Myra Ahmad On Where Patients Fall Out Of Care And How To Bring Them Back

Mochi Health began with a question. “Where do patients fall out of care, and how do you bring them back?”

That was the thought that began Myra Ahmad’s founder journey. The answer she arrived at? An argument about the structure of care itself.

Ahmad came to that question through research rather than entrepreneurship. After earning her MD from the University of Washington School of Medicine and holding research positions at MIT and UCSF, she spent significant time studying how obesity care is actually delivered.

The pattern she kept finding was that patients with obesity were bouncing between bariatric surgeons, endocrinologists, and primary care providers, and that none of them was really treating the underlying disease. Care existed. Coordination did not.

A System Built Around Billing Codes

Ahmad’s diagnosis of why this happens 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, yet no one seems to ‘own’ their care.” The problem is not bad clinicians but misaligned incentives.

When providers are paid by the volume of billable encounters rather than by whether a patient actually improves or stays in treatment, the system has no built-in reason 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 involves metabolic, hormonal, and cardiovascular concerns that cut across specialties.

A patient referred from one practice to the next can end up managed in fragments, with each visit treating a piece of the picture.

The result is the dropout pattern Ahmad has spent years documenting, in which patients start treatment, lose the thread, and disengage.

Continuity As The Product

Mochi, which Ahmad founded in San Francisco in 2022, is built as an answer to that fragmentation.

She describes it not as another prescription-first telehealth service but as a three-sided marketplace connecting patients, providers, and independent pharmacies on one platform.

Patients choose their own provider and pharmacy. Clinicians practice without the interference Ahmad associates with the conventional system. Pharmacies, meanwhile, plug into Mochi’s software for transparent fulfillment.

The connective tissue is the patient-provider relationship, structured around long-term continuity rather than one-off encounters.

In practice, that means patients keep the same provider as their needs change and have around-the-clock 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 at transparent prices.

The phrase she increasingly uses for the destination is the “primary care home”: a single trusted relationship through which a patient can manage the full range of their health rather than reassembling it across disconnected practices.

Notably, Ahmad has said 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 weight-loss treatment, so the platform grew to meet that demand.

If the founding insight was that patients fall out of care in the gaps between specialists, the company’s growth into adjacent areas is, by Ahmad’s account, those same patients asking to keep their care in one place.

Why Continuity Matters Most For Women

Ahmad is direct 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 such as PCOS, perimenopause, or fertility challenges, concerns that are themselves interconnected 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, having continuity in care is essential,” she has said.

A model that keeps a patient with one trusted provider across all of those needs is, in her opinion, simply what good care for these patients was always supposed to look like.

The Data Problem Behind The Care Problem

Bringing patients back into care, Ahmad argues, also requires fixing a logistics problem. The information that should follow a patient does not. “Most providers are getting labs from separate systems that never talk to each other,” she has said.

Fragmentation makes genuinely individualized medicine difficult, because no one is looking at the whole record at once.

Mochi’s response is to integrate those pieces. Ahmad has said the company is building toward giving patients and providers access to lab testing that feeds directly into the care plan, so that labs, medications, the provider relationship, and the treatment itself sit in one connected system.

The aim is less about novelty than about closure. Removing the seams where a patient’s information, and with it the patient, tends to get lost.

An Unfinished Thesis

It would be fair to note that the continuity model is not without open questions. Keeping patients engaged over the long term is difficult for any provider, in or out of telehealth, and a platform that broadens into many conditions takes on the challenge of maintaining quality and coordination across all of them.

Continuity is easier to design for than to guarantee. Ahmad’s argument is not that Mochi has solved the problem but that the conventional system is structured in a way that makes solving it nearly impossible, and that building around continuity from the start is the more honest place to begin.

What is consistent is the throughline from the original question to the company that grew out of it. Ahmad set out to understand where patients fall out of care and concluded that the answer lay in the architecture, in incentives that reward encounters over outcomes and in records that never quite follow the person they describe.

Bringing patients back, in her view, means rebuilding the relationship at the center: one provider, one connected record, one place a patient can return to.

Whether that vision scales is a question the next several years will answer. The clarity of the thesis, traceable from a research question to a half-million patients, is already on the record.