Startup Physicians

Translating Clinical Skills Into Startup Strategy with Dr. Rebecca Miksad

• Alison Curfman, M.D. • Season 1 • Episode 14

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This episode I’m joined by my friend and former co-consultant Dr. Rebecca Miksad. Rebecca is a powerhouse—Harvard-trained oncologist, health economist, startup executive, and now Chief Medical Officer at Color. We go deep into how she made the leap from academia to startups, how she navigated uncertainty and mentorship, and why your clinical skills are more transferable than you think.

If you're a physician who's even thinking about what else is possible beyond traditional medicine—this one’s for you. Rebecca shares how to talk about your skills in business terms, what it's really like working at a startup, and how to find your footing in a world that feels totally new. I promise you’ll walk away with a fresh dose of courage, clarity, and a few laugh-out-loud moments, too.

Dr. Rebecca Miksad is a physician-scientist and nationally recognized leader in oncology, healthtech, and data science. As Chief Medical Officer at Color Health, she leads clinical strategy for innovative cancer care solutions, including screening, diagnostics, and survivorship programs. Previously, she built the Strategic Affairs and Research teams at Flatiron Health, helping shape real-world data standards and FDA guidance. With over 100 scientific publications, Dr. Miksad continues to care for patients at Boston Medical Center, where she is an Associate Professor. She holds an MD from Cornell and an MPH from Harvard.

 

Episode Highlights:

[1:50] Rebecca shares her background in oncology, economics, and her “aha” moment discovering medical decision-making.
[4:26] We nerd out over early academic research and how her MPH training shaped her next career steps.
[6:00] Why her ideas were “too big for an R01”—and how that pushed her to explore other options.
[8:45] Her first leap into startups: Flatiron Health, cold networking, and convincing mentors it wasn’t a terrible idea.
[10:58] We dive into the reality of startup uncertainty, equity, and redefining mentorship.
[12:45] How to use LinkedIn (yes, even if you haven’t touched yours since residency) and why cold outreach really works.
[16:36] Breaking down “transferable skills” for physicians—what you actually bring to the table.
[19:50] Learning to speak tech: scrums, sprints, and agile product teams for docs new to startups.
[23:45] What’s a must-have vs. a nice-to-have in healthtech product design—and how to be that trusted clinical voice.
[27:32] Rebecca’s consulting phase: working with tiny startups and helping them decode the healthcare ecosystem.
[30:58] Our own mini-community of consulting docs and how peer support changed the game.
[33:22] Her current role as CMO at Color—and building a 50-state virtual cancer clinic to fight healthcare deserts.
[35:32] Virtual care, prevention, and the future of cancer treatment for working adults across the U.S.
[36:55] Final thoughts on building a meaningful career outside the traditional path—and doing it your own way.

 

Resources:

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, rate, and leave a review. Don’t forget to share this episode with fellow physicians who might be interested in startups. Together, we can shape the future of healthcare! See you next time.

Dr Rebecca Miksad:

The other thing I often tell physicians or any mentees when you're looking to change industries is to think about your transferable skills. On the surface, I think docs are often like, No, I've never done that. But actually, if you run a grant, if you've run a department, you've had that budget experience, and a lot of docs don't have direct people management in the sense of hiring and firing, but we manage fellows all the time. We manage medical students. We manage complex teams with nurses and other staff. So being a little bit creative about understanding how to translate those real life skills that you actually do have to those business terms, even if on the surface it doesn't seem automatically the same, our job is just to explain how it is exactly the same.

Alison Curfman:

Welcome to StartUp physicians. Please Like and follow our show to join our community of physicians who are re imagining healthcare delivery. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the startup physicians podcast. I'm your host, Dr, Allison Kirkman, and I'm thrilled to be joined today by my colleague and friend, Dr, Rebecca mixad, Hi, Rebecca, thanks for joining. Hey, Allison, so glad to be here. Awesome. Well, Rebecca and I crossed paths a little over a year ago when we were both doing some consulting and advising with startups, and I was immediately intrigued by her background and all of the work that she had done and and then now her work with a new startup. And I am so excited to talk about your story, Rebecca, and kind of what got you into this field, and what all the twists and turns might have been to get you here, and so I'd love to start out by having you just tell us a little bit about your background, your training and kind of how you got into this world.

