Prior to working with Vega Health directly, I remember the early days of medical school where Mark (Sendak) and I would ideate about where and how computation, data driven decisions and scalable engineering would fit in healthcare. He hadn’t started Vega Health yet, but those initial conversations about the intersection of technology and healthcare eventually led us both to work on that same thing together, years later.
My official journey with Vega Health started this summer with the strategy and implementation team and gradually pivoted across several core groups in the business – including engineering, human resources, data, and at times, with the CEO, Mark, himself.
In startups, pivoting can be perceived as negative, and founders may ostensibly seem like they’re abandoning a direction before it’s had enough time to develop. To me, pivoting isn’t negative. In my experience, pivoting with purpose has allowed me to best meet the needs of the moment while building a more comprehensive foundation for my work. Pivoting with purpose is something startups need to do, and my time at Vega Health has shown me how to do it well.
During my first few weeks at Vega Health, I focused on our team’s active deployments in three key ways: understanding the operational and strategic pain points facing our health system and developer partners, evaluating the value delivered by existing models versus Vega Health’s models, and identifying where our implementations enabled their workflows in ways that produced meaningful clinical benefit. I grounded each of these in direct conversations with implementation team and partners, using their feedback to shape which pain points and use cases we prioritized.
Practically, this involved two main efforts. First, I developed competitor roadmaps of existing capabilities centered on our use cases and researched the broader competitive landscape of other solutions in the market. Second, I attended leading industry and academic conferences centered on novel technical research and its clinical utility in real-world settings and combined those insights with client perspectives to determine how robust technical solutions could close critical gaps preventing these solutions from being useful in practice. These gaps included health administration buy-in, staff shortages, and how patients could be best prioritized based on the many factors providers use for triage.
As I continued at Vega Health, I pivoted to working with the internal operations team to help optimize the organization's people-infrastructure. I came to appreciate how manual documentation and HR processes were becoming increasingly complex as the team and business scaled, adding operational nuances at every turn. To address this, I built an AI-driven HR agent, designed to reduce the HR team's repetitive workload, give employees faster self-serve answers, and cut down on duplicate or misrouted requests. By automating routine questions and requests, the bot gave employees near-instant answers and let HR redirect their time toward more strategic growth, hiring and operational work.
Finally, I got glimpses of Vega Health’s heartbeat by shadowing investor meetings with our founder, Mark. It gave me a deeper appreciation for the fact that Vega Heath is building solutions for problems most hospital systems do not fully recognize they have yet. That early-mover position made these conversations especially nuanced: we had to translate what Vega Health’s success meant practically to investors, all while staying grounded in what matters to our customers. Getting this right will pay off: it will build sticky contracts, solidify relationships, and grow trust with emerging players across all sides of the field, something that Vega Health has prioritized doing so consistently.
My journey at Vega Health ironically mirrors my present-day journey as a dual degree medical-engineering student and the core values I hope to embody. The team at Vega Health has personified the mantra I hold dear: pivoting with purpose. That means staying adaptable when the problem, the approach, or the people involved shift, and holding onto the humility to keep learning. It's a value I hope to carry into my career: building solutions that don't just work on paper, but genuinely meet the people, patients and providers, on the other end of them.
