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Tom Hale

Chief Executive Officer, Oura

Search every verified Tom Hale interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Tom Hale, CEO of Oura, discussed the company's approach to wearable health technology on the Heart of Healthcare podcast, which was replayed on September 22, 2025. He stated that the healthcare industry lacks sufficient physician capacity, noting that primary care doctors in the US could provide roughly 500 million hours of care annually, equating to about an hour and 20 minutes per person per year, which he said is insufficient to change behavior. Hale said Oura's belief is that the foundation of health is based on individual behaviors. Hale also described Oura's product design, attributing the ring's accuracy to its sensor placement on the finger, which he said captures blood flow near the heart and provides meaningful data for machine learning. He credited the company's founders for establishing a culture focused on clinical-grade accuracy, with sleep tracking validated against polysomnography as the gold standard. Hale noted that Oura has been drawn into traditional healthcare faster than anticipated, citing an example of Essence, a Medicare Advantage provider, approaching the company to distribute the ring to its members and share data with clinicians.

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“We always thought it was like on our three-year plan. And what's happened is we've been pulled in that direction faster than I anticipated. And I'll give you a couple examples. So one is Essence, a Medicare Advantage provider, small plan, 65,000, 70,000 lives under management. They came to us and they said, 'We want to roll this out to our Medicare Advantage customers and we want to include the ring and we want the d”

“The reality of the healthcare industry is there's just simply not enough doctors to go around. If you were to take all the time of all the primary care physicians of in the US, say, you might have 500 million hours of care that you could provide. Well, there's 330 million people in the US. So each person's going to get an hour and 20 minutes of care a year. That is just not enough to change someone's behavior. And ou”

“The retention of Oura with the subscription membership model is literally off the charts. I've been in subscription businesses my entire life. Our retention at 1 year is 80%. Netflix and Spotify are not. They're below that at 1 year. And by the way, there's convexity after you get to year two and year three. The retention in year two is 85%. So it's like it's a convex curve. Now, why is the question? It's obviously n”

“We are a health intelligence platform that will redefine the future of health care. How? By continuously monitoring everyone's already got a supercomputer. Everyone should have a device on their body. There should be a machine intelligence that is personalized and customized to that individual and a large physiological model. You've heard of an LLM, large language model. We're a large physiological model that is maki”

“If we have a large physiological model that makes predictions about you, and those predictions aren't just like, hey, you're getting sick and in 3 days you're going to be on the couch. It's more like, hey, in 10 years, if you don't change your course, you're going to have a heart attack. That's so powerful. It's powerful from so many different dimensions for the individual, for insurance companies, for your doctors, ”

“We have sick care, we don't have healthcare. How do we optimize health? We talk about this idea of connected care. We're not going to do everything. We're going to find you the partners to make sure that you're getting the right care, to get the kind of care that you need. Our role in this is to be helping with preventative behavior change that bends the curve on the cost of healthcare and bends the curve on your own”

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