Dr Rebecca Miksad:

Well, it was a great pleasure to meet you, Allison, and certainly, our collaborations have really helped land me where where I am. So thank you. And my goal for this podcast is really to help other docs realize that there's paths to all sorts of new and interesting things. Certainly going to med school back in the day, I didn't really think that there were other options. I thought I was locked in, and it's been so exciting to really have been able to create a different path. So you asked about my story. I'm a medical oncologist, and I thought I was going to be an academic, and I was for a while within the Harvard system, that I always knew in the back of my mind, I wanted to do something different, and that really you can find the start of that is that I did economics as an undergrad, not a traditional, yeah, before going into med school. So I've always been a numbers person, but I wasn't really quite sure how to bring that into medicine, from a sense of actually taking care of patients at an individual level and at a population level. And it seems so obvious now, in retrospect, my aha moment was walking into Milt Weinstein's medical decision making class at the School of Public Health. He is considered the grandfather of medical decision making. And here was the field that I always wanted to do, which was decision making in the setting of uncertainty, and how you can use quantitative analysis to talk about things that I cared about, that maybe were invisible to other folks, other policy makers, other other administrators and executives. So that was the aha moment for the type of career I was going to have. Where were you at that point? Were you in training or in school? Still? That was during fellowship. So I did med school and internal medicine residency in New York, which I published my first nerd paper, which was a Bayesian re analysis of three different lung cancer trials, which I was very proud. It took many, many rewrites actually get into a clinical journal this very at the time, esoteric, statistical

Alison Curfman:

congratulations. I have some like, bizarre publications on my that I spent a ton of time and analysis on in my in my history. And I'm like, Yeah, that. I don't know how much that relates to what I do now, but it was good experience. So your expert in paci and analysis, and then you were, you getting your MPH, like during fellowship, during fellowship, I was lucky to be on a NIH training grant. I can't remember what, what type of grant it was, but it was the program and cancer outcomes research.

Dr Rebecca Miksad:

Training, okay, being a Farber, which included an MPH. So that spanned last year my fellowship, in the first year of being on faculty. Okay, so what happened after that? So you got your MPH, finished fellowship, and then started a more traditional career. I had a more traditional career. I my research was broadly health services research or outcomes research. It's gone by many names over the years, and I was living the dream. I had a K 23 so a five year junior faculty grant. I ran the clinical trials program at Beth, Israel in GA oncology, So phase one through four on international steering committees for clinical trials, you know, making a national, international reputation, and then the transition to ours. Yeah, more funding was looming over me, and I realized that all my ideas were too big, just too big to fit in an R sized application grant. I know how that feels. I and I know this about you, that you're a big thinker, and sometimes it's hard to be like, yeah, like, how can I fit this into one grant? You know, very specific. And for your listeners who aren't deep in NIH funding, our grants are the next set of research grants for faculty, and they're they tend to be sort of very focused, and all of my ideas were much larger. I wanted to be working with large sets of data. I wanted to have an impact at scale for patient populations. I wanted to work with multidisciplinary colleagues, both within medicine as well as the statisticians and the engineers and sort of all the other components that really help you have an impact beyond the patient who's sitting in front of you. I remember feeling those same feelings. And I actually think it's not unique to us. I think that there are a lot of physicians that think I want to do something more. I want to contribute in a bigger way. I want to do more than just like clocking in and clocking out and generating our views. And you know, but not all of us end up on pathway that you and I are on so what? What was the difference for you? So you were like, I can't fit all of my ideas into an r1 grant. So, so what did you do? I'd had connections with flatiron health previously, which is whole nother fun story. And flatiron is, it's a real world data company that started maybe 15 years ago, really at the inception of the ability of EHR data to be available for research. So really set about establishing the field of real world evidence as an entity, as a market, as something that both internal decision making at pharma companies could count on, as well as in regulatory settings. And I was really excited by the vision at the time, that it was just the vision, and I had reached out to their chief medical officer and said, I can't move to New York. But who's doing something like that in Boston, where I live? And the chief medical officer said, nobody. This is brand new. This is so you reached out to another doctor. Did you know this person? I did through a long series of events, which is another fun story it sounds like. So it was some element of strategic networking. You had ideas. You had, you know, thoughts on what someone else was doing. And instead of just like reading about it, you actually initiated a conversation Exactly, exactly. What did that lead to? Well, she was lovely. She gave me some suggestions for people to network in Boston. I went and had coffee with them. And then she also said, Well, I commute up from North Carolina to New York, where the company is based. So why don't you just commute from Boston? This is pre pandemic, sort of before the whole virtual thing. Yeah. So I went down, spoke to the teams and had a contract with a startup six weeks later, and my mentors were like, actually, that's a really even worse idea than having too big of an arm.

