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where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers.

Today, direct-to-consumer health care.

Ashwini Nagapon is a health care entrepreneur with a PhD in

health policy. She joins Dr. Josh Sharstein to talk about whether all these ads, tests, and

medications coming directly to patients are a good thing. Let's listen. Dr. Ashwini Nagapon,

thank you so much for joining me today in Public Health on call. I'm excited for

this conversation because I've been seeing advertisements for healthcare all over the place.

Thanks, Josh, for having me. I'm excited to talk about direct-to-consumer healthcare.

So before we jump into the direct-to-consumer healthcare, let's talk about the not-direct-to-consumer

healthcare, like the old way of doing things. How would you characterize that? So typically, the way that health care has happened is that

individuals will go to their provider. Their provider will see them and then determine, okay,

this person needs follow-up testing, might need a prescription, and then from there, the patient will receive a

prescription or a test. But what the direct-to-consumer healthcare model ends up doing is it actually

starts with the consumer. So the consumer is initiating the process of ordering a product or a

service, often online with little to no involvement of a provider depending on

that particular platform. And it is somewhat of a departure from the norm. I mean, by having

direct-to-consumer in front of health care, we're kind of signaling that there is a departure

from the norm in some sort of way. Right. So we said like the old way used to be described as

...