It started with a question. Not a pitch deck question. A clinical one. “Where do patients actually fall out of care, and how on earth do you bring them back?”
Myra Ahmad didn’t start this path chasing a startup. She was digging into the mechanics of obesity care, fresh from an MD at the University of Washington and stints at MIT and UCSF. What she found wasn’t a lack of doctors. It was a lack of glue.
Patients bounced between bariatric surgeons and endocrinologists and primary care PPs. Nobody was treating the disease. Just the symptoms. In isolation.
The Billing Trap
Ahmad’s diagnosis is blunt. The system is rigged.
“Our healthcare system is optimized for billing codes, not clinical outcomes,” she said in April 2021 (wait, 2026? The prompt says 2026, I’ll stick to the prompt’s date or general time. Prompt says April 2026). Okay, April 2026 interview with Women of Wearables.
Providers get paid for encounters. Not improvements. So why would they keep a patient in long-term management when a quick specialist consult pays better? The incentive is broken. Obesity is messy. It hits the metabolism, the hormones, the heart. A fragmented system sees parts, not the person. You end up treated in shards. Then you drop out.
Continuity Is The Product
Enter Mochi Health. Founded in SF in 2022.
It’s not another script mill. Ahmad calls it a three-sided marketplace. Patients. Providers. Independent pharmacies. All on one platform.
Patients choose their own provider. They choose their pharmacy.
No middleman interference for clinicians. No opacity for drug prices. Over 2,000 meds available, transparently priced. The goal? The “primary care home.” A single trusted relationship that follows the patient. Not just for weight loss, though that’s where people come from. They asked for more. Mochi gave it to them.
Ahmad calls it the discovery layer of healthcare. Find your person. Stick with them. Keep the nutritionist on the team too. Around-the-clock access.
Why Women Need This
Continuity isn’t just nice. For the women Mochi serves, it’s survival.
They don’t just come in for weight. They’re wrestling with PCOS. Perimenopause. Fertility struggles. These aren’t silos. They overlap. A fragmented specialist approach fails here because it doesn’t connect the dots.
Having one provider who knows all of that context? That’s essential. Ahmad sees it as simply what care was always supposed to be. Good care. Whole care.
The Data Mess
You can’t fix the care without fixing the plumbing. Data doesn’t travel with the patient. Labs sit in silos that don’t talk to each other. How do you make individualized decisions when you can’t see the full picture?
Mochi is stitching it together. Lab results feed directly into the care plan. The medication history sits next to the provider notes. One system. One record. It removes the seams where information falls through the cracks. Where the patient disappears.
Is It Solvable?
It’s an unfinished thesis, sure. Keeping people engaged for years? Hard. Doing it across multiple chronic conditions? Even harder. Quality control scales poorly if you’re not careful.
But Ahmad isn’t claiming they’ve solved it. She’s arguing the current model makes solving it impossible. You can’t patch a hole in a sinking ship; you have to redesign the hull.
The original question still stands. Where do patients fall? In the gaps between the billing codes and the specialists. The answer isn’t a new drug. It’s architecture. One provider. One connected record. One place to land.
Will it scale? The next few years will tell. The idea is solid, though. Half a million patients have bought into it so far. Maybe that’s enough data.
