Matt dives into a specific healthcare topic to help those in the industry, and those outside of it, better understand the market drivers causing today’s healthcare challenges.

Not because he was famous. Because he had resources, visibility, and access to healthcare most Americans can only dream about. And he still died from a preventable cancer.

That tells us something we keep refusing to hear: our cancer care system is failing at the most basic level.

World Cancer Day arrived this year under the theme "United by Unique," celebrating personalized cancer care and prevention. We saw survivor stories. Awareness campaigns. Discussions about new treatments like India's planned Boron Neutron Capture Therapy. Policy interventions like England's "Jess's Rule" requiring doctors to escalate care after repeated patient visits.

But here's what we're not saying loud enough:

We're building better mousetraps while patients can't get through the door.

Van Der Beek was 48. Current screening guidelines recommend colonoscopy at 45—changed from 50 in 2021. Still too late for him. Still too late for thousands of others.

We've watched cancer rates in young adults explode since 2020. The data screams at us. Yet the system reacts years behind, adjusting guidelines only after bodies pile up.

The American Cancer Society uses the term "those at average risk." Patients hear that and self-select out. They think: no family history means no risk. They're wrong. Currently, 17.5 per 100,000 individuals with no family history develop colorectal cancer.

That's not a communication problem. That's a system designed to confuse.

Insurance companies don't want to bear the cost of massive screening swings. They'd rather you roll the dice and not spend the money.

Think about that for a second.

The business model of health insurance is fundamentally at odds with prevention. Insurance companies function like banks. They collect your premiums and use that money for their own investments. When you use healthcare dollars, you limit their ability to invest. They're public companies with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, not customers.

Wall Street wants profits. Screening programs cut into those profits.

So we wait. Guidelines lag. People die.

This is why we co-founded WE THE PATIENTS, a 501(c)(3)/(c)(4) focused on consumer protection rights lobbying in healthcare. There has never been an organized effort to rally the patient community as a voting bloc on healthcare. We're changing that.

For more on We The Patients, follow the links and check out co-founders Matt Zachary & Sally Neely Nix (who really need no introduction). Better yet, take the pledge and fill out our national survey providing vital insights into patient needs across the country!

World Cancer Day celebrated personalized, patient-centered care while the actual financial architecture of healthcare is designed to depersonalize and delay care.

Oncologists and health systems want to personalize treatment. Many genuinely do. But they're constrained by insurance formularies and medical policies written by people who've never sat across from a patient receiving a cancer diagnosis.

We're celebrating innovation—BNCT, targeted therapies, precision medicine—while building expensive solutions for late-stage problems. Meanwhile, insurance companies actively discourage the cheap, early interventions that would prevent those problems.

That's not irony. That's strategy.

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England's "Jess's Rule" requires GPs to escalate care after repeated patient visits. On the surface, it sounds like progress.

But we're legislating what should be basic medical practice. We're passing laws to force doctors to listen to patients who keep coming back saying something's wrong.

What does that tell you?

It tells you the system has a listening problem so severe that policy intervention became necessary. Apathy is winning.People would rather stay with the status quo than change their workflow. Hospitals run on antiquated management models. Doctors are burned out, pushed by administrators to see more patients—turn and burn—rather than take the time they need to engage.

We developed the Fusion Formula as a disciplined operating system for turning patient insight into measurable business performance. It forces commercial teams, medical teams, and advocacy leaders to align around one truth:

If you don't understand how care actually gets delivered and experienced, you waste capital, stall adoption, and lose trust.

Fusion sits on three integrated moves:

First, stakeholder fluency. Most teams map physicians and payers. Few map the full delivery ecosystem. In cell and gene therapy, one treatment can require coordination across pharmacy, revenue cycle, infusion nursing, case management, and hospital finance. Ignore even one node and adoption slows.

Second, structured patient voice integration. Listening to patients means more than collecting testimonials. It means extracting pattern-level insight about barriers, delays, denials, and lived tradeoffs. When you quantify those patterns, you expose operational blind spots.