Alison Curfman:

I've had people in more traditional paths, tell me that my ideas are, yeah, that it's not a good way to go, but I did it anyways. So your thought was that you would pivot away from academics and writing NIH grants and go work for the startup instead, and then that, when you were asking about, like, the pivot point, that really was.

Dr Rebecca Miksad:

The time where I could say I actually can do something different, and my mentors have their best interests, my best interests at heart, and there's something different that that I want to be able to, yeah, it was super scary. It was, you know, a startup with a limited runway. I learned had to learn all these new things about equity and stock options, and, yeah, on salary with with equity, I think also getting comfortable with the idea of of career uncertainty. So I'd spent lots of academic time looking at medical decision making and settings of uncertainty, and here I was able to translate that thinking to the uncertainty of a career in business, which is totally different than the established pathway that we have in academic medicine. Yeah, and you talk about mentorship, and you probably had a lot of amazing mentors in your clinical training, in your academic career, I definitely did as well. But wanting something more, wanting something different, or or seizing an opportunity that's like, in a different direction, sometimes one of the best things you can do is find new mentors, like find new connections. And maybe for you, part of it was, you know, a CMO who's already in this role, and was already working at this company, and could provide you with the perspective that you certainly could not have gotten from your academic mentors. That is really true, and from the beginning, I had always been advised and advise other docs to have a mentor team, because no one person is going to be able to fill all of your mentoring needs and questions, so I essentially brought in my mentor team. I still valued all of my academic mentors, and the role at Flatiron was very scientific, and actually published more research at Flatiron than I ever did as an academic doc, that's hilarious. So it was more about expanding and broadening the mentorship team. And I did do some cold calls.

Alison Curfman:

