Out of Patients EP447: Taco Thursday Meets Broken Healthcare: Dr. Sarah Matt

Dr. Sarah Matt heard a human cough at 4am in a dairy barn and thought she was about to die. It was a sheep. That moment killed her plan to become a vet and pushed her into medicine, then surgery, then straight into the machine that runs healthcare.  

She trained in burns, where people show up shattered and time decides everything. Then she walked away. Not out of burnout. Out of math. One doctor can only see so many patients. The system does the rest. So she went to Oracle, built cloud infrastructure, scaled care across millions, and watched expensive ideas collapse the second real doctors had to use them.

I wanted her on because she has lived on both sides of the lie. She knows how decisions get made and who eats the consequences. Her book calls it out plain. People build products for buyers, not users. CFO buys it. Doctor uses it. Patient pays for it when it fails.

We get into tacos, roller derby, broken legs, and why she calls herself a great once a week doctor. That line stayed with me. So did this one. Everyone has a healthcare access story and most of them suck.

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Out of Patients is proudly the #1 independent healthcare podcast worldwide. New episodes every Tuesday. We’ve been turning medical trauma into momentum for 17 years. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Matthew Zachary

Matthew Zachary has spent three decades fighting to make the American healthcare system less cruel, organizing millions through advocacy and media. A former concert pianist whose life was turned upside down by brain cancer at just 21, he founded Stupid Cancer, the largest nonprofit for young adults with cancer. He also launched The Stupid Cancer Show, widely regarded as the first healthcare podcast, which later evolved into the award-winning Out of Patients. He produced Cancer Mavericks, a documentary series about the rebel patients who changed modern oncology. He is CEO and Co-Founder of We The Patients, a national movement organizing patients into collective civic power, and the author of We the Patients: Understanding, Navigating, and Surviving America’s Healthcare Nightmare (Wiley, May 2026) with Jen Singer.

https://www.matthewzachary.com
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