Building Technology to Fix How We Find the Right Healthcare

Monisha Saldanha (00:00) Welcome to Colorado Tech People. Today I'm joined by Tenay Benes, founder of The Care We Need and co-founder of Benes Companies, a Colorado company working to improve how people with complex illness find, navigate, and connect to the right care. Tenay brings a remarkable combination of lived experience, military intelligence, systems thinking, and health innovation to a problem many families know too well.

The healthcare system is fragmented, confusing, and not designed around whole person healing. The care we need is reimagining intake and care matching so that patients, caregivers, and care professionals can better understand the full picture behind someone's health. In this conversation, we'll talk about complex illness, the patient odyssey, technology-enabled care coordination, and what it takes to build a company around a deeply personal mission.

Welcome today. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Tenay Benes (01:01) Thanks so much for having me, Monisha.

Monisha Saldanha (01:04) So let's start with the problem. What is the care we need trying to solve? And what is the solution you are building?

Tenay Benes (01:14) The care we need started as a what-if when I was navigating my own complex illness healing journey. I am a retired Army intelligence officer. I experienced PTSD and medical injury in Iraq, and I was medically evacuated in 2007, and by 2014 my body shut down. I had chronic fatigue syndrome. And

Was really surprised because I I did everything my doctors were telling me to do, and I got worse every time I listened to them. And having a biology degree from Johns Hopkins undergrad and having a master's of business administration being an intelligence officer, I knew that I could find information and I could find

the solution to my problem if I searched diligently enough, but as I started trying to navigate, you know, which care providers

care professionals to use, insurance, NIH PubMeds, are are my doctors really recognizing the symptoms that I have? I realized that with someone with so many privileges and benefits, a really amazing education, professional experience finding hard to find information, if someone like me couldn't connect with the right care professionals who recognized my symptoms with all of my

research work, then the average person in America certainly couldn't. And so I kept saying, I wish there was a website where I could just enter my symptoms and I would get a list of care professionals who say they treat those symptoms. That's all I wanted. Because I realized that by using the insurance route, and this is through private insurance as well as the VA and the DOD,

I was just a a billing code and a spe a specialist, you know, and I had to know what my symptoms meant, what diagnosis they were, and then which specialists

diagnose those things. so that I could then call my insurance and then ask for specialists who are accepting patients in the whole nine, right? So Just trying to connect with the right next care professional was like a month to three month journey for every single one. And when you have complex illnesses like complex post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, or many others, you need multiple care professionals and you need to be rotating through them because each one can only usually provide like one or two

treatments that might help you a little bit, but then you need to move on to the next area of your life. So I was like, this is unmanageable. So that's the problem. We're trying to reduce the patient odyssey, driving patients going from care professional to care professional, hoping for someone to recognize their symptoms in that first intake appointment, which already took them one to three months to get to. Right? So we're saying, why don't we generate a directory that has all care professionals

across the entire US care ecosystem, healthcare, wellness, and human services, all three are necessary to heal from complex illness. And across complementary, conventional, integrative, and holistic care, not just the conventional, mostly insurance-covered care, which is generally battlefield medicine. It's great to patch you up if you're bleeding or broken arm, but it's not optimized currently to heal and cure complex illnesses. So

That's what we're trying to build. And the hope is that by having on the care professionals profile the symptoms that they say they treat and the diagnoses that they say that they understand and the populations that they say they have expertise in before that first intake appointment, we can really get care professionals a higher quality, better matched patient who is more likely to return.

And thereby reduce their patient acquisition costs, and we can get patients a higher quality match with their care professionals so that they're more likely to be compliant with their treatment of care. And it reduces their expenditure and healthcare expenditure and their time and energy wasted on going to the wrong care professional.

Monisha Saldanha (05:39) Wow, that's amazing. And where are you in that journey of building that platform?

Tenay Benes (05:46) On Tuesday, one week ago, nope, two weeks ago, wow, time flies, September 1st, we

Monisha Saldanha (05:53) Mm-hmm.