I remember reaching out to certain individuals who are have high public profiles, and they were so kind and generous to respond to my cold outreaches. When I'm like, do I really leave academic medicine? What is what is it like to be a doc on the other side? Now there's so many more docs doing other things post pandemic, that it's even easier, I think, to do those cold outreaches well. And when you talk about cold outreach, I've done that too. And a lot of times I teach doctors around like, okay, maybe find a company that you're interested in, and do reach out to the physician. Maybe you're scared about, maybe you're scared of like the CEO, but like the physician, like you have something in common with them, and maybe send a message on LinkedIn. Now, I find myself on the other end of that, where people are doing cold outreach. To me, I don't know if you feel that too or sense that too, with people wanting your opinions and your thoughts. Since you are a you know, C suite level physician has worked at multiple startups, I try to say yes, though, after this podcast, I may have not have enough time in my schedule to say yes to everybody. Maybe not say yes to everybody, but like, if somebody sends you a LinkedIn connection or a message, like, you're not going to be like, No, I'm too important for you. You know, like, I mean, I think that there's a lot of us who want to help other physicians like find their path. And yes, we're all limited by by time. But you know, for those of you who might be intimidated at the thought of reaching out to someone who's actively working in the field that you're interested in, just coming from the other perspective. Like, I never find it annoying when people send me a message. Same here, and my advice is on LinkedIn to make a little add that note to LinkedIn connect request. Yes, yes. A lot of people don't even know how to use LinkedIn, like, a lot of people probably listening to this podcast are probably like, yeah, I don't have even, oh, my God, my husband. He was like, I think I made a LinkedIn profile when I was a resident. I was like, Is there a profile out there that says that you are a resident? Because it might, it might say that, but that's the approach of a lot of physicians. Is like, I don't, I don't use LinkedIn, but it's such a powerful networking tool to learn about other companies, learn about other people at companies, and you know, do connection requests. I do not do very much social media. I don't love social media at all, but LinkedIn, I kind of like accept every connection. And when there's a note with it that says, like, Hey, I listened to your podcast, or, Hey, I have a question about how you got started, or something like, I definitely noticed that yes, and I tell physicians all the time, you need a LinkedIn presence if you want to move into the more business or entrepreneurial side, because academic medicine or even private practice, LinkedIn isn't much of. Yeah, for a needed tool. Yeah, it's not a priority, and it is probably so I've been leading this course to kind of teach positions, the basics, the foundations of getting started in startups, and a big part of it is learning how to tell your own narrative and how to translate that into your, you know, elevator pitch and your bio and your LinkedIn profile. And I swear to God, it gives people the most like Hartford to be like, I don't know how to do LinkedIn. I'm like, good thing we have AI. And so I think that it's all about like, really getting to the core of, like, who you are, what you care about, what you've done and what you want to do, and then putting it into a story, into a narrative like that about me section, it shouldn't be all like gobbledygook about, you know, outcomes, like generation and like just business words, like tell your story and, and I think you're right that, like, you actually cannot operate in this space without having a LinkedIn profile. And I also tell people, like, it should look pretty good, but I guarantee you nobody's gonna look at it for more than like, 90 seconds, so they're gonna be like, Oh, what's your story, and where have you been in the past? Like, where'd you do your training, or where have you worked, and what roles have you held? And so I think a lot of people are very intimidated by LinkedIn, but kind of just kind of like, rip off the band aid and figure it out totally. And the other thing I often tell physicians or any mentees when you're looking to change industries is to think about your transferable skills. I'll give an example from from my own

Dr Rebecca Miksad:

world. When I went into business, I was like, I've never had a budget that I've P and L, but I actually was like, actually, I do have to say you can't use these business terms, P and L,

Unknown:

profit and loss statements, and I did, when running our clinical trial program, I was responsible for$2 million budget and making sure that, of course, our can't get an NIH grant without a budget. NIH grant for millions of dollars. So on the surface, I think docs are often like, No, I've never done that. But actually, if you've run a grant, if you've run a department, you've had that budget experience, and a lot of docs don't have direct people management, in the sense of hiring and firing. But we manage fellows all the time. We manage medical students. We manage complex teams with nurses and other staff. So being a little bit creative about understanding how to translate those real life skills that you actually do have to those business terms, even if on the surface it doesn't seem automatically the same, our job is just to explain how it is exactly the same, the same pressure, the same decision making. Yeah, we have a lot of transferable skills. And it's so funny that you're saying this, because literally, right before we got on to record this, I recorded a solo episode where I kind of went through 10 parallels between practicing clinical medicine and working in startups, and which skills actually match up perfectly. So that'll be a later episode, but this is my little teaser that exactly what you're talking about is what I really trying to get doctors to understand, that they have so many, so many transferable skills beyond just their subject matter expertise. You could have been like, I am a clinical oncologist, and if people would like to ask me questions about certain tumors, I can tell them the answers, right? That's a subject matter expert, and you can do some advisory work as a subject matter expert, but you were able to see that you had so many more skills, so many more so much more vision of how to really transform health care. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about like during and after your time at flat iron. Sounds like you probably, in that immediate post transition period had, like, a massive learning curve. Probably gained a ton of skills. And how did you feel about that, and what was the impact you were making? It was so much fun. It was such a a joy to be with a group of mission driven, really smart people just trying to fix problems, and to be all growing in the same direction with the same objectives, which doesn't always happen within academic medicine, where it feels like there's a bit of a more of a competition, and to your point, around that learning curve, when I talk to other docs who are joining, particularly tech companies, which I think is slightly different than pharma, because most docs are really well versed in at least the big picture aspects of drug development. Within tech, there is a huge learning curve for understanding how tech thinks about problems and being able to talk in the same language. And I freely admit it took me a good year.

