Sana— Virtual Primary Care embedded in a health plan

Sana Benefits is a healthcare company that provides value-based health insurance and healthcare programs to small businesses. When I joined, most of Sana’s members were primarily in Texas. They operated one brick and mortar practice in Austin, TX. The problem is they have members all over the US. They hired me first as a consultant to help them understand how to deliver virtual primary care at scale. I made my pitch for a Sherpaa-like nationwide virtual primary care practice and they bought in. So we shut down the brick and mortar practice and went all in on becoming a payvidor and built a nationwide virtual primary care practice for their 30,000 members.

Sana— Virtual Primary Care embedded in a health plan

Sana Benefits is a healthcare company that provides value-based health insurance and healthcare programs to small businesses. When I joined, most of Sana’s members were primarily in Texas. They operated one brick and mortar practice in Austin, TX. The problem is they have members all over the US. They hired me first as a consultant to help them understand how to deliver virtual primary care at scale. I made my pitch for a Sherpaa-like nationwide virtual primary care practice and they bought in. So we shut down the brick and mortar practice and went all in on becoming a payvidor and built a nationwide virtual primary care practice for their 30,000 members.

Sana— Virtual Primary Care embedded in a health plan

Sana Benefits is a healthcare company that provides value-based health insurance and healthcare programs to small businesses. When I joined, most of Sana’s members were primarily in Texas. They operated one brick and mortar practice in Austin, TX. The problem is they have members all over the US. They hired me first as a consultant to help them understand how to deliver virtual primary care at scale. I made my pitch for a Sherpaa-like nationwide virtual primary care practice and they bought in. So we shut down the brick and mortar practice and went all in on becoming a payvidor and built a nationwide virtual primary care practice for their 30,000 members.

From one neighborhood to 15 states in 18 months

From one neighborhood to 15 states in 18 months

From one neighborhood to 15 states in 18 months

From one neighborhood to 15 states in 18 months

We built our own care platform from the ground up, hired the providers, and expanded the professional corporation to cover ~90% of our population. Most importantly, we had to transition our member positioning from “you’re on your own…find a doctor using our doctor finder” to “you’ve now got your own personal provider you can reach out to at any time…start with them for anything shy of an emergency and they’ll care for you and coordinate your care with local specialists when necessary…and next time you need care you’ll work with the same provider.”

Our NPS has consistently hovered around 90. After a year of operating, we’ve cared for 30% of our population and we’re consistently growing every month. Considering ~40% of people don’t use any healthcare in a given year, we’re already the PCPs for half the population. That’s quite the transition.


But primary care costs only 7-10% of all medical care in a population. That’s peanuts. The real costs lie in all the downstream care— specialist visits, hospitalizations, medications, surgeries, etc. The only way to impact those costs is to get patients to start online with their care, build trust, and intelligently direct all that downstream care. Once a process starts online, it unlocks a whole new process. Instead of going to the library, you fired up google. Instead of calling a taxi service, we fired up Uber. The real effort went into ensuring all our provider orders were “intelligent.” While Sana’s network of specialists and hospitals were nationwide, we essentially created our own super skinny network of specialists and facilities that had billed us before (and therefore we knew their prices) and then, when one of our PCPs attempted to make a referral, all we asked them to do was make a general referral like “neurologist convenient to the patient” and that would send a task to one of our care navigators who would then put the final specifics around the provider’s general order. That way, we didn’t put the onus on the provider to make their order intelligent. And the ROI on that investment in the care navigator effort was obviously off the charts given how widely variable costs are out there.

Legacy

Legacy

Legacy

Legacy

This was the 5th time I’ve built a platform from the ground up to power a virtual care practice. With one designer and three engineers, we built the platform and practice in seven months. It's now powering their nearly nationwide 30,000 patient practice of four physicians, five nurse practitioners, nine care navigators, and two medical assistants.


As of 2025, Sana has raised $107M in venture funding and is well on their way to profitability. The practice is humming, the platform is up and running, the product/engineering team have a great roadmap, the providers are top notch, and now there’s a new payvidor in America. That’s essentially what I’ve done with my career. I like to find little corners of healthcare that don’t operate under traditional misaligned incentives and build out all the moving parts of care services that make patients feel like this is the way care should be.