Vanguards of Health Care by Bloomberg Intelligence
Transcarent’s Bet on AI and the End of Healthcare Scarcity
22 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is Transcarent's vision for healthcare?
Welcome to another episode of Bloomberg Intelligence's Vanguards of Healthcare podcast, where we speak with the leaders at the forefront of change in the healthcare industry. My name is Jonathan Palmer, and I'm a healthcare analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, the in-house research arm of Bloomberg.
I'm thrilled to welcome back Glenn Tullman, the CEO of Transparent, who previously joined us for an episode in April 2023. Glenn is a titan in this sector. He's formerly the CEO of Livongo and Allscripts, and he's also the co-founder and a partner of Seven Wire Ventures. I'm beyond excited to have this opportunity to sit down with him again. Glenn, welcome back.
Well, thank you very much. It's great to be back.
Well, why don't we start at a 30,000-foot view with what TransKaren is, and maybe we can cover a little bit what's changed in the last few years since we chatted.
Chapter 2: How does Transcarent aim to reduce friction in healthcare?
And how much time do we have? Because a lot has changed. Maybe the elevator pitch. Let me start off with Transparent. So in some ways, it's very simple to understand. And this is the beauty of health care, because all of us have experienced health care. And so when we think of Transparent, we really think of our vision. And our mission, our vision is all of your health and care in one place.
Imagine that if you could just look at your phone and everything you needed to do was right there. Wouldn't that make life a lot simpler?
Chapter 3: What changes have occurred in healthcare since the last discussion?
And our mission is to make it easy for people to access high quality, affordable health and care. So make it easy. First and foremost, when I moved out to Silicon Valley, they kept saying, you know, we don't understand health care because everything you do creates friction. It's a copay. It's coinsurance. It's, you know, preauthorizations. It's approvals.
And why don't you just create something that makes it easy for people? That's what we do in Silicon Valley. So that always stuck with me, making it easy.
Chapter 4: How does the Accolade acquisition fit into Transcarent's strategy?
The second thing is access. And when you think about access, think about the fact that in healthcare, most access, other than an ER, is eight to five. And that happens to be exactly the time that most of us work. And that's when our children go to school. So it's as inconvenient as you can make it. And in fact, some doctor's offices even close during the lunch hour.
So the idea is I'll pop over there during lunch. So easy to access, high quality. First and foremost, it's about our health. And you and no one else listening to your podcast would ever say, find me the cheapest place that I can get care for my kids.
Chapter 5: What is the concept of WayFinding in healthcare?
We all focus on quality first, and that's what we do at Transparent. So easy access, high quality, affordable. It doesn't help you if I say here's the best place, but you can't afford it. And then lastly, we separate health care into health, keeping people healthy and outside the four walls of the hospital.
And care, taking care of them when they do need care at a high quality, affordable place where they're going to get the care they need and only the care they need. Really important because we do 30% too many surgeries in this country.
We want to make sure that second opinions are used and you take as much care in getting surgery as you do when you get a recommendation for a restaurant before you go and eat there.
Well, you covered a lot of different pain points and areas of friction. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about how you're tackling some of those, whether it's quality of care, affordability. How does the pieces of the puzzle all fit together?
Chapter 6: How does AI play a role in transforming healthcare delivery?
Well, let's just, again, go through that. Easy means everything's available on your phone. Access means 24 by 7. And it means the ability to actually be texting with a physician in 60 seconds, 24 hours a day, unheard of anywhere else. And we've introduced that and we've set that standard. And initially, even my own team said, Glenn, do you have to say 60 seconds? Couldn't we say 15 minutes?
Isn't that more reasonable? And I said, this isn't about reasonable. This is about your son, your daughter, your mother, your father, your spouse has an emergency.
Chapter 7: What challenges does Transcarent face in the healthcare market?
You don't know what to do. Five minutes seems like eternity. And my youngest son has type 1 diabetes. And if he was having a seizure, 30 seconds is forever. So, you know, that is why that, you know, that's how this feels. And that's what health care is about. So access 24 by 7, easy on your phone, high quality, making sure we've done the vetting so you don't have to.
And making sure it's affordable, getting you the best pre-negotiated deal. And then, again, health, keeping you healthy, and then care. So that's how it feels to use Transparent, which, again, we're fortunate to have, you know, a great base, 1,700 clients who are using at least one of our services and increasing number use the entire platform.
Chapter 8: What future developments can we expect from Transcarent?
How many members does that work out to these days?
Well, it's over 20 million members, but I want to be clear that every one of those people, this is healthcare. You don't need to use a healthcare app every day. So we hope you don't have to. So unlike a lot of software companies where they say, you know, Facebook gets measured, you know, meta now, who's a great client of ours, they get measured on how many hours you spend on their app.
But we don't. We, in a sense, want you to spend as little time as possible. If you need to go to an ER, we want to tell you, here's the three closest ERs. Here's the wait time at those ERs. Here's the directions that you need to get there. Or if you're not driving, can we get you an Uber? Or do you need an ambulance? That's the experience. So it's not about how long.
It's about how fast can you get there. the problem solved.
That's a great summary. You know, if we think back to a couple of years ago, you know, there's been a lot of changes in the marketplace. Maybe can you give us a lay of the landscape from a from a competitive perspective? You know, who are you competing with and what is the total market addressable market look like?
Well, you know, it's fascinating. I've often said that the world is filled with friends and enemies and frenemies. And sometimes, you know, we have all three at the same time. So we have a platform. And that means that on our platform, we have partnerships with people that we also compete with.
And ultimately, what we want to say, not unlike an Amazon, what we want to say is you can choose us, you can choose someone else. Our job is to make it easy to access whatever you want, one place for all your health and care. So that's a case where we might have a competitor on our platform that we're working with to help make it easier to use them.
And then we might be competing with them at the same time. You know, that said, the world kind of falls out into three areas. One area is, if you think of it, the traditional health plans. And those are both partners. We have great partnerships with organizations like Blue Shield of California, a great partner, a great innovator.
You saw what they've done to disrupt the market in a number of cases. So very proud of that. And we have other health plans who might think of us as competitors, but they might think of us as partners, too, with some of the products that we provide. So that really depends on how an employer or a state government or other entities want to use us.
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