In this episode of The Jess Larsen Show on Innovation & Leadership, Jess sits down with Dr. Stephen Hammond, physician, entrepreneur, and co-owner of Waccamaw Dermatology, to explore how he helped build a rapidly growing dermatology organization serving roughly 200,000 patients a year.
Stephen shares how the company grew from seeing around 20 patients a day to building a vertically integrated healthcare platform that combines medical dermatology, surgery, pathology, cancer treatment, clinical research, aesthetics, and other services under one roof. He explains why bringing more of the patient journey in-house has allowed the organization to improve communication, reduce friction, and deliver better care while continuing to scale.
Jess and Stephen also dive into how artificial intelligence is beginning to transform healthcare. Rather than relying entirely on outside vendors, Stephen’s team is developing AI capabilities internally using its own clinical data. He discusses where AI can improve efficiency, reduce errors, and support physicians, while also explaining why medicine still requires human judgment when multiple data points have to be combined into a real treatment decision.
The conversation goes beyond healthcare into entrepreneurship and leadership. Stephen explains why physicians are often trained to avoid risk, how he learned to reinterpret that risk when becoming an entrepreneur, and why having a strong professional safety net can actually make it easier to take ambitious bets.
Stephen also breaks down the strategy behind vertical integration, including why entrepreneurs should often partner with experts before bringing a new capability in-house. He shares how to recognize the right inflection point for expansion and why taking on a new revenue stream also means taking on the complexity required to operate it well.
Jess and Stephen close with a deeper discussion about culture, confidence, and leadership. Stephen shares his philosophy of making every employee responsible for the person immediately before and after them in the service chain, creating stronger accountability and teamwork as the organization approaches 300 employees. He also explains why great leaders lower the temperature during difficult moments, remain accessible, and help people build confidence by first giving them opportunities to succeed.
This episode is a wide-ranging conversation about healthcare entrepreneurship, AI in medicine, scaling a medical business, vertical integration, leadership, company culture, risk, and building an organization around both operational excellence and patient care.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
