Keep Health in Play
Eight episodes. Coming 2026.

Keep Health in Play.

Care by Design.
A new podcast with Dr. Cono Badalamenti

American medicine has gotten very good at managing chronic disease. That is not the same as being well. This show makes a bet: that the gap can be closed — not with more advice, but by redesigning the care itself.

Keep Health in Play — Design Beats Intention — with Dr. Cono. Podcast cover showing Dr. Cono Badalamenti in white coat against a sunset community gathering scene.

Care can be rebuilt. That's the bet.

American medicine has built a system that controls chronic disease on paper. The numbers improve. The conditions get coded. The visits get billed. And the people inside that system are still — quietly, often invisibly — not actually well.

That gap is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of design. And the bet of this show is that the design can be changed — not with more advice, but by redesigning where care actually happens.


Three claims. Eight episodes.

The arguments this season defends.

Claim One
Well-managed should mean well-lived.
American medicine has gotten very good at controlling chronic disease on paper. That is not the same as living fully inside the life you have. The gap between them is where most of the suffering lives — and where almost no one is looking. The bet of the show is that the gap can be closed.
Claim Two
Design beats intention.
Good clinicians in broken systems produce broken outcomes. The system isn't failing — it is succeeding at the wrong objective. If we want different outcomes, the system itself has to be redesigned. Not the people inside it.
Claim Three
Community is where health is made.
Health is made in homes, kitchens, sidewalks, workplaces, and communities. Care is delivered in fifteen-minute encounters inside buildings most patients find intimidating. Until the care team operates inside the lives where health is actually made, the gap stays structural.
Your Host
Dr. Cono Badalamenti
Family Medicine & Lifestyle Medicine,
dual board certified

Dr. Cono is a dual board-certified family medicine and lifestyle medicine physician, currently the Chief Clinical Officer at Blue Zones™ Health. He has spent twenty-five years inside American healthcare — from a hospital dishroom at nineteen to leading clinical strategy at a national well-being company — asking the same question every level of the system would let him: what would it actually take to keep people well?

Keep Health in Play is where he works through the answer in public.

The first episode drops soon.

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A new podcast from Dr. Cono Badalamenti · Coming 2026
Best from the beginning. Strong from anywhere.