I grew up wanting to work in finance, studied economics at the University of Vermont, and graduated fully intending to move to New York. Instead I moved to France.
I lived in Antibes, Paris, and Nantes for several years, including a year supporting the acquisition of a French shoe manufacturer, which confirmed that finance wasn't for me. What I found instead was theater. I studied with alumni of the Actors Studio in Paris, performed in productions of Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and eventually moved to Chicago to pursue acting seriously. Over six years I worked with Victory Gardens, Court Theater, Lookingglass, American Theater Company, and Bailiwick, earning a Joseph Jefferson Citation for Actor in a Leading Role for my portrayal of Alan Strang in Equus. I took a big turn from acting to medicine (and then tech), but I hope one day to bring a Sam Shepard theater and film festival to Winthrop, Washington, where I have a home.
What ended my acting chapter was a wilderness medicine course: a NOLS trip in northern British Columbia that made me curious about medicine in austere environments. I got certified as a Wilderness First Responder in Utah's Wasatch Mountains, and the following summer, sitting on a rock in Glacier National Park on a solo bicycle ride from Chicago to Seattle, I decided to become a doctor.
I enrolled at the University of Washington School of Medicine in 2001, drawn to family medicine for its breadth and what I'd call its activist tendencies. It's the specialty most willing to ask uncomfortable questions about whether the system is actually serving patients, families, and communities. During my residency I had an outpatient clinic at Seattle-King County Public Health, where it became clear that what my patients needed most was social work, not medicine. The system wasn't built for that, so they got me instead. That gap between what people need and what systems deliver has driven my work ever since.
I joined Group Health Cooperative in 2008, practicing full-spectrum family medicine: clinic, obstetrics, pediatrics, home visits, the whole range. Within a year I was clinic chief (I was the only one willing to do it) during an ambitious implementation of the patient-centered medical home model, drawing on Group Health's pioneering work and applying lean process improvement methods across the team.
The work I'm most proud of from that era was a system-wide chronic disease management initiative that put RNs and clinical pharmacists at the center of care delivery, using protocol-supported, treat-to-target approaches and health coaching designed to build patient self-management and agency. It just worked. Seeing patients develop genuine capacity to understand and influence their own health trajectories was, and remains, a formative insight for everything I've done since.
I went on to a process improvement fellowship, then spent my final six years at Group Health as Medical Director of Innovation, an internal startup studio. I built CareClinics in partnership with Bartell Drugs; CareChat, a direct-to-clinician chat model with over 70% same-encounter resolution; Contour, a home-based adaptive care model for complex patients (sometimes called hotspotting); and ultimately a Primary Care model that wove these elements together with a health coaching relationship at the center.
The work I can't quite talk about
In 2019, Apple recruited me to join its health team, and I've been there since. I can't say much about the specifics — the work is appropriately confidential — but I can describe the framework that animates it, because it connects directly to everything I built before.
My core conviction is this: the US healthcare system is defined by information asymmetry and structural power in favor of the care system, at the expense of patients. The chronic disease management work at Group Health showed me that when you genuinely shift agency and self-efficacy toward patients, outcomes improve and the relationship between patient and clinician becomes something closer to a partnership.
At Apple, I think about that challenge at a scale that wasn't previously possible. My focus is on a three-part foundation: first, building a safe, private container in which people can actually engage with their own health; second, enabling genuine self-efficacy, helping people understand and act on their own data; and third, supporting more productive relationships between patients and their care teams, where patients arrive informed, with tools for communication and advocacy. AI is what makes the third part newly achievable at scale.
I came to medicine through theater, wilderness, and a very long bicycle ride. I stayed because the gap between what people need and what systems offer turned out to be large enough to spend a career exploring.