Erasing One Billion Unnecessary Opioid Pills

Brand Newland is the founder of Goldfinch Health, a company that uses Enhanced Recovery to help surgical patients recover faster, return to work safely, and depend far less on opioids for pain management.

The benefits are twofold – patients obviously recover quicker and face less risk of addiction, and their employers spend far less on things like replacement workers, overtime, and lost productivity.

We first met through a program here in town called BoostATX, the brainchild of Shannon Sibold, which helps local founders connect and knowledge-share as they scale from 7- to 8-figures.

He blew my mind with the stats on opioid mis-prescription.

Not just in terms of the patients who end up hooked, but also other consequences I’d never thought of – like how over-prescribing drugs dramatically increases the cost of healthcare, and leads to billions of unused pills (which themselves are the leading cause of poisoning-related death among kids 5 and under).

Goldfinch is getting very respectable results. Recent third-party verification showed they reduce time-back-to-work by 35 days, saving costs for employers, and delivering >9x ROI for companies that work with them.

To me, it’s a fascinating example of how business and innovation can solve some of society’s most intractable issues.

Enter Brand…

1. Okay, tell us about your business! What's the backstory? And how did you get your first customer. 

Back in 2018, my mom (a nurse) had a major health event that required multiple surgeries. (She’s doing great today, thankfully!) Due to that experience, I had an up-close-and-personal view of surgery, before, during, and after. As a pharmacist, the pain management and opioid component of the experience really grabbed my attention. 

While my mom made it successfully through her surgeries, I saw how much room there was for improvement–improvement in terms of better educating and supporting patients, improvement in terms of setting up both patients and hospitals for better surgical recovery and fewer expensive complications, and improvement in terms of proactive pain management and fewer unnecessary opioids.

Around that same time, a long-time friend, John Greenwood, and I were spending a lot of time talking about the need for an improved standard of care for surgery. (This might sound like a crazy thing to be talking about amongst friends but maybe it makes more sense when you know John’s professional experience prior to co-founding Goldfinch Health involved training surgeons on minimally-invasive surgical techniques, including robotic-assisted surgery.)

Finally, we reached a day where we could see the better protocol for surgery (based on what’s known as Enhanced Recovery), we could see it wasn’t being widely implemented, and we decided we didn’t want to live in that world. We wanted to change it because we knew the kind of surgical experience we would all want for ourselves and our loved ones. And we could see this change would be worth it–for patients and families, for employers, for insurers, for healthcare providers, and for society (considering the opioid crisis). 

So we dove into trying to figure out this problem in 2018 and 2019. In early 2020, we had a breakthrough in the form of an invitation to participate in an accelerator program called BrokerTech Ventures. The program put out a press release that spring. Not long thereafter, we received a message from a benefits consultant we had never met and who was not linked to the BrokerTech Ventures program. He had a client who needed Goldfinch and the rest is history. 

2. What’s one unconventional decision you made early in your business that you believe set you apart from competitors, and how do you think it shaped your trajectory?

The Enhanced Recovery protocols that form the basis of our program are supported by thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles over the years. Healthcare changes very slowly, if it changes at all. In fact, research shows that the adoption of evidence-based medicine can take 17 years–essentially, an entire generation!

When we decided to try to be a catalyst for change in this very specific way, we looked at the market and decided one of the key elements missing was there had not really been any effort to translate the benefits of this approach to surgery and recovery into terms that would matter to (1) patients but, perhaps even more importantly, (2) self-insured employers.

We could see that better supported patients following the key principles of Enhanced Recovery protocols would not only have less risk of expensive complications but they would also get back to their lives sooner and back to work sooner. Most companies with innovative solutions in our world would create a return on investment model first based on the avoidance of unnecessary healthcare expenses (like readmissions and return trips to the emergency room). While our program delivers those outcomes, we decided to focus our return on investment model in a different area. We set out to answer the question–how much faster can we get your employees back to work than the national benchmarks? 

That resonated and stood out from the pack. It also happened to be an area where we learned we could deliver outstanding results. In mid-2025, we completed third-party validation of our results for the second time. This time, we found that, on average, we save nearly 35 days (5 weeks!) in recovery and return to work time, on average. That has helped differentiate ourselves in a crowded marketplace for employee benefit solutions.

3. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve spent significant money on for your business or yourself as a founder, and how has it changed your understanding of value?

Goldfinch Health logo gear! We have an entirely distributed workforce. Having a polo or a sweatshirt or a quarter-zip with the GH logo helps the whole team to stay connected, in a little way. And I have to say it gives me a boost of pride when I see members of our team pop on Zoom wearing company-branded gear. It’s a way of demonstrating commitment to the team and to the mission. Those small deposits add up!

4. What’s one belief about entrepreneurship you held when you started that you’ve completely abandoned, and what made you change your mind?

Listening to entrepreneur stories might lead some to believe that the magic comes in the “pivot”. You thought you did one thing but then realized you should be doing something entirely different–and then your company takes off like a rocket ship. Those are fun stories but a pivot isn’t necessary to find success, at least in our experience. The program we market to employers and insurers is almost exactly what we envisioned it to be 7+ years ago. 

That isn’t to say we haven’t followed opportunities to new places. About three years ago, we decided to pursue opioid settlement funds at the state, county and city levels. We have a prevention program at a key gateway to prescription opioid exposure for patients, families, and communities. We didn’t know then if the stakeholders overseeing those funds would see a role for a program like ours. Thankfully, they did! And we now market what we call the “Billion Pill Pledge Program” to those overseeing settlement funds nationally while delivering the program in seven different states. 

Needless to say, we have expanded our view of our go-to-market strategy. But we remain committed to the initial concept that more people in more places need the experience of an Enhanced Recovery protocol, including multimodal pain management and fewer unnecessary opioids. 

5. If you were to recommend one under-the-radar Austin spot to another founder for brainstorming or unwinding, where would it be and why?

Turnstile on Burnet. It’s versatile–it can be quiet or social, inside or outside, shade or sun. And they have both great coffee and a rotating and excellent beer selection.

6. If you could borrow one quality or skill from another Austin founder you admire, what would it be, and how would you apply it to your own business?

A long-time friend from our days at the University of Iowa happens to be an Austin-based founder as well. His name is Adam Flagg. Alongside his entrepreneurial “day job” at Collective Advisors, Adam launched the Austin Eras podcast.

I admire Adam’s curiosity as he records each podcast episode. He’s in no hurry to get to an end point. And the episodes never feel like they are a means to an end. It seems that pursuing curiosity for himself and the listeners is the end goal. 

We try to carve out time from a busy schedule at Goldfinch Health for journal article reviews and book clubs and Zoom “Golden Hours”. I would love to find more ways to do all of that and more.

“Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures.”