Tenay Benes (05:54) launched the beta version of our minimum viable product. So version 1.0, which is the fully free directory. We captured eight professional codes across the Denver metro area, and that was 50,000 care professionals

from mental health. Mental health has several codes like social workers, licensed professional counselors, marriage and family therapists, etc. acupuncturists, chiropractors, naturop naturopathic doc doctors, and massage therapists. And we felt that these were the most likely to try to get

direct to consumer or like B2C marketing and so it's harder for them to get even just clients in the door because they don't work with insurance usually. So 50,000 people we've built our directory and now we're looking for beta testers to come on over and give us feedback on the user experience. And then we're hoping to take the MVP fully live hard launch on January 4th, 2027.

Monisha Saldanha (07:06) So exciting. And how did

Tenay Benes (07:08) It is.

Monisha Saldanha (07:09) you manage to get did you get fifty thousand of these professionals to complete their profiles? So talk about the symptoms that they treat and the diagnoses that they understand and so forth?

Tenay Benes (07:22) No, but that would be amazing. What we did

Monisha Saldanha (07:24) Yeah.

Tenay Benes (07:25) instead is we took a a data science approach and we said, hey, these professionals have to be registered in different places on the internet. they have to have a footprint at this point for us to for them to connect with their

potential future patients. So we started with pulling from three directories: the NPPES, which is the national provider directory, for everybody who accepts insurance. They all get a unique identifier. And then we filtered for Colorado, Denver, metro area and these professional codes. Then the Colorado has a database called HPPP, and that's healthcare related registry. And then Colorado has Dora. That's everybody who is licensed

in something. So you can be a licensed financial advisor, or you can be a licensed professional counselor. Your license has to go in that database. So we started pulling different pieces and parts, and we called these sources of truth for the profile, and we started generating and combining different profiles until we we generated 50,000 that we can trust that are unique. And then for the symptoms and diagnoses

we are using internet research in medical publications to generate what each of these people, these unclaimed profiles, what that specialty tends to treat generally. So, for example, a social worker tends to help people with the psychological

journey of navigating a difficult life situation. It can be financial crisis, housing, healthcare, immigration, etc. And so we will put that on there, and then these are the types of populations and diagnoses that this

specialty tends to treat and then we we highlight that you know this is generalized and once that professional claims that profile they can personalize it for them. But we also have additional plans to enrich that data even before that personal claiming and individual enrichment

That requires more funding. We can do AI web crawlers, keyword searches, connect with professional organizations like the Social Workers of America organization, and they might have additional information on each of those care professionals that we can also push onto their profile before they even claim them. So we really want it to be a high-value experience for those people navigating complex illness, even before the first care professional has ever claimed their profile.

Monisha Saldanha (10:17) Very exciting. You've described the journey through complex illness as painful and fragmented. What did your own experience teach you that traditional healthcare systems often miss?

Tenay Benes (10:31) it taught me that most people expect their primary care provider to provide

what I would call care navigation or case management services. One doctor who understands the entire care ecosystem and then can send you to the right specialist at the right time in a sequenced manner in your healing journey. And the fact is that that is just not true. It's not fact for most complex illnesses with most care professionals, like most primary care providers.

Right now. Primary care providers are trained in conventional medicine. They are limited to the billing codes that the insurance providers that they use require. They're limited to the standards of care that the owners of their clinics and their hospitals require. And a lot of those decisions are made on profit and loss statements. And so a lot of primary care professionals.

Providers can't provide the kind of care they want to provide. And there's actually a crisis in America. Not enough PCPs anywhere, no matter how many times you try to recruit and give them, you know, scholarships and grants and free education and bonuses, they're just they're reducing and dwindling in numbers for that reason. So because that layer of case management, care coordination, care navigation is missing, then

I decided that I was gonna build it. And the first step starts with just connecting with the right professional and reducing that patient odyssey to maybe start your journey or get unstuck in your journey. And then there are other features that we plan in the future that will improve the ability of the care ecosystem to provide preventive, coordinated, collaborative care around one person navigating complex illness.

Monisha Saldanha (12:37) And you come from a military intelligence and joint cyber operations background. How did that training shape the way you think about healthcare problems?

Tenay Benes (12:48) Well the military intelligence piece, military intelligence is essentially the military's version of information science, right? We and our ultimate job is to predict the future, accurately tell our commanders what's going to happen in the battlefield so that they can then create the plans they need to prevent death, promote military objectives, etc.

