TED Talks are driving change in the healthcare industry

Read the first part of this series here.

A TEDx Talk forces speakers to crystallize their story, and the process to get featured involves a heavily vetted application process for more than 3,000 events in 170 countries. 

TEDx events are organized independently by communities with a license from TED whose focus is on sharing ideas within their areas. For Dave Chase, co-founder and CEO of Health Rosetta, his talk was an opportunity to give benefit brokers and advisers hope that they could actually do something about the high — and wildly variable — cost of healthcare.   

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"If you look at people who've driven real change at any level, whether it's local or global, they are able to tell a compelling story very well," Chase says. "It amounts to huge credibility in their sphere of influence," he observes. 

Chase giving his TEDx talk

In his January 2017 TEDx Talk entitled "Healthcare Stole the American Dream — Here's How We Take it Back," Chase sought to tackle expectations around what could be done in the space. "In my view," he says, "there's a tyranny of low expectations in our industry."

Chase gave his TEDx Talk in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he had previously lived — describing it as "a small place" with an "outsized influence." He recalls doing about 50 to 100 practice runs to nail what became an 11 minute and 44 second talk, which led up to publishing a book on this topic about nine months later. 

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"You're trying to get a pretty big concept down into a crisp amount of time that's understandable to regular people," Chase says. "It's nerve wracking as you might imagine — waiting and waiting, trying to manage your nerves, then channel that energy." 

Like other TED speakers, Chase was deeply motivated by his messaging. "Every community has a mighty river of healthcare money flowing through it, and the source of that river of money is the employees and their organization's pockets," he explains. "What we're trying to do is have that river of money work like a water cycle that renews, restores and improves a community as opposed to corporate pipelines extracting that money and creating a drought in that community."