D.A. Wallach met his late wife, Liz, at a Halloween party in Los Angeles hosted by the Maroon 5 star Adam Levine.
At the time, the erstwhile indie rocker never imagined that his relationship, and his career, would lead him to declare an all-out war on the U.S. health system. But then, Wallach said Thursday, she died four years ago, the day after giving birth. That tragedy fueled his desire to effect real change in a health system he views as fundamentally broken.
Far too much of modern medicine, Wallach said, is still effectively “witchcraft” — lacking both a genuine scientific basis and true incentives to deliver high-quality care.
“We need to be honest about the fact that we’re succeeding 2,000 years of it being bullshit,” he said. “It only recently became science, and we have a lot of work to do to deliver on that potential.”
Wallach’s remarks, which came at the 2024 STAT Summit in Boston, represent his first public acknowledgement of his family’s tragedy.
Since his wife’s death, Wallach said, he has grown increasingly aware of the broad lack of standards throughout the U.S. medical system and the fact that at nearly every level, the system evades consequences for harming the people it’s meant to serve.
“Unfortunately, physicians and hospitals over the past 30 or 40 years have insidiously constructed a legal regime in America where the consequences for hurting or killing patients have been systematically eliminated,” he said. “It’s hundreds of thousands of people a year, and we need to do better on that. We need a system that puts real consequences in place so that there’s a feedback loop that doesn’t reinforce the error and instead gives people an incentive to correct it.”
Wallach cited a Department of Health and Human Services study showing that one-third of hospitalized Medicare enrollees experienced patient harm during their stay. (The true figure is 27%, to be exact.)
“So advocates in this space have made the point: Would you ever check into a hospital if you thought there was a 1 in 3 chance you were going to get hurt?” Wallach said.
But the entire medical establishment is resistant to change, he added, citing the American Medical Association’s specific interest in eliminating caps on medical malpractice liability — essentially meaning that patient payouts for malpractice suits would be capped at a specific level, no matter how egregious their error or how high the damages sought.
“What we’re up against here is the AMA, we’re up against every hospital in America,” he said. “Whatever people say, you can look at where these organizations and interest groups spend their money.”
Wallach, once the lead singer for the indie rock group Chester French, is now a partner at Time BioVentures, a Southern California venture capital firm focused on health care and life sciences. Together with Tim Wright, a pharma insider who spent decades working in drug development, the pair has invested in over a dozen startups ranging from medical devices to online mental health providers.
During his remarks, Wallach made reference to the golden phonograph records that NASA included aboard the two Voyager missions in the late 1970s, meant to highlight human achievement and to portray the diversity of Earth’s culture to potential alien species that might one day encounter them.
The records, Wallach said, were a place where scientists had universally agreed upon a common conception of humanity. The same is needed for health care, he argued: A common set of standards that can serve as a basis for improved care, especially as the role of artificial intelligence in health care grows larger.
“My key point is that it’s time for us to create the golden record of medical knowledge,” Wallach said. “It’s a deceptively simple idea, but we haven’t done it yet.”
