When my family moved from Canada to the US and then to the Bay Area, my Dad tasked me with figuring out how to run his new primary care medical practice. I started helping when I was 13. The summer when I was 16, I took over as office manager — coding, sending appointment reminders, greeting patients, and negotiating with health plans. Through the trust he placed in me, I learned the good and bad of our healthcare sector. I saw the power of trust in physician-patient relationships, the value of a doctor who could help a family navigate some of the hardest medical choices.
I saw first-hand how our healthcare system and health IT were tearing away at that dynamic. And how physicians increasingly felt healthcare had lost trust in them, too. It sparked in me a lifelong passion for working to fix the system. I went to college, then grad school, and started on a path toward founding Elation Health and the more I learned, the more I realized the important lessons I already knew from the front office. Even all these years later and as CEO of Elation, I continue to help with our family medical practice and see how personalized care helps people.