Product and Growth Ideas
A few ideas for expanding Hera’s model and reaching more patients. Not fully fleshed out, just some general thoughts.
I was basically my mother’s care manager while I was still in high school. Later, while working in a family medicine practice, I watched patients fall through the cracks between appointments, prescriptions, and paperwork. Usually, there was no dramatic failure. It was a bunch of small handoffs that nobody owned.
Many of the patients I worked with were older and had no one coordinating their care. I saw how quickly the burden piles up for the patient and, if they had someone helping them, the family member trying to hold everything together. A lot of patients had nobody at all.
I work in personal AI now, and honestly, it feels dystopian and disconnected from who I am. I miss working toward something with a deeper purpose and a visible impact on real people. I want to help change how care actually gets delivered, and Hera is one of the few companies I’ve seen doing that in a real way.
Hero in the appointment
Patients often forget what they wanted to ask or leave without fully understanding what happens next. Before the visit, the Hero could help prepare a short list of questions, join virtually, take notes, catch medication changes, and handle the follow-up afterward. This could be a paid add-on for families or covered by a payer for higher-risk patients.
Family care at a glance
Give families one simple page showing upcoming appointments, current medications, recent changes, and what still needs to get done. It should take 30 seconds to understand what is happening, without digging through long notes or calling the Hero for an update.
Benefits and affordability
Hera could check every patient for programs that might lower their costs or make daily life easier, including Medicaid, Medicare Savings Programs, prescription assistance, transportation, food, and utility support. The Hero could help with the paperwork and keep checking programs that temporarily run out of funding.
Medicare Advantage partnerships
Hera currently works with Original Medicare, which excludes a huge part of the market. In 2026, 35.2 million people, or 55% of eligible Medicare beneficiaries, are enrolled in Medicare Advantage. I would start with one plan or value-based provider group and track whether Hera improves follow-up and keeps patients out of the hospital. If it works, Hera gets access to millions more patients and the plan gets a service that saves money.
Local medical sales reps
Healthcare is still relationship-driven. I would hire local reps to regularly visit primary care offices, geriatricians, hospital discharge teams, home-health agencies, senior communities, and elder-law firms. Each rep would own a territory, and every referred patient would hear from Hera within 24 hours. If clinicians trust the rep and see that Hera follows through, they will keep sending patients.
Florida push
I would start around The Villages and the surrounding counties. There are a ton of older adults concentrated in one area, so a small local team could repeatedly visit the same practices, hospitals, and senior communities. Hera could figure out what works in one market, then take that playbook elsewhere in Florida.
Post-discharge and rural partnerships
The weeks after a hospital discharge are when families suddenly have to manage new medications, appointments, transportation, and home care. Hera could partner with hospitals to manage the first 30 days and make sure those things actually happen. Rural-health funding, about $10 billion a year nationally, also creates an opening to work with hospitals and clinics that already have money set aside to improve access and reduce readmissions.
- Growth and operations. I have built growth systems, managed vendor and cloud relationships, and onboarded users directly. I could help launch and operate a Florida pilot on the ground. I have also worked with patients and clinicians as early as high school.
- Work on product. At Sentience, I have shipped production code and could prototype the family dashboard or benefits engine quickly, at least as spikes.
- Navigate affordability. I built Patient Assistance Lookup Chat, an AI tool that helps patients find copay cards, patient assistance programs, and lower-cost pharmacy options. No Patient Left Behind adopted it.
- Handle compliance. I led SOC 2 readiness at Sentience and understand the security, privacy, and operational work required for payer and health-system partnerships.
- Measure outcomes properly. Three years of cancer immunology research and preclinical work at Capstan Therapeutics taught me how to frame answerable questions, design studies, and evaluate outcomes. I would apply that rigor to readmissions, completed follow-ups, care gaps, and patient retention.
- Work with clinicians and patients. I worked as a medical scribe in a family medicine practice with a large geriatric population. I have also navigated complex care and medication affordability for my own family and grandparents.