I learned systems by watching what happens when they fail people.

I started in Wards 7 and 8 in Washington, D.C., working in HIV and STI testing, treatment access, prevention, counseling, and community health education. That is where I first learned that access is not an abstract systems problem. A broken handoff, confusing process, or missing resource changes whether a real person gets care.

At Mount Sinai, in addiction medicine, I saw the same truth from inside a large health system. Scheduling, referrals, documentation, medication access, care coordination, provider capacity — every operational decision had a human consequence. I kept getting pulled toward the places where the workflow itself needed to change.

That is what took me deeper into implementation, analytics, product thinking, and eventually AI systems. Not because I wanted to move away from healthcare, but because I wanted more leverage over the systems shaping it.

Now I work at the boundary between operating reality and technology. I am most useful when the problem is messy, the answer is not obvious, and someone needs to move from “we know this is broken” to a system that works differently.