One oncology company discovered patients abandoned therapy not because of side effects, but because scheduling delays between biopsy and treatment initiation exceeded 21 days in certain systems. They reengineered coordination protocols with hospital partners. Time to treatment dropped. Persistence improved. Revenue stabilized.

Listening revealed an operational failure that commercial analytics alone never surfaced.

Third, advocacy to impact. Insight means nothing without translation. Convert patient and stakeholder intelligence into specific system interventions. Redesign prior authorization support. Create hospital-ready budget impact tools. Train field teams to engage finance instead of only clinicians. Each intervention must tie to a metric.

This isn't sentiment. This isn't optics. This is operational advantage built on real human experience.

Awareness campaigns love survivor stories. They're inspiring. Emotional. Shareable.

They also let the system off the hook.

When we celebrate individual resilience and survival, we mask the fact that the system itself is designed for apathy and inertia. We need to apply more pressure on days like World Cancer Day, not just share success stories. Far too many people are still dying.

Both need to happen—patients celebrated and the system called out—to build real momentum.

If we want to organize patients as a voting bloc, we need a scoreboard that reflects what people actually live through, not just whether they survive five years.

Survival matters. But survival alone hides system failure. You can "survive" and still lose your job, your fertility, your savings, and your trust in medicine.

Here's what we should track:

Time. Measure median time from first reported symptom to confirmed diagnosis. Measure median time from diagnosis to treatment initiation. Break both down by race, income, and geography. In many solid tumors, even a two to four week delay in treatment initiation correlates with stage progression risk.

Early intervention accessibility. Track percentage of high-risk patients who receive guideline-recommended screening on time. Not just screening availability—completed screening. Then track time from abnormal screening result to biopsy.

Financial toxicity as a primary endpoint. Track out-of-pocket cost as a percentage of household income for each stage of treatment. Track rate of treatment abandonment due to cost. Cancer patients are significantly more likely to file for bankruptcy, and those who do have higher mortality. Financial collapse becomes a clinical variable.

Functional outcomes. Track return to work rate within 12 months post-treatment for working-age patients. Track sustained employment at 24 months. Track long-term cognitive function and fatigue burden in survivorship.

Denial rates and appeal success rates. How often do insurers initially deny guideline-aligned oncology treatments? What percentage of patients lack the resources to appeal? That data exposes access inequity in real time.

Equity in stage at diagnosis. If one zip code presents predominantly at Stage I and another at Stage III, survival statistics mask structural failure.

Right now we celebrate five-year survival improvements. We ignore diagnostic delay, administrative burden, financial collapse, functional impairment, and access denial patterns. Those omissions protect institutions. They don't protect patients.

Including patients in the process sounds transformative. In practice, it's often theater.

Companies host "patient listening sessions" and then move forward with the same launch plan they walked in with. Optics without authority changes nothing.

Real implementation requires three levers: voting rights, budget influence, and public accountability.

Patients need formal governance roles in protocol design with voting rights on protocol steering committees. When companies prepare value dossiers and regulatory submissions, patient-defined outcomes should shape primary and secondary endpoints. Patient representation at the board level for companies whose revenue depends on chronic disease populations changes the conversation.

Advocacy and patient engagement budgets often sit under marketing. That placement dilutes power. Take all the money from direct-to-consumer advertising and redirect it toward efforts that work alongside patient communities. No product should go to market without patient insight.

The difference between presence and power comes down to this: patients already carry the biological, financial, and emotional risks. Decision-making power should correlate with risk exposure.

Having patients in the room softens the tone. Giving patients defined authority changes the outcome.

If we could implement one change tomorrow, it would be this:

A national 14-day rule from confirmed cancer diagnosis to treatment authorization and initiation, with automatic approval if the clock expires.

One rule. One clock. No exceptions hidden in policy language.

Right now innovation moves at record speed. We launch targeted therapies, cell therapies, precision diagnostics. Yet patients wait three, four, sometimes six weeks for prior authorization. Each day erodes trust and, in certain cancers, erodes survival probability.

In aggressive malignancies like pancreatic or certain lung cancers, median survival can measure in months. A 21 to 30 day delay from diagnosis to treatment changes staging risk and treatment eligibility.