And so predicting the future is complex. It requires asking the right questions about the battle field, and then devising understanding what your sources of data are to collect towards answering those questions, and then devising a method, asset management, to have different sources collect different types of information, gathering those, synthesizing them into information, bringing information together to generate knowledge.

And then putting that knowledge into the the context of the battlefield and military operations and the culture of the people you're interacting with to generate wisdom. And wisdom means if I do X, then Y will happen. If I do A, then B will happen. It's a it's a predictive process. So that whole journey, I ended up having I ended up getting to do that journey at every echelon in the army up through a four-star command. So

Company commander, that's a unit, probably like a hundred and fifty people. battalion commander is like say six hundred, these are these numbers vary, but these are averages. and then as an O five commander, O six is like four of those twenty four hundred. And then by the time you get to four-star commander, it's like many thousands of people, right? So

Monisha Saldanha (14:34) Mm-hmm.

Tenay Benes (14:35) I ended up ha seeing this process work at scale globally.

across multiple data centers, collection operations, how do you federate data and all that stuff. And I never studied data, but I realized I got really good at finding data, synthesizing data, generating knowledge,

generating predictions about how something will happen and enabling decisions and effective decisions and then evaluating if your decisions achieved the goals that you wanted them to achieve. And so I'm take bringing that same experience into the healthcare space.

Monisha Saldanha (15:14) It's great to see the parallels between your past experience and what you're doing now in a very different venue. When you started building the care we need, what was the hardest thing to translate from your lived experience into the product?

Tenay Benes (15:30) The complexity of navigating a complex illness healing journey. there are several frameworks that I developed to help me navigate my own healing journey, and I published them all in my

Autobiography, Heal or Die,

Monisha Saldanha (15:48) Mm-hmm.

Tenay Benes (15:48) a True Story of Trauma, Complex Illness, and Unexpected Help. It documents the first five years of my healing journey from the day that I had to quit my life, leave seminary, move into my parents' attic like a homeless veteran, and you know, cried out to God and was like, Why is this happening to me? And I couldn't work, I couldn't get off the couch for more than an hour a day, and I was officially everything that I feared becoming.

And then I started searching the internet and saying, wow, the you know this whole care ecosystem is so difficult to navigate. If I can't do it, I doubt anyone can do it. And so I started creating these frameworks, which is also a very military officer kind of thing.

So one of the frameworks is seven-part person. The idea that every person has seven areas of their life that they need care in, and they need to care for each one a little bit every month, let's say, so that they can move the needle up together. That idea is foreign to most care professionals in the conventional medical system and in America. So

Seven part health. And and

The industry term that people use is whole person health. It used to be holistic health, but then holistic health got the connotation of like being really woo and yoga and mind body and Reiki and and I'm not against any of those things. but this is more than that. this includes financial health and social health and professional health, which all are affected by and affect your health, your physical health, your psychological health and needs to all be considered.

The second framework is the eight plus four complex stimulus healing journey. So eight steps and four sports, right? So now this is like, here's how I have to sequence which care professional I need to see it when.

In my journey, something that I wanted my PCP to do and never did. so and here's how we integrate wellness and human services into healthcare to give really whole person support. so trying to represent those two frameworks in the MVP version 1.0 of a platform was like I needed to pull back and be like, you know what, these frameworks are important, but I need to build the the

foundation of just the information and the directories and then we I can start tagging and sequencing and making recommendations for which care professional to see first l a little later. So I had to calm myself down. Too many features.

Monisha Saldanha (18:35) Yeah, I can I can see how that could become challenging. Healthcare founders often have to decide whether to focus first on patients, providers, employers, payers, or care organizations. Who is your first customer and why?

Tenay Benes (18:56) My first customer is the patient. And because I had a patient experience and

I was so frustrated by it. And then, as over the years, as people started coming to me, I started providing them care coaching and helping them navigate a disjointed experience, that really is the center of my heart. However, patients experiencing a complex illness and especially in a crisis have no money. They

Monisha Saldanha (19:26) Yeah.

Tenay Benes (19:27) are spending all of their money on

their care professionals, and I didn't want to incur have incur yet another financial burden upon them, and I did not want this platform to be something that only the rich could afford and benefit from. I think the people who need it the most sometimes tend to be the people who can afford it the least. So then I had to figure out how I can make this beneficial to the

the professionals, the care professionals, providers, practitioners, etc. in a way that also met their needs and helped them connect with the the patients or the clients, depending on what kind of care professional you are.

