything from clinical judgment to what U.S. medicine consistently gets wrong.
What You'll Learn
Why ambient AI documentation tools are capturing clinical complexity that physicians never had time to write down, and what that means for how patients are coded and how doctors get paid
How hospital quality scores, mortality rankings, and US News ratings are all downstream of documentation completeness and what physicians can do about it
Why the regulatory framework for healthcare AI is already behind the technology, and what happens if it doesn't catch up
How his time teaching medicine in East Africa changed the way he thinks about resource stewardship, clinical judgment, and the U.S. healthcare system's relationship with overtesting
What tech companies consistently get wrong about physicians and what physicians consistently get wrong about tech
Why Travis sees his role as a translator between medicine and technology, and how clinical training makes you better at both

Resources & Where to Find Travis
Solventum.com
Travel Health Consult:
LinkedIn

🩺 Offcall is more than a platform — it’s a community. Join today!
📝 For a full transcript of this episode click HERE
🎧 Subscribe to receive new How I Doctor episodes directly in your feed here: https://episodes.fm/1767429315
👨‍⚕️Follow Dr. Graham Walker on
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/graham-walker-md/
IG https://www.instagram.com/ubergraham/
Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/drgrahamwalker.com
✉️ Join our newsletter On/Offcall here https://offcall.beehiiv.com/subscribe
🟧 Follow Offcall on
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/joinoffcall/
IG https://www.instagram.com/offcalldotcom/
TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@offcalldotcom