Our mission
Ursa's leadership
As a physician executive for UCLA Health’s ACO, Robin developed and led the enterprise-wide care transformation infrastructure, which still includes hundreds of clinicians, all specialties and sites of care, and dozens of system redesign projects. This infrastructure enables the ACO to achieve its financial and clinical goals, has received national attention, and is a model for other delivery systems. These experiences taught Robin about the critical role of information in successful transformation, from the IT requirements necessary to synthesize data to the preparation of insights that activate clinicians and others. Robin co-founded Ursa Health with a vision that the spread of trusted information can unlock successful, authentic innovation for healthcare organizations.
Robin is a board-certified internist and has published broadly on medical home transformation, quality measurement programs, and population health delivery systems. He received his medical degree from Cornell University and completed his residency in internal medicine at UCLA Medical Center. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree in the science of health services from the UCLA School of Public Health. He also completed the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at UCLA/RAND.
Andy is a co-founder and chief product officer of Ursa Health. Over the course of a 20-year career in technology and healthcare, he has held positions on both the supply and demand side of data and analytics. He has worked for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the RAND Corporation, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and UCLA Health, in roles ranging from software and database developer to policy analyst and health services researcher.
Andy has taught courses on improvement methods to physician and nurse leaders in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, as well as published a number of papers in the peer-reviewed literature, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. He holds a master’s degree in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School and a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Harvard University.
Before joining Ursa Health, Steve was head of development at xTuple, the world's #1 open-source ERP software company, managing a diverse development team that spanned four continents. Before that, he founded Speak Logistics, a tech startup borne out of his experience in the transportation industry, which introduced the user-friendly and modern sensibilities of the consumer Internet into the enterprise space. His professional passions include JavaScript, open-source software, continuous integration, and scalable code.
Steve holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Harvard University and an MBA from William and Mary. He is a frequent speaker on subjects such as JavaScript, modular architecture, git, open source, and asynchronous programming.
Caroline is responsible for supporting Ursa Health’s general operations and ensuring the smooth functioning of its administrative processes. She also manages the company's vendor relationships, ensuring best-in-class services so the Ursa team can work efficiently and focus on supporting clients. In addition, Caroline is responsible for the company's privacy policies and procedures, working in partnership with the security team.
Before joining Ursa, Caroline was vice president of partnerships for Aspire Health, the nation’s largest home-based palliative care company, where she was the business and operations liaison between the Aspire clinical team and health plans, provider groups, accountable care organizations, and other types of organizations. Before transitioning to a partnerships role, she was senior director of clinical operations, helping expand Aspire’s clinical care services across the country.
Caroline’s background is in supply chain management, which aids in her role at Ursa by streamlining process improvement. She holds a BS in business administration from the University of Tennessee.
Sandy has more than three decades of experience in marketing strategy, program delivery, and content development, with a focus on healthcare information technology. She formerly led marketing at Cotiviti, joining the company when it was Verisk Health and helping guide it through two major rebranding initiatives. Before Cotiviti, Sandy led communications and content marketing at Healthways, a population health and well-being company, where she helped the company gain visibility for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a measure of global well-being in individuals and populations. She also held senior marketing positions at McKesson Health Solutions and ikaSystems.
Sandy developed diverse marketing skills over the eight years she spent at Aria Marketing, an integrated marketing agency serving healthcare information technology clients. Before her marketing career, she focused on content development, with positions at the IT consultancies Gartner and IDC and at the research organizations Shriners Burns Institute, Harvard Medical School, and Eastern Research Group. She holds a BA in English from Amherst College and is Pragmatic Institute level 4 certified.
Aaron oversees the development and delivery of all services to Ursa Health customers. His entire career has been in the healthcare industry in matrixed roles spanning strategy, operations, and analytics.
Before joining Ursa, Aaron was director of operations at Contessa Health, where he worked with payers, hospital systems, and ancillary providers to deploy the clinical services and financial operations to provide patients with the essential elements of inpatient-level care directly in the home under a bundled payment. Prior to Contessa, Aaron served as the director of strategic operations at Aspire Health, a national home-based palliative care provider in the country overseeing central analytics for clinical resource planning and provider relations teams. In addition, he was on the population health team at The Advisory Board Company, where he worked with large health systems and accountable care organizations on their population health strategies surrounding data integrations and care management deployment. Aaron holds a BA in sociology from SUNY Geneseo.
The Ursa Health story
We come from the field of continuous quality improvement, which requires a gritty, action-oriented mentality. You have to be comfortable “failing toward progress,” understanding that you must define a change, assess its impact, and then use that feedback to design the next version of the change. And you may need to do this multiple times—bringing all those people who are most familiar with the problem along for the ride—before you come to the right solution. This is a philosophy and methodology we drew upon in redesigning systems of clinical care, but it has deep roots in other industries as well—one of the most famous examples being the Toyota Production System. When an organization is trying to improve the performance of a system, we believe this iterative process is mandatory.
Before we formed Ursa Health, when we were trying to generate the analytics necessary to apply this methodology in a complex, integrated health system, we had a revelation. When we prepared the data to answer the organization’s many complex questions, we took the same gritty, action-oriented approach. We brought together the clinical teams with the data teams. We set up feedback systems and went through multiple iterations. And it worked.
We learned a few other lessons along the way. Because healthcare is complex, clinical and business users may not actually know what question they need answered from the outset, and their clarity is greatly enhanced through this iterative process. And, often, data programmers are the ones who surface incompleteness or patterns in the data that inform the “right” definition of the question. Conversely, data professionals can’t always anticipate the messiness of healthcare data from the outset. Over the course of preparing the data, they will need to make decisions about how to interpret fields from source systems or inclusion/exclusion criteria for the analysis, and these are best informed by the clinician/business end user. Together, each helps the other succeed in their respective domains through a process that involves creating a rough, first pass at an analysis (e.g., the list of eligible cases or of adverse outcomes), assessing for adequacy (e.g., false positives), adapting the logic based on the feedback, and repeating. At the end of the cycle is knowledge that the organization can trust to guide innovation initiatives.
Our breakthroughs were a set of best practices and programming techniques that elevated the entire innovation team. Analytics consumers were engaged in validating the data transformation decisions, and analytics generators were freed up to facilitate this tight-knit collaboration. We created an organized approach to forming the data and SQL transformation code into reusable components, with each hard-earned asset saved centrally and usable in future reports. Our development team had no single solution to facilitate this adaptive approach. Instead, we patched together different tools, saved common logic in shared folders, maintained the ETL dependency manually in spreadsheets, and set up the analytic output into the health system’s visualization tools. It worked, but not without a lot of muscle and additional time.
That was the genesis of Ursa Health and our fully no-code analytics development platform. We wanted to make it easier for people with good ideas to bring them to fruition.
Interested in our mission?
Think you might want to join the Ursa team? We don't blame you! It's exciting to come to work here every day, knowing you're part of a movement to help the U.S. healthcare system work a little better for all of us.
Learn more about what it's like to work at Ursa here, or consider subscribing to our News & Insights blog here.