TALKS
Dr. Sarah Matt | Clinical Realist
Dr. Sarah Matt has spent 15 years on both sides of American healthcare — as a physician providing charity care and as an executive building the technology behind major health systems. What she found is a system designed around an assumed patient: insured, digitally connected, fluent in English, and willing to trust institutions. Everyone else gets described as “hard to reach.”
Matt’s Five Distances framework turns that assumption around. Instead of treating the patient as the problem, it asks why the system has failed to meet people where they are. By making those barriers visible and specific, Matt reframes healthcare access as a design problem — and shows how understanding where we’ve fallen short can point to better solutions.
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Dr. Sarah Matt is a surgery-trained physician currently providing internal medicine charity care in rural upstate New York, and a healthcare AI strategist who has spent fifteen years inside the systems she critiques. She has served as VP of Healthcare Product Strategy at Oracle Health (one of the largest health IT platforms in the world), VP of Solution Strategy at NextGen Healthcare, Chief Strategy Officer at Sovato, and an executive at ESO. She is Assistant Professor at SUNY Upstate Medical University. Her book “The Borderless Healthcare Revolution” (Wiley, 2025) is a national bestseller and introduces the Five Distances framework. She hosts The Clinical Realist, a podcast on healthcare AI and care delivery. She holds a BS from Cornell, an MD from SUNY Upstate, and an MBA from UT Austin.
