The inception of Mochi Health stemmed from a fundamental query: “Where do patients disengage from their care, and how can they be reconnected?”
This pondering kickstarted Myra Ahmad’s journey as the founder. Her quest led her to a realization about the structure of healthcare itself.
Ahmad’s path to this question was paved through extensive research rather than a direct plunge into entrepreneurship. With an MD from the University of Washington School of Medicine and research roles at MIT and UCSF under her belt, she delved deep into the delivery of obesity care.
Her findings revealed a recurring pattern where obese patients were shuttling between bariatric surgeons, endocrinologists, and primary care providers, none of whom were addressing the root cause of the disease. While care was present, coordination was lacking.
A System Centered Around Billing Codes
Ahmad’s diagnosis pinpointed a stark reality: “Our healthcare system prioritizes billing codes over clinical outcomes,” she disclosed to Women of Wearables in April 2026.
She noted, “Patients move between specialists, yet no one truly takes responsibility for their care.” The issue isn’t with the clinicians themselves but with the misalignment of incentives.
When providers are compensated based on billable encounters rather than the actual progress or continuity of a patient’s treatment, there’s no inherent motivation to ensure that the patient remains connected to a single, accountable healthcare relationship over time.
The complexity arises from obesity often intertwining with metabolic, hormonal, and cardiovascular issues that transcend specialties.
A patient transitioned from one practice to another may end up receiving fragmented care, with each visit addressing only a fraction of the overall health picture.
The consequence is the dropout trend that Ahmad meticulously documented over the years, where patients initiate treatment, lose track, and eventually disengage.
Continuity as the Core Offering
Established in San Francisco in 2022, Mochi emerged as a response to this fragmentation.
Ahmad portrays it not as just another telehealth service focused on prescriptions but as a tripartite marketplace connecting patients, providers, and independent pharmacies on a unified platform.
Patients have the liberty to select their preferred provider and pharmacy. Clinicians practice without the conventional system’s constraints, while pharmacies seamlessly integrate with Mochi’s software for transparent service fulfillment.
The linchpin is the patient-provider relationship, structured around sustained continuity rather than sporadic interactions.
In practical terms, this translates to patients retaining the same provider as their requirements evolve, coupled with constant access to a comprehensive care team encompassing nutritionists and dietitians.
Ahmad dubs this model the “discovery layer of healthcare,” where patients can discover a trusted provider and stick with them, all while having access to over 2,000 medications at transparent prices.
The term she increasingly employs for this concept is the “primary care home”: a singular dependable relationship through which a patient can address their entire health spectrum without the need to fragment it across disconnected practices.
Noteworthy is Ahmad’s revelation that the expansion beyond weight management wasn’t part of the original blueprint. Patients expressed the desire for their Mochi providers to oversee more aspects of their care, and providers welcomed the opportunity to extend their services beyond weight-loss treatment, prompting the platform’s evolution to meet this demand.
If the initial insight was about patients slipping through the gaps between specialists, the company’s diversification into adjacent domains, according to Ahmad, stems from these very patients seeking comprehensive care under one roof.
The Vitality of Continuity for Women
Ahmad asserts that continuity isn’t just a theoretical ideal but a pragmatic necessity for the demographic Mochi predominantly serves.
Many approach Mochi for weight management while concurrently grappling with conditions like PCOS, perimenopause, or fertility issues, all interconnected concerns inadequately catered to by episodic, specialist-centric care.
“For women managing obesity alongside health complications such as PCOS, perimenopause, or fertility challenges, maintaining care continuity is paramount,” she emphasized.
In her view, a model that retains a patient with a singular trusted provider across all these needs epitomizes what optimal care for such patients should embody.
The Data Challenge Underlying the Care Challenge
According to Ahmad, reengaging patients in care necessitates addressing a logistical hurdle. The information that should trail a patient often doesn’t. “Most providers receive lab results from disparate systems that don’t communicate with each other,” she remarked.
The fragmented nature of this setup hampers personalized medicine since there’s no holistic view of the patient’s record at any given time.
Mochi’s strategy involves amalgamating these fragments. Ahmad indicated that the company is working towards granting patients and providers access to lab tests that seamlessly feed into the care plan, thereby consolidating labs, medications, the provider relationship, and the treatment process within a unified system.
The goal isn’t novelty but cohesion. By eradicating the gaps where a patient’s information, and consequently the patient themselves, tend to get lost.
An Ongoing Thesis
It’s worth acknowledging that the continuity model isn’t devoid of uncertainties. Sustaining patient engagement over the long haul poses challenges for any provider, within or outside the realm of telehealth. Furthermore, a platform that broadens its scope to encompass various conditions undertakes the task of upholding quality and coordination across all fronts.
Designing for continuity is simpler than ensuring it. Ahmad’s stance isn’t that Mochi has cracked the code but rather that the conventional system’s framework makes resolving it nearly insurmountable, emphasizing that anchoring the model on continuity from the outset is the more authentic approach.
What remains consistent is the thread linking the initial query to the resultant company. Ahmad embarked on a quest to determine where patients drop off the care continuum, concluding that the crux lies in the system’s architecture, the incentives favoring encounters over outcomes, and the disjointed records that fail to trail the individual they describe.
Reviving patient engagement, to her, involves reconstructing the core relationship: one provider, one integrated record, one sanctuary where a patient can consistently return.
Whether this vision scales up is a query the forthcoming years will address. Nonetheless, the clarity of the thesis, tracing back from a research inquiry to a substantial patient base, remains firmly established.