Dr Rebecca Miksad:

To figure that out about how to be effective in that type of of environment, and things like scrums and sprints and the size of teams, and how you involve other stakeholders into decision making while keeping the core team small and nimble, sort of all these concepts were

Alison Curfman:

new to me, and one of the things I do as a manager, both at Flatiron and now as Chief Medical Officer at color, help new Docs anticipate that learning curve and to normalize that we're all just Trying to get the same stuff done, the adage of Perfection is the enemy of good. Is like so key we need to get done is better than perfect. Run is better than perfect, while also making sure that we've always protect the patient. And it's tension between what's right for the individual patient versus what's feasible and what's scalable. That big term like, once you go from the patient in front of you or your clinic to millions of patients, there's all those different trade offs, and that perspective of the physician being in the room, I think, is really important so that we have get that trade off correct, at least the trade off correct for today, it may need to change tomorrow. Yeah, and have that flexibility to continue learning as as a group. Yeah, I want to react to two other things you've just said. So one, co developing technology is something that we as physicians do not have a whole you, most of us don't have experience with you named some terms from more like Agile methodology and other ways that you know software teams are probably tend to operate. And it's not rocket science. I mean, it's different. But I think one of our tendencies in traditional medicine is to make decisions by committees, you know, like, let's add this committee, and let's add this committee, and let's just get all of these people to weigh in until we get a really ideal solution, which, in some things, that is exactly the right approach. So for instance, if you're trying to come up with the best evidence based guideline for like, you know, febrile infants or something, you don't want one person to come up with that. You want to get so much broad input of all these experts, of all these different backgrounds, to really collaborate and come up with a great clinical guideline. But when it comes to like making decisions on something like software, like, should this button go here or here? And should this question be asked this way or this way in our survey? Like, you just do not want so many people involved. And while you do want feedback, the best feedback you can get in developing technology is to get like a b minus product out there and get your users feedback right. So you want to be able to iterate rapidly on something that's actually launched and has a foundation to build upon and improve upon, as opposed to keeping something in pre launch stage and just hemming and hawing, getting so many stakeholders opinions on before you put it out there. So it's very different, but it can be some of the most like fun work, because it's it's interesting. And the other thing I wanted to hone in on that you said, was about protecting the patient and protecting quality. And one of the things I really try to help people differentiate is what is quality and safety versus what is just not. You would never want to put out a c plus product of an, you know, actually implementing like care for patients that's like, kind of thrown together. No, never. But if you didn't have the most perfect pitch deck, but you had a conversation with the potential investor and got feedback and grew from it like it doesn't matter that the pitch deck wasn't perfect. There's a lot of there's different like levels of risk, and we're used to managing risk as physicians. We're used to wanting an A plus plus effort on everything, because it matters so much in clinical care, we're talking about people's lives here. I think one of the mindset shifts that are really important is really differentiating what is quality and safety, what is just a nice to have, not a need to have. And it's it takes practice to be able to think that way. It really does, and it's a little scary, I think, for Docs often who are Type A's and micromanagers, because, yeah, that's what many of our patients need to keep them safe, is to be able to step back, to be able to say, these are the must haves for patient safety. These are the nice to haves, either because that's the way I prefer to practice medicine, or because it makes.

