In a healthcare landscape shaped by rising costs, an aging population, and technology advancing faster than policy, leaders are under pressure to create solutions that actually move the needle. But how do you build healthcare technology that’s more than just a buzzword? How do you turn innovation into real impact—at scale? In this episode of the American Journal of Healthcare Strategy podcast, I sat down with Jamey Edwards, MBA, President & Chief Strategy Officer of Cairns Health, to dissect what separates meaningful innovation from the noise. Edwards, a serial social impact entrepreneur and former investment banker, pulls no punches: he’s been on both sides of the boardroom, led technology pivots, and grown mission-driven companies—all while wrestling with the hard truths of U.S. healthcare. If you want to learn what it actually takes to create tech that matters in today’s environment, read on.
Why would a successful investment banker leave Wall Street to build healthcare startups? According to Edwards, it wasn’t the plan—but it became the mission.
The transition from private equity to healthcare wasn’t about a loss of opportunity in finance, but rather a growing conviction. “As you get older, you’re just exposed to everything that’s kind of wrong in the healthcare system,” Edwards explains. Family connections (his sister, a physician; uncles and aunts in medicine) opened his eyes, but real understanding came from consulting for his uncle’s ER practice. “I always knew in the back of my head that I wanted to be a Founder. I became addicted to…taking an idea in your head, making it real, making it matter to people in a positive way and have it impact them.”
But healthcare is uniquely broken: from the U.S. physician shortage to healthcare as the leading cause of bankruptcy, the problems are both personal and systemic. Edwards frames the stakes in plain terms:
Patient Experience: “How can we treat patients like data points as opposed to the unique story that they are?”
Clinician Burnout: “How can we treat doctors like consumables that we as the patient get to use up as opposed to…another human being…?”
Systemic Scale: “It was going to take a village…maybe a city or the whole world…to fix the issues.”
Key Takeaway: If you’re considering your next move as a leader, the biggest impact may be found in solving the hardest problems. For Edwards, that meant turning down the “millions” of banking for the mission of healthcare entrepreneurship.
What does Cairns Health do, and how does technology translate into patient impact? Edwards gives us the product leader’s blueprint.
Cairns Health—formerly CoCo Health—is more than an AI startup. Under Edwards and CEO Andrew Ritter, the company pivoted from a simple fall-detection radar to a holistic digital care enablement platform. Their solution:
Ambient Sensing: Radar detects patient activity and sleep, without wearables.
AI-Driven Interventions: Large language models and audio signals inform a “cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia using the intelligent ambient sensing.”
Care Plan Simplification: The result is “an AI companion that takes really complex care plans, makes them simple, and delivers them to the bedside.”
Behavioral Health Integration: Addressing loneliness and mental health for seniors.
The product strategy is explicit: “We’re not an AI-first business; we now consider ourselves a Patient First business and a caregiver first business and a clinical team first business. That’s how you solve these problems in healthcare.”
Direct questions, direct answers:
How much domain knowledge did Edwards need? “Candidly…still coming up to speed every day…drinking from the fire hose on some of these intelligent ambient sensing technologies and how they work.”
How do they keep learning? Through “codevelopment partnerships” with health systems, securing NIH grants, and building with—rather than for—their users.
Key Features of Cairns Health’s Innovation Approach:
Start with user problems, not cool tech.
Collaborate with real health systems (NIH grant, Alzheimer’s use cases, remote patient monitoring).
Build scalable, regulatory-compliant solutions.
Focus on impact, not investor hype.
What’s the difference between “product-led” and “technology-led” companies, and why does it matter in healthcare?
Edwards is clear: a product-led company solves real user problems, while a tech-led company builds for the sake of building. “There are a lot of great technologies…that are like, ‘this is an amazing tech,’ and it never gets deployed.” The graveyard of unused healthcare tech is a warning for leaders:
Product-Led Innovation:
Begins with customer pain points and real clinical workflows.
Works with end-users throughout the process.
Measures success by adoption and outcomes.
Technology-Led Pitfalls:
Builds solutions looking for a problem.
Chases the AI “gold rush,” often for investor optics (“There’s some AI-washing that’s happening…unless AI is a huge driver…you can’t really classify yourself as an AI business.”)
Lacks real-world impact and staying power.
For health systems and vendors alike, the lesson is harsh but necessary: unless the product answers a true clinical or operational need, it won’t scale.
Can you build a billion-dollar healthcare company without making the exit your primary goal? Edwards says yes—and argues you must.
