Broken System: Halle Tecco on What it Takes to Build Massively Better Healthcare
What would it take to make healthcare massively better?
In this episode of Breaking Precedent, Leah Solivan sits down with Halle Tecco, founder of Rock Health, to unpack why the U.S. healthcare system remains so hard to change—and what it will actually take to fix it.
Drawing from her upbringing in the Midwest, decades of experience across healthcare, investing, public health, and education, and her new book Massively Better Healthcare, Halle explains how incentives, power dynamics, and regulatory capture shape outcomes far more than technology alone. From Medicaid disparities and data misuse to venture capital timelines and the myth of “innovation solves everything,” she challenges founders and leaders to see healthcare as a system—not just a product opportunity.
Together, Leah and Halle explore why healthcare resists scale, how evidence differs from proof of impact, and why founders must often become advocates—not just builders. Halle shares lessons from Rock Health, insights from teaching at Columbia and Harvard, and hard truths about incumbents, misaligned incentives, and what meaningful progress actually looks like.
Halle Tecco is a healthcare investor, educator, and author focused on improving outcomes, access, and equity across the healthcare system. She is the founder of Rock Health, an early-stage venture firm supporting digital health startups, and the author of Massively Better Healthcare: The Innovator’s Guide to Tackling Healthcare’s Biggest Challenges. Her work spans investing, public health, teaching, and policy advocacy, with a mission to make healthcare meaningfully better for more people.
Massively Better Healthcare (Book): https://www.halletecco.com/book
Rock Health: https://rockhealth.com
Cost Plus Drugs (Mark Cuban): https://costplusdrugs.com
Epic Systems (EHR): https://www.epic.com
Cleveland Clinic: https://my.clevelandclinic.org
National Academy of Medicine (Social Determinants of Health context): https://nam.edu
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS): https://www.cms.gov
Menlo Ventures – AI in Healthcare Report: https://menlovc.com/perspective/ai-in-healthcare/
Shownotes
00:00 Welcome to Breaking Precedent
02:10 Icebreaker: A Personal Moment That Changed Halle’s View on Healthcare
06:30 Growing Up in the Midwest and Early Healthcare Experiences
10:45 Fairness, Access, and Social Determinants of Health
15:20 Questioning Systems from the Inside and Outside
19:40 Founding Rock Health and Early Digital Health Investing
24:10 Why Healthcare Resists Scale
28:30 Data, AI, and the Future of Healthcare
33:10 Incentives, Power, and Misalignment
37:20 Writing Massively Better Healthcare
41:00 What Needs to Change and What Innovators Can Do Next
44:30 Final Thoughts
Leah Solivan is the host of Breaking Precedent, a podcast that explores the stories of innovators who are pushing societal boundaries and setting new precedents in their fields. Leah is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. Leah has 15 years of experience building and creating technology products that have reached millions of people around the globe. She started her career at IBM as an engineer in the software group, working on Lotus Notes and Domino. In 2008, Leah founded TaskRabbit, the leading on-demand service marketplace in the world.
Connect with Leah:
Website: breakingprecedent.com/
Instagram: leah_solivan
X: @labunleashed