Dr Rebecca Miksad:

Nice XYZ experience easier or faster. There's and being really crisp about what the need to haves are versus the nice to haves. Because if you if as a document crisp, then the engineering teams who are fiddling around with the button placement will respect when you say, no, no, that is not feasible. I'm willing to, like, negotiate on these things that are really the extras, but you need to listen to me when XYZ is will be bad for clinical care, and when you have that ability to be very articulate about those distinctions, that's when I think you can really work with engineering teams to get the right product out the first time. Even if it's a b minus on the nice to haves, you have to get an A plus on the must haves. And that's that, that compromise and to remember the doc isn't always right. We're all continuously learning, yes, absolutely takes that humility, which I, I feel like both of us kind of getting thrown into, like, a totally different environment. I mean, it's not hard to be humble when you're like, Yeah, I don't know anything about this. Like, just, you just have to teach me. So you gotta have that learning mentality. So after flat iron, I love to hear I know that's you, know, you and I connected in that period between flatiron and your job at color now, and I definitely want to hear about what you're doing at color, but what were you doing when we first connected? It was a really fun time. It was about a year, and I knew that I wanted to continue having impact at scale, one step or two steps closer to the patient. So flatiron is all about data and about establishing real world evidence as a as a scientific field, and creating a new variable called real world progression, and sort of all of those things that were really impacting at the policy level, and at the large drug development level. And also knew that AI was really just coming out, and there's a lot of fluff around AI, and I wanted to understand really where AI was being was a real thing, before jumping into a new company where, where I would want to be involved, be involved with AI, but have it as a real tool that's solving a problem rather than a tool looking for

Alison Curfman:

Yeah, so you were kind of in this phase of discovery, yes, definitely. That's a good that's a good client term.

Dr Rebecca Miksad:

And so you were doing some consulting, right? Yeah. So I consulted with a number of different companies, both small and large. I focused a lot on the very small tech companies because I Health Tech, I felt that companies that weren't big enough yet, are fortunate enough yet to have a co founder that was a physician and we're trying to break into the health tech space, were really stymied by that lock of true understanding of the entire healthcare ecosystem. Ecosystem is a overused word. So what I mean by that is that you know you have, yes, you have to have a product that makes the docs happy. Yes, you need a product that makes the patients happy, and it's good for patients. But we also need to think about nursing, and we need to think about the operations folks in the clinic. We need to think about the administrator being counters at the hospital. We have to think about it and getting their tech integrated with all the other it things. Now we also need to think about the pair, and the fact that there's many different types of payers, including federal versus private insurance. And then we have to think about the regulators, not only for pharmaceuticals, but also the hospital inspectors. So like there's this huge complexity of an ecosystem that I think as physicians, we innately understand. We cross these stakeholders every other day. But if you don't have that background, intuitive knowledge, and only are able to gain certain perspectives because you don't know what you don't know. Yet,

Alison Curfman:

I found that every really important place where I could bring that perspective to these early tech companies to try to help them cross that divide between being successful and having a great product that ends up on a show, I feel like we connected because you were in some someone's like, coaching program, and somebody else that I knew who was in to that same coaching program was like, wait, you do startup consulting and you do startup consulting. You two should meet. And so I remember we connected, and it was right around the same time that someone else. Connected me with another physician who was doing startup consulting, or industry consulting, and I remember this very fondly, because I kind of put it together. I was like, Okay, I've just met two other physicians who are doing really cool things, who are kind of at a, you know, exploratory phase of their career, after having done something really cool and looking to, you know, grow something new. And we were all doing consulting, and we started our own little like little group, our little, tiny community of the three of us to bounce ideas off of each other and get to know each other more in each other's work. And I think you referred me some clients, and vice versa. And I think that one of the things I found so valuable was, you know, I was, I was new to, like, consulting contracts and things, and I remember I would send you guys some of the terms or the structures of some of the contracts that was negotiated be like, what would you what would you do with this? And got some, like, amazing feedback

