Our mission

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.

Erik has dedicated his life’s work to influencing the patient journey while improving and simplifying the clinician experience and supporting new reimbursement models. In his role at Ursa Health, he promotes solution enhancement and client engagement through analytic insights and strategic thought leadership.  

In his trajectory from a clinical pharmacy specialist to a leader in clinical transformation, Erik has come to excel in finding common ground and building collaborative relationships. He has held clinical operations and clinical transformation leadership roles supporting the strategic development of three highly respected yet diverse U.S. healthcare organizations: Highmark Health, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (OSUWMC), and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). Results include the delivery of new standards of care, virtual and traditional care models enhancements (e.g., addressing nation’s opioid epidemic), tech-enabled clinical support frameworks, elevated IT steering and governance, and multimillion-dollar efficiencies. Most recently, he led a cross-functional team in simplifying and automating prior authorization in a “pay-vider" enterprise founded on clinical interoperability. 

Erik’s clinical roots began at the bedside with a pharmacy practice residency at OSUWMC, followed by a specialty practice pharmacy residency in cardiology at UPMC. He was an integral part of Cardiac Surgery and Critical Care multidisciplinary teams and their strategic developments at OSUWMC. As a highly active clinical educator of nurses, pharmacists, physicians, respiratory therapists, and trainees, he has authored more than 40 publications and is a regular speaker at regional and national events. Erik holds a BSc in biology from Marshall University, a PharmD from West Virginia University, and an MBA from The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business.

Colin is responsible for advanced analytics at Ursa Health, which covers any method used to discover information in the data, such as visualizations, statistical models, and machine learning algorithms. Ursa Studio has several built-in applications to facilitate this discovery process, and part of Colin’s job is to help create and maintain these tools.

Before joining Ursa, Colin worked in the energy industry as a data scientist. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Reed College, where he was Phi Beta Kappa, and a Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Washington, where he wrote his dissertation on models of human causal learning.

As director of technical services, John serves as a technical resource for clients during their implementation of the Ursa Health Platform. He has extensive experience in data interoperability and data modeling, having spent seven years with the Advisory Board, a research think tank. He first worked with the company’s business intelligence suite of tools, creating and perfecting algorithms and focusing on real-time data collection via HL7 data interfaces. Then, he served as the integration engineer for the company’s population health workflow tool, focusing on claims, EMR, and more real-time data integrations. In his final role with the company, he worked in the data acquisition services group, an implementation team that worked across the product portfolio. 

Before joining the Advisory Board, John worked for Medical Present Value, a healthcare claims analysis company, as well as Epic, where he was a technical services engineer working on an enterprise master patient index product. He holds a BS in mathematics and a BA in economics from the University of Texas at Austin.

Tyler has spent the majority of his career in healthcare technology, accumulating experience across payer, provider, and vendor organizations. At Ursa Health, he supports Ursa customers in their pursuit of transformative innovation by creating strong and sustainable processes that enable easy and effective utilization of the company’s products and services. He is most passionate about delivering value and working with customers to foster quick and impactful business, operational, and technical problem-solving.

Before joining Ursa, Tyler worked for Redox, where he helped lead technology adoption for its healthcare interoperability platform and supported digital health solutions in integrating their products with core clinical and operational systems. He also spent two years as director of customer success at Apervita, a healthcare analytics company, where he created a framework for customer onboarding and management while also directly owning its largest clients. There, he supported an enterprise quality management and improvement program for a large integrated health system, which included a successful regulatory submission for over 15,000 providers. In addition to these experiences, Tyler worked at UnitedHealth Group as a product owner for its payment applications, specializing in claims payment and overpayment recovery, as well as implemented EHR software across the United States with MEDITECH. He holds a BS in business management and international business from Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Mary Lou has 13 years of experience in healthcare data integration, reporting, and analytics. As director of integrations, she serves as a technical resource for clients during their implementation of Ursa Studio as well as supports ongoing operations with existing clients. Most recently, she was director of data and reporting at Aspire Healthcare, the nation's largest home-based palliative care company, where she first led the company’s data integration team and then assumed oversight for the business intelligence team.

Before joining Aspire Healthcare, Mary Lou worked for Healthways, a population health and well-being company, where she was a data services manager leading the data implementation and integration teams. She holds a BS in business administration, marketing, from Tennessee Technological University.

Throughout his career, Ryan's focus has been on eliminating confusion from complexity, for clients and students alike. From managing multimillion-dollar development and implementation projects to cleansing raw data, his analytics experience spans the full process from data collection to presentation. Ryan began his career as consultant with Deloitte responding to forensic analytics needs arising from major commercial litigation as well as federal investigations. He has since worked in healthcare analytics, building deep experience in quality improvement at Fresenius Medical Care, the nation's largest provider of kidney care services.

Ryan holds a BA in management and human relations from Trevecca Nazarene University and an MA in conflict management from Lipscomb University, where he also spent several years as an adjunct professor. He currently serves on the board of Wild Heart Meditation Center and has taught insight meditation from Petite-Riviere-de-Nippes, Haiti, to his hometown of Nashville.

In his DevOps role at Ursa Health, Rob has diverse responsibilities, ranging from customer support to technical operations, including privacy and security. He spent 10 years in atmospheric science research at Colorado State University, primarily in a Fortran/Python programmer role, and has held general programming positions at both HP and Sun Microsystems/Oracle. Rob holds a BS degree in computer science from Colorado State University.