Three ventures, three different problems.

UPMC had spent more than a decade developing a clinically effective, multidisciplinary approach to chronic pain care, supported by 11 operating clinics and longitudinal data from approximately 40,000 patients. But the model remained constrained by in-person delivery, specialist capacity, and health-system complexity. Research with 35 primary-care physicians and nearly 1,000 qualified patient respondents showed that PCPs did not need another recommendation tool, they needed a trusted partner to assume responsibility for coordinating complex pain care.

I designed the venture thesis and business architecture, spanning the clinical model, enterprise distribution, unit economics, data strategy, product roadmap, and milestone-based financing.

The key decision was to build a virtual-first, clinician-led care management business, not another standalone clinical tool. By taking responsibility for medication management, care planning, and coordination, the venture could solve the PCP's real problem, establish trust, and generate outcomes data through care delivery.

That created a deliberate path from services to clinical intelligence to value-based care: prove the model through delivery, use UPMC's longitudinal evidence and new real-world data to build differentiated decision support, and translate demonstrated clinical and cost outcomes into partnerships with health systems and payers.

UPMC Enterprises and an external venture-building partner formed the venture and recruited the founding leadership team to build and operate the business.

Once the CEO and product leadership were in place, my role shifted from architect to strategic advisor. I supported the leadership team on enterprise positioning, partnership structures, data and research agreements, investment milestones, and the deal frameworks required to align UPMC, the venture partner, and the new company.

The venture launched first within UPMC, securing single-signature access to all UPMC PCP practices (100+ sites) through its initial enterprise relationship, and has since expanded to multiple additional enterprise health-system clients. A structured analysis of approximately 40,000 UPMC patients also created an evidence base around reduced avoidable utilization and strengthened the company's commercial credibility.

Cognitive decline was being identified too late. Primary care teams lacked a scalable way to screen and stratify patients, specialists were already capacity-constrained, and existing digital tools largely replicated paper assessments without fixing the surrounding workflow.

The bet was that the real opportunity was not another assessment tool, but an integrated cognitive care platform connecting early detection, clinical interpretation, care planning, reimbursement, and longitudinal monitoring. The harder challenge was making that platform work inside a complex academic health system, earning clinical trust while navigating compliance, integration, economics, and frontline adoption.

I recommended investing in and integrating an external platform rather than building internally or treating it as a conventional vendor procurement. Its defensibility came from validated clinical science and demonstrated workflow adoption, capabilities that would have taken years to reproduce.

I then designed a staged path to reduce risk and build conviction: validate the highest-risk assumptions through a formally governed study, establish an initial perioperative use case, resolve enterprise security and compliance requirements, integrate the platform into Epic, and expand through the primary-care Annual Wellness Visit workflow. I also helped shape its enterprise positioning, pricing model, and product strategy as the relationship evolved from vendor evaluation to strategic partnership.

The thesis led to an initial investment and subsequent participation across multiple financing rounds, creating a significant minority position and board-level influence. The platform became Epic-integrated and expanded from a focused clinical deployment into primary-care workflows across UPMC.

The streamlined cognitive care workflow at UPMC reduced provider onboarding time by approximately 90% and achieved denial rates of ~2%. Because patients moving through the integrated pathway already met medical necessity for cognitive testing, fixing the workflow unlocked an estimated $3-6M/yr in reimbursement for care UPMC was already providing. An initial rollout captured $400K+ of that in FY25, an early proof point the company has continued to scale against. The company also grew to hundreds of practices and 100K+ annual assessments enterprise-wide.

The arrival of disease-modifying Alzheimer's therapies further validated the original thesis: early cognitive identification had become not only a workflow improvement, but essential infrastructure for determining which patients could access a new category of treatment.

A temporary telehealth tool scheduled for wind-down had solved a problem the major platforms had overlooked: the friction involved in initiating and routing an urgent specialist consult. The opportunity was to turn that insight into a configurable platform for extending specialist capacity across hospitals.

I led the commercialization strategy in close partnership with product, engineering, clinical, and operations leaders. We focused the platform on the highest-value service lines, built toward a configurable enterprise foundation, and deferred capabilities that did not strengthen the core workflow. When standalone growth proved constrained, I led the shift to a strategic-partnership model and helped shape the acquirer's transaction and co-development framework.

The platform expanded across six service lines and 30+ UPMC locations, reduced specialist connection time to under two minutes, and nearly tripled consults handled per specialist, measured before and after, without adding specialist headcount, while supporting more than 40,000 consults.

It was acquired by a strategic acquirer in 2024 through a transaction that also included a strategic UPMC investment and an 18-month co-development relationship. I moved from product and commercialization leadership into deal architecture, followed by governance and escalation as the partner teams took over integration and scale.