Unknown:

from both you and Jeff around, like, structuring things, or ways to think about things, and I value that so much, because when you're doing something new that you haven't done before, it's great to have a community, and our little, tiny community that we actually still have the tech stream going well over a year later, was part of The vision that started for me around building a community of physicians who are working in this space, who have the support and the knowledge and the feedback that they need to find opportunities to, you know, position themselves to really make the biggest impact that They can. Yeah, I valued that, that introduction as well, just down to the technical things of like, I don't know, but what should my retainer be? Or what should like, you know, how much free consulting advice do I give away before making a you know, next steps, dependent on a on a contract, all those little things when I was at a startup company, you know, the lawyers were dealing with and the business people. So even though I had a lot of that experience from from being in the environment, I hadn't actually executed my own contract before. So it was really helpful to to share best practices and the coaching program you mentioned was huge in terms of really helping me feel confident about stepping out on as a solo entrepreneur. And I think what you've built is sort of the next deeper step beyond the general

Alison Curfman:

physicians doing other things to being physicians doing other things in the startup and and consulting area, which is a step more niche than some of these other amazing physician coaching programs that are that are out there. So congratulations and kudos to you on that. Oh, thank you. And I am. I was so grateful for all of your you know, feedback and insight over that year, that we were all supporting each other. And I remember when you were like, Hey guys, I'm not going to be a consultant anymore. So tell me about your transition to your current role, and don't worry, you're still in our text group.

Dr Rebecca Miksad:

Thank you. Color really called to me as a mission based company that felt very much like early flatiron in the sense of really smart people tackling really hard problems and trying to get things done for large groups of patients and really having an impact and doing something brand new, a 50 state virtual Cancer Clinic. Whoever heard of such a thing, taking advantage of the timing of the where society is and where Marc it are post pandemic, where telemedicine has become much more of a socially acceptable type of care, and then really pushing forward a clear vision about what it means to provide center of excellence level care to patients, no matter who they are or where they are. And there's so many healthcare deserts in the United States where people don't even have an oncologist like to drive like an hour and a half, two hours, there was a recent study on healthcare deserts in rural America for oncologists and then, like you And me, busy adults with families and outside responsibilities and all sorts of things that make the working day really hard to get the health care done. And we know by the American Cancer Society data that the diagnosis of cancer is getting younger and younger. And so where we've really focused is that working age. Adult population that has unique needs, and particularly where virtual care can help fill those gaps. So you can do it while you're waiting for your daughter's tennis lesson to finish, or, you know, 20 minutes after your big presentation to the board, you can be like, phew, celebrate. Let's get on my call to talk to an oncologist about my symptoms and and how can manage the fatigue maybe that I'm feeling this this evening because I'm going through treatment for cancer.

Alison Curfman:

Wow, that's such a powerful mission. I think that what I've really been impressed by with color and the vision that you all have is that it's more than just a population health model for treatment of cancer. It's also for prevention. And I know y'all use a lot of AI correct. It's kind of built into your business model. AI is a tool for specific problem. That's the key part of problems, and I know they are so fortunate to have you at the helm of their clinical operations. And I think it's so cool that you know your journey has gone from, you know, Harvard and NIH to like what Bayesian analyzes, and then your crossover into flat iron, and then your time and consulting, which probably gave you a bit pretty broad spectrum of, like, a lot of different things going on. And then it was like, you know, you got hooked by one. I see this a lot, when people are deciding to work with a lot of different companies, and then something just like, there's just some magic there with one client and and it grows to be kind of like a real, like longer term career option. So it's been so fun to see you grow and to see the work and the impact that you're having. Any last thoughts that you wanted to share before we wrap up, I highly encourage anyone who's listening to this podcast was an inkling of wanting to do something different, that there's many, many different pathways. Allison and I both really jump ship. I still see patients once a week, and I know Allison does as well, and that's been a real joy. You don't have to make that huge of a jump. There's lots of smaller ways to to really bring your skills and creativity to something that really matters to patients beyond those in your the four walls of your clinic. That's an amazing ending thought, and I will make sure to put everything in the show notes of how you can get in touch with Rebecca. We'll put her LinkedIn profile so you can send her a message. Make sure to add a note if you connect with her, and then also the website for her company, which is doing some really amazing work. So thank you all for joining and listening. I hope that this was as inspiring for you as it was for me. And thank you so much, Rebecca, and I really appreciate you coming. Thanks so much, Allison, thank you for listening to startup positions, don't forget to like, follow and share you.