Mochi Health started with a question. “Where do patients fall out of care and how do we get them back?”
That was the idea that started Myra Ahmad’s founding journey. What answer did she arrive at? A discussion about the structure of care itself.
Ahmad arrived at that question through research rather than entrepreneurship. After receiving her MD from the University of Washington School of Medicine and holding research positions at MIT and UCSF, she spent much of her time researching how obesity care is delivered in practice.
The pattern she continued to discover was that obese patients were bouncing between bariatric surgeons, endocrinologists, and primary care providers, with none of the doctors actually treating the underlying disease. Care existed. No adjustments were possible.
A system built around billing codes
Ahmad’s diagnosis of why this happens is straightforward. “Our healthcare system is optimized for billing codes, not clinical outcomes,” she told Women of Wearables in April 2026.
“Patients move from specialist to specialist, but no one seems to ‘own’ their care. ” The problem is not the clinician’s fault, but the misaligned incentives.
If a provider is compensated by the amount of billable care, rather than whether the patient actually improves or stays in treatment, the system has no built-in reason to keep that patient tied to a single accountable relationship over time.
The challenge is that obesity is rarely diagnosed on its own. It often involves interdisciplinary metabolic, hormonal, and cardiovascular issues.
Patients referred from one clinic to the next may end up being managed piecemeal, with each visit treating part of the whole picture.
The results revealed a pattern of shedding that Ahmad had documented over the years: patients begin treatment, lose the threads, and then withdraw.
Continuity as a product
Mochi, which Ahmad founded in San Francisco in 2022, was built as an answer to that fragmentation.
She describes it as less of a prescription-first telehealth service and more of a three-sided marketplace that connects patients, providers, and independent pharmacies on one platform.
Patients choose their health care providers and pharmacies. Clinicians practice without the interference that Ahmad associates with traditional systems. Meanwhile, pharmacies connect to Mochi’s software for transparent fulfillment.
Connective tissue is the patient-provider relationship, which is built around long-term continuity rather than one-time encounters.
In practice, this means patients can keep the same provider as their needs change and have 24-hour access to their care team, including a dietitian and nutritionist.
Ahmad calls this model the “discovery layer of health care,” a place where patients can find and maintain a trusted health care provider, and where more than 2,000 medications are available at transparent prices.
The phrase she uses for destination is “primary care home.” This is a single, trusted relationship where patients can manage the full scope of their health, rather than having to rebuild their health across disparate healthcare settings.
Notably, Ahmad said expanding beyond weight loss was not the original plan. As patients asked Mochi providers to manage more of their care and providers welcomed the opportunity to offer more than weight loss treatment, the platform grew to meet that demand.
If the company’s founding insight was that gaps between professionals were preventing patients from receiving care, Ahmad explained that the company’s growth into adjacent areas is that those same patients want their care to stay in one place.
Why continuity is most important for women
Ahmad candidly says that persistence is not an abstract virtue, but a practical necessity for the patients Moti serves most often.
Many people come to our clinic for the purpose of weight management, but at the same time, they also have problems such as polycystic ovarian syndrome, perimenopause, and infertility treatment, which are interrelated and cannot be adequately addressed by temporary care by specialists.
“Continued care is essential for women who are managing not only obesity but additional health complications such as PCOS, perimenopause, and fertility issues,” she says.
In her opinion, a model that addresses all of these needs and keeps patients in the hands of one trusted health care provider simply represents what good care for these patients should always look like.
The data problem behind the care problem
Logistical issues also need to be resolved to get patients back into treatment, Ahmad argues. Information that should be followed up with the patient is not being followed up. “Most providers get their labs from separate systems that never talk to each other,” she said.
Fragmentation makes truly personalized care difficult because no one sees the entire record at once.
Mochi’s response is to integrate those parts. Ahmad said the company is working to bring labs, drugs, provider relationships, and the treatment itself within one connected system by giving patients and providers access to lab tests that feed directly into their medical plans.
The goal is closure, not novelty. Eliminate the seams where patient information, and with it the patients themselves, tend to be lost.
unfinished paper
It is fair to note that the continuity model is not without unanswered questions. Maintaining patient engagement over time, both within and outside of telemedicine, is difficult for any healthcare provider, and a platform that spans many conditions presents challenges in maintaining quality and coordination across all conditions.
Continuity is easier to design than to guarantee. Ahmad’s argument is not that Mochi has solved the problem, but that traditional systems are structured in a way that makes problem solving nearly impossible, and that building around continuity from the beginning is a more honest starting point.
What is consistent is the content that is consistent from the first question to the companies derived from it. Ahmad sought to understand where patients fall out of care and concluded that the answer lies in structure, incentives that reward encounters over outcomes, and records that don’t fully track the personas they describe.
In her view, getting patients back means rebuilding relationships at the center. That means one provider, one connected record, and one place patients can return.
Whether that vision expands is a question that will be answered in the coming years. The clarity of the paper, which can be traced back from the research question to 500,000 patients, is already on record.
