In health care circles today, everyone is talking a lot about innovation and shaking up the status quo. But perhaps no one is stirring the pot quite so vigorously — or entertainingly — as Zubin Damania M.D. He is founder of the out-of-the-box clinic called Turntable Health, director of healthcare development for Downtown Project Las Vegas, and even a viral health care rapper/entertainer under the pseudonym ZDogg MD. We’re thrilled to have Damania as one of our keynote speakers at the third annual “Connecting to Transform Communities” conference and hearing him share his revolutionary “remixed” approach to health care that “knocks down roadblocks that make no sense.”

After a nearly decade-long career as a hospitalist at Stanford University Medical Center, Damania was stressed out and burned out. He felt the healthcare system was dehumanizing doctors and patients alike. He’d even started a shadow career performing stand-up comedy and rap routines for medical audiences worldwide. Today, ZDoggMD’s videos have amassed nearly a million views while educating patients and providers and mercilessly satirizing our country’s healthcare system.

After Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh saw the videos, he invited Damania to join him in Downtown Las Vegas to work on the Downtown Project,an ambitious urban revitalization movement that Hsieh is spearheading. He’s investing $350 million in the revitalization of the urban core of Las Vegas, including small business development, residential housing, education, technology and healthcare. Hsieh told Damania it would be an opportunity to fix the problems with health care that he complained about in his videos.

As shared on Turntable’s website, Hsieh asked Damania to “do nothing less than rethink entirely how a $2.8 trillion industry — healthcare — might look if it were just done right from scratch. Luckily, he found that the answer was probably simpler than it has been made out to be. We don’t do primary care right in this country. But through good primary care, you can treat or better yet prevent most costly illnesses. So fix primary care … and you fix medicine.”

In partnership with Iora Health, Turntable Health is setting out to do just that as an innovative model of “remixed” healthcare delivery that promotes wellness at both the individual and community level. It describes itself on its website as “a membership-based wellness ecosystem that focuses on everything that makes you healthy, from primary care to nutrition to wellness classes and more.”

For a monthly membership fee of $80 for a single adult (with additional membership options for children, couples and families), patients get access to a team of a personal physician and health coach who collaborate with them to help them reach their goals; access to the team through email, video chat, phone or by walking in; free classes on everything from nutrition to yoga to group therapy in the ultra-sleek facility's onsite studio and demonstration kitchen; the latest medical record technology; and follow-up via proactive communications and full coordination with outside specialists.

The clinic says it is proving to be a sustainable business model and has been successful so far in keeping patients healthy and keeping down medical costs. Read more about the clinic and Damania’s approach in this article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Then join us at the Connecting conference and prepare to be inspired!