Referencing the Theranos scandal and startup culture, Edwards challenges the “exit slide” mindset: “I never include exit slides…in any of my decks. I find them to be the most annoying slide in an investor deck…If you build a great company, exit opportunities present themselves. If you build a great company, clients want to work with you.”
Principles for Mission-Driven Growth:
“The goal is never to build a billion-dollar company. It might be to impact a billion patients…that’d be a better goal in a positive way.”
Focus on making employees’ work meaningful through mission.
Let market opportunities (including exits) follow naturally.
For founders and executive leaders:
Investors care about impact and sustainability as much as they do about financial returns—especially in healthcare.
Build a business that employees and clients want to join, not just one that’s easy to sell.
How can founders and leaders avoid the “roller coaster” of isolation in healthcare entrepreneurship? For Edwards, Startup Health is the answer.
Startup Health is more than an accelerator; it’s what Edwards calls a “global Army of Health Transformers.” His company, Cloudbreak Health, was part of this network before merging into a SPAC. Edwards is now an Entrepreneur in Residence, coaching others through the ups and downs.
Startup Health’s Model:
Multi-year, longitudinal support (not a 12-week bootcamp).
Community focused on 15+ “moonshots” (e.g., Alzheimer’s, Type 1 Diabetes).
Access to impact boards of industry experts.
Emphasis on founder mindset, peer support, and shared learning.
“All great business is about great storytelling,” Edwards notes. Building a mission-driven business is as much about creating a narrative employees, clients, and partners want to join, as it is about the tech.
Why is healthcare innovation so hard for large nonprofit systems? Edwards pulls no punches: most are stuck in a system that punishes risk and underfunds change.
“This current fee-for-service environment…is not built for innovation.”
Large, profitable systems (e.g., Advocate Aurora, Intermountain, Kaiser) can allocate resources to innovation. Most others—urban, rural, safety-net hospitals—cannot.
“Turns out, a lot of care ends up being rejected even though it was already given…doctors on the front lines are thinking they’re doing what’s right for patients without regard to reimbursement, and then reimbursement…turns out to be a problem.”
Barriers to Innovation in Health Systems:
Underfunded Care: Thin margins prevent real R&D investment.
Regulatory and Political Gridlock: Innovation is held hostage by payment models and policy inertia.
Focus on Survival: “The lay Community Hospital…literally just focused every day on survival, has a problem with innovation and they might need innovation more than anybody else.”
Is Value-Based Care the Solution?
Edwards believes in value-based care, but penetration remains low: “We’ve been talking about value-based care for like 30 years and we’re like five or ten percent penetrated.”
Core challenges: risk aversion, lack of resources, and entrenched legacy systems (especially EMRs, which “intermediate the relationship with the patient” and create “user experience [that] sucks” for clinicians).
What Works?
Integrated models like Kaiser Permanente, which innovate in care delivery, not just technology.
Making tech easier to use, interoperable, and aligned with clinical workflow.
How do you lead transformation—especially as a new executive—without burning bridges? Edwards advocates for patience, transparency, and servant leadership.
“Change management is always such a big problem,” he notes, particularly when new leaders arrive en masse. Edwards’ playbook is clear:
1. Start With Listening:
“The first thing I always like to do is go in and listen…interview everybody. What were their challenges? What did they like about how the organization was previously run? What could be improved?”
Transparent sharing of survey results builds early trust.
2. Set a 30-60-90 Day Plan:
“The hardest thing to be is patient…sticking with that 30-60-90 day plan.”
Communicate intentions, then observe before acting.
3. Servant Leadership, Not Authoritarianism:
“My leadership style was to be a servant-oriented leader…helping all of you do your job, not just do your job but succeed in your careers.”
Make your role about enabling, not dictating.
4. Build Bidirectional Communication:
Ongoing town halls, transparency, and real follow-up.
5. Storytelling as Culture-Building:
“We’ve built a story that these employees really want to be a part of…and that gives them true meaning in their work.”
For administrative fellows and new executives: This approach works. Avoid the “bull in a china shop” mentality. Build trust, model patience, and give people a story—and a mission—to follow.
Healthcare innovation isn’t about technology for its own sake. As Jamey Edwards, MBA, President & Chief Strategy Officer at Cairns Health, demonstrates, true impact comes from solving real problems—patient by patient, workflow by workflow. Mission-driven companies that put user needs above investor optics, embrace change management as an act of service, and leverage community support like Startup Health will set the new standard. The lesson for today’s healthcare leaders? Money follows mission. If you want to create technology that matters, start by building trust, listening deeply, and telling a story people want to join.