Here's how it works: Once pathology confirms malignancy and a board-certified oncologist submits a guideline-aligned treatment plan, the payer has 14 calendar days to approve or provide a clinically rigorous denial tied to published evidence. If the payer fails to respond within that window, the treatment auto-approves.

Simultaneously, health systems would report median time from diagnosis to first infusion or first oral dose publicly, broken down by zip code and payer. Transparency drives behavior.

This single intervention forces alignment across the entire chain. Pathology must move faster. Navigation teams must coordinate earlier. Payers must streamline review. Manufacturers must ensure drug supply and field support readiness.

Speed becomes the metric everyone optimizes.

It also changes psychology. A patient who hears "we start in 10 days" feels momentum. A patient who hears "we're waiting on authorization" feels powerless. That psychological difference affects adherence, trust, and long-term engagement.

This one rule creates pressure for broader reforms. Systems that know they must treat within 14 days will tighten screening to diagnostic workflows. Patients can rally around a clear demand: 14 days from diagnosis to treatment. Simple. Concrete. Hard to argue against publicly.

Can we fix this system? Or are we headed toward some kind of breaking point where the whole model collapses and has to be rebuilt from scratch?

We're not sure.

But we know we need to push in this direction. If the model breaks, it breaks. It won't be without us trying.

At this point, a broken model is better than one that exposes patients to harm daily.

The current system's stability is built on patient suffering. If pushing for real change breaks it, so be it.

Van Der Beek's death reminds us that cancer doesn't discriminate. Neither should access to quality care. We have the data. We have the science. We have breakthrough treatments on the horizon.

What we don't have is a system designed to get those innovations to the people who need them when they need them.

That changes when patients stop being advisory voices and become decision-makers. When we measure what matters. When we demand speed as a standard of care. When we organize as a voting bloc that refuses to accept apathy as policy.

The theme was "United by Unique." We're still waiting for the healthcare system to prove it means it.

If you lead a team and want sharper execution, deeper trust, and measurable patient impact, bring Matt in.

The Fusion Formula gives healthcare professionals a clear operating system for stakeholder fluency, patient voice integration, and disciplined commercial execution. Matt challenges teams to identify system friction, engage the right institutional stakeholders, and convert insight into sustained action. He has worked inside these dynamics for years. He knows where teams stall. He knows how to unlock performance.

If your organization speaks about patient centricity but struggles to operationalize it, Matt will confront the gaps and help rebuild the foundation with clarity and accountability.

For patient communities, employers, and progressive health leaders, the EMPWRD Patient Model equips individuals to move from passive participation to informed decision making. Matt teaches patients how to prepare for appointments, ask better questions, navigate denials, and engage clinicians with confidence and respect. When patients elevate their voice, outcomes improve and system friction declines.

He does not deliver inspiration for its own sake. He delivers frameworks audiences can apply immediately. He has been in both spaces - as an executive and a chronic pain patient. He has built the systems he wished he had in those experiences!

If you want a keynote that changes behavior, not just fills a room, connect to explore bringing the Fusion Formula or the EMPWRD Patient Model into your organization.

Book Time With Matt To Dive Deeper!

The EMPWRD Patient Mastermind is a high accountability training experience for people who refuse to navigate healthcare passively.

This course teaches patients how to think, prepare, and engage like strategic partners in their own care. You will learn how to interpret guidelines, prepare for high stakes appointments, push back on denials, document patterns, and escalate concerns with clarity and confidence. We break down how insurance models work, how hospital systems make decisions, and where leverage actually lives inside the system.

Each session combines real world case analysis, tactical scripts, and implementation assignments. You will not just talk about empowerment. You will practice it. You will leave with appointment prep frameworks, denial response templates, care coordination checklists, and a personal escalation plan.

This mastermind also builds community. You will work alongside other driven patients and caregivers who want to raise the standard of care, not just survive it. We challenge each other. We share playbooks. We hold the system accountable.

If you want to stop feeling intimidated in exam rooms, confused by bills, or stuck in administrative loops, this program gives you structure and strategy. Empowerment requires skill. We build it.