Mochi Health started with a question. “Where do patients drop out of care, and how do you bring them back?”
That was the thought that started Myra Ahmad’s founding journey. The answer she came up with? An argument about the structure of healthcare itself.
Ahmad came to that question through research and not through entrepreneurship. After earning her MD from the University of Washington School of Medicine and holding research positions at MIT and UCSF, she spent a lot of time studying how obesity care is actually delivered.
The pattern she kept finding was that obese patients were bouncing between bariatric surgeons, endocrinologists, and primary care providers, and none of them were actually treating the underlying disease. There was concern. Not coordination.
A system built around billing codes
Ahmad’s diagnosis of why this is happening is blunt. “Our healthcare system is optimized for billing codes rather than clinical outcomes,” she told Women of Wearables in April 2026.
“Patients bounce from specialist to specialist, but no one seems to ‘own’ their care.” The problem is not bad doctors, but misaligned incentives.
When providers are paid based on the number of billable encounters rather than whether a patient actually improves or remains in treatment, the system has no built-in incentive to keep that patient connected to a single, accountable relationship over time.
The tricky thing is that obesity is rarely a standalone diagnosis. It often concerns metabolic, hormonal and cardiovascular problems that cross specialisms.
A patient referred from one practice to another may end up being treated in fragments, with each visit treating a piece of the picture.
The result is the failure pattern that Ahmad has documented for years, in which patients start treatment, lose track, and withdraw.
Continuity as a product
Mochi, which Ahmad founded in San Francisco in 2022, was built in response to that fragmentation.
She describes it not as just another prescription telehealth service, but as a three-sided marketplace that connects patients, providers and independent pharmacies on one platform.
Patients choose their own provider and pharmacy. Doctors practice without the intervention that Ahmad associates with the conventional system. Pharmacies are now plugging in to Mochi’s software for transparent processing.
The connective tissue is the patient-provider relationship, structured around long-term continuity rather than one-off encounters.
In practice, this means that patients keep the same provider as their needs change and have 24-hour access to that care team, including nutritionists and dietitians.
Ahmad calls the model the “discovery layer of healthcare,” a place where patients can find a provider they trust and stay with them, with more than 2,000 medications available on transparent prices.
The term she increasingly uses for the destination is the “primary care center”: a single trust that allows a patient to manage the full range of his or her health, rather than having it reassembled into disconnected practices.
Notably, Ahmad has said that the expansion beyond weight loss was not the original plan. Patients asked their Mochi providers to manage more of their care, and providers welcomed the chance to offer more than just weight-loss treatments, so the platform grew to meet that demand.
While the basic insight was that patients are falling out of care in the gap between specialists, Ahmad says the company’s growth into adjacent areas is those same patients asking to keep their care in one place.
Why continuity is most important for women
Ahmad is clear that continuity is not an abstract virtue, but a practical necessity for the patients Mochi most often serves.
Many arrive for weight management while also navigating conditions like PCOSperimenopause or fertility problems, problems that are themselves linked and poorly served by episodic, specialist-by-specialist care.
“For women managing their obesity, as well as additional health complications such as PCOS, perimenopause or fertility issues, continuity of care is essential,” she says.
A model where a patient stays with one trusted provider for all of these needs, she says, is simply what good care for these patients should always have looked like.
The data problem behind the healthcare problem
Getting patients back into care, Ahmad argues, also requires solving a logistical problem. The information a patient should be following doesn’t. “Most providers get labs from separate systems that never talk to each other,” she has said.
Fragmentation makes truly individualized medicine difficult because no one looks at the entire file at once.
Mochi’s answer is to integrate those pieces. Ahmad said the company is working to give patients and caregivers access to laboratory tests that feed directly into the care plan, so that labs, medications, the provider relationship and the treatment itself are in one connected system.
The goal is less about novelty than closure. Removing the seams where a patient’s information, and therefore the patient, tends to be lost.
An unfinished dissertation
It would be fair to note that the continuity model is not without open questions. Keeping patients engaged long-term is difficult for any provider, both in and outside of telehealth, and a platform that expands to many conditions rises to the challenge of maintaining quality and coordination across them.
Continuity is easier to design than to guarantee. Ahmad’s argument is not that Mochi has solved the problem, but that the conventional system is structured in such a way that it is virtually impossible to solve the problem, and that building around continuity from the beginning is the fairest place to start.
What is consistent is the through line from the original question to the business that emerged from it. Ahmad sought to understand where patients fall out of care and concluded that the answer lay in architecture, in incentives that reward encounters over outcomes, and in data that never quite follows the person they describe.
According to her, bringing patients back means rebuilding the relationship in the center: one provider, one connected file, one place for the patient to return.
Whether that vision is scalable is a question that will be answered in the coming years. The clarity of the thesis, which can be traced back from a research question to half a million patients, is already known.
