Our mission
Formed by clinical, IT, and healthcare industry veterans dedicated to improving quality and reducing waste in the U.S. healthcare system, Ursa Health is the company behind Ursa Studio, healthcare’s pioneering analytics development platform. Our focus: transforming analytics so you can transform healthcare.
Ursa Health'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.
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
Healthcare is awash in data and reporting requirements yet few performance improvement or innovation success stories building off of those requirements. Older quality measurement programs contribute more frustration than actual clinical progress. Newer interoperability standards have eased the challenges inherent in data exchange, but few organizations have succeeded in leveraging these standards to support individual patient care.
This might give the impression that our industry is not particularly amenable to using data or already saturated with information, but the opposite is true: Organizations, teams, and individuals are practically starving for meaningful feedback. Complicated analytics are the norm, obscuring the path to better healthcare for all.
Clinicians don’t know which of their approaches yield the best outcomes. Health plans don’t know which providers or programs offer the greatest value. Partners can’t tell whether their partnerships are driving clinical improvement or financial ROI. Care decisions are made in isolation and without complete information. No wonder so much variation exists and transformational change is so difficult.
We experienced this problem firsthand in a complex, integrated health system. And we solved it with a gritty, action-oriented approach. We brought together clinical teams with data teams to define a change, assess its impact, and then use that feedback to design the next version of the change. Sometimes we needed multiple iterations, and that was okay — we were comfortable “failing toward progress.” It worked, but not without a lot of muscle and time.
That was the genesis of Ursa Studio, our fully no-code analytics development platform. We wanted to enable this collaborative, iterative process, but have it proceed much more smoothly and efficiently.
Transparency was the first critical goal, so those in need of information could see how the analytics were constructed and adjustments could be made more quickly, which led us to embrace a no-code approach. We also wanted a toolkit with breadth, to avoid the problems and costs associated with cobbling together a host of solutions across all the steps of the data journey. And then we recognized the importance of immediacy, that organizations just couldn’t wait forever to get insights from their data, so we built our own data model, reference library, and foundational measure sets — once again, keeping their makeup transparent and easily localized.
Ursa Studio is the embodiment and propagator of a fresh approach to healthcare data analytics, one that explodes the stale approaches and false dilemmas that have held the industry back. At Ursa Health, we’re transforming analytics so you can transform healthcare.
Meet the team
Behind every great product is an equally great team, made up of people who prioritize game-changing results for clients and the right kind of workplace for employees. We understand that means keeping a critical eye on what we do, how we do it, and why we do it, and being open to feedback and change at every step. Read more about our team on our blog, where each colleague—including our founders—shares more about their background and role at Ursa Health as well as what makes them tick.
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.