Offcall Physician Spotlight: Meet Dr. Adam Brown

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1. Adam, you author a biweekly column “Prescriptions for a Broken System.” So what’s one policy reform that would truly change U.S. healthcare?

If you read through “Prescriptions for a Broken System,” there’s a consistent theme: Consolidation.

The scale of consolidation in American healthcare is staggering. Most people — including clinicians — don’t realize that between UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Cigna, and Humana, more than a trillion dollars of healthcare spend is concentrated in just four entities. And it’s not just insurance anymore. These companies own physician groups. They own PBMs. They own pharmacies. They own data infrastructure. They influence reimbursement, supply chains, technology platforms, and care delivery models. When you vertically integrate insurance, care delivery, pharmacy benefit management, and retail pharmacies under one umbrella, the power imbalance becomes enormous.

If there’s one reform we should be talking about more seriously, it’s meaningful antitrust enforcement and structural separation in healthcare. Transparency alone isn’t enough. We need to examine whether vertical integration at this scale is compatible with competitive markets and patient-centered care. Until we address consolidation, we’re rearranging deck chairs.

2. What’s one innovation in medical devices or U.S. healthcare startups that excites you most?

The company I founded, ABIG Health, works with innovators from early stage companies to major international medical device companies across the spectrum, helping them navigate the complexity of the U.S. healthcare market — including AI-assisted decision support tools, physical medical devices, digital therapeutics. The creativity is remarkable. What excites me most isn’t a single gadget. It’s how technology is improving workflow, documentation, research synthesis, and patient engagement. We’re seeing tools that reduce friction for clinicians, accelerate clinical insight, and even reshape treatment modalities.

I mean, who would have predicted that a video game could treat depression? Yet digital therapeutics are demonstrating measurable impact in areas we once thought required only pharmacology or traditional therapy. The real innovation isn’t just hardware or software. It’s integration — technology that fits into real clinical workflows rather than disrupting them.

3. What AI tools have made the most impact on your practice and why?

ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity have all been useful tools for rapid synthesis of information. To be clear — and this is critical — you must verify everything. Cross-reference studies. Confirm citations. AI can hallucinate, and overconfidence in these tools is dangerous.