And then I know that they have a lot more income. And then I'm going to expand to organizations that they're in next because organizations have more income. But it's really how can I build an amazing service for for patients for free or nearly free in a way that also

Monisha Saldanha (20:31) Mm-hmm.

Tenay Benes (20:32) meets the needs of everybody else. So let's just make this a win-win-win situation for everyone.

Monisha Saldanha (20:39) And what is one assumption you had early on that changed after testing the idea with users, care professionals, or the Colorado startup ecosystem?

Tenay Benes (20:52) I had a list of seven feature groups that I had developed in a potential development roadmap, and I took that to a national survey of 114 respondents across East Coast, West Coast, North to North Edge to South Edge of America, I guess north border to south border, and everywhere in between. And I wanted them to rate the usability of each feature set.

And I I also asked them what their personal experience was with complex illness, either person as either as a patient or a provider. you know, direct, but it had to be direct experience. And what I found was the people who had the highest direct experience, whether personal or professional,

valued all of the features really high. But then the people who had the least experience valued the directory, the free directory just finding care professionals the highest. And that was surprising to me. I thought that they would rate some of the other features.

And so I I decided to make the MVP refer suite, is what I call it, the free patient provider matching directory. It's not a matching algorithm or anything, so that people can just start there with the basic first step of their healing journey.

Monisha Saldanha (22:24) How do you think about using technology to connect the dots across medical care, mental health, wellness, human services, lifestyle, family context, and social support?

Tenay Benes (22:37) Well the best thing that technology does for us generally is it consolidates information. And consolidating information, a lot of information.

And making it slicing and dicing it so that only the relevant information that you want is available to you in one snapshot is the primary feature that I'm trying to get technology to do. And in essence, I'm trying to make this centralized, all-inclusive national health care directory, care ecosystem directory, a health education platform, right? So If I've I'm tired all the time and I go to thecarewe need.com and I enter, I'm tired

all the time into the AI chatbot and it says, Ask me a few questions, how long has it been going on? Did anything else happen? When you started getting tired all the time. And then based on that, it recommends that we search for the following symptoms. It's translating my layman's terms, I'm tired all the time, into professional terms: fatigue, chronic fatigue, low energy,

possibly depression. if I say I'm tired all the time 'cause I just got a divorce. Right? So it's it's not diagnosing me, but it's saying what you're saying is translated into these words. Now we can search for care professionals who say they treat these symptoms. And when they do that, the average person might say, Okay, maybe I I'm expecting a primary care provider. Maybe I'm expecting a nutritionist or an exercise person, you know, a an athletic trainer.

Whatever. But they might be surprised to find a mental health expert.

Or they might be surprised to find an acupuncturist or a massage therapist. Like, what's what's massage therapy got to do with people who are tired all the time? And then they might click on that profile and just get a little bit of education and have a potential in the back of their mind for when they're ready that you know what, just their primary care provider is not the only option, is not even the only the best sometimes first option for someone who's tired all the time. But then more importantly, they might find integrative medicine or

functional medicine, people who manage sugar, people who manage life coaches, who manage your sleep patterns, or a sleep specialist. And those are things that they might not have thought of either. So I think technology can really help empower people with information. And then if we give them only the right information for them, that's the key part, then they can make much better decisions for their lives.

Monisha Saldanha (25:19) AI is becoming a major part of the healthcare conversation. Where do you think AI could genuinely help people navigating complex illnesses?

Tenay Benes (25:30) I think AI can help that initial conversation. Let's translate layman's terms into professional terms after asking some clarifying questions. I don't think AI is very good for diagnosing anything.

At all. I know that there are some platforms that are being trained to support diagnostics and there are clinical decision support systems. but I think the general AI Chat GPT Claude and all that is is not great at that. I think AI can really help with doing research on your behalf when it has really great guardrails and a very limited data set. And

So it can, you know, you can come build a profile, set up parameters for searching for these types of care professionals that you want to find or these types of patients that you're looking for, and it can continue to, you know, generate results for you and then refine your search over time.

So and then it can also help manage sequences of tasks. When you're in a complex illness healing journey or you're even a care professional, you have multiple patients, it can say, Hey, you know, you need to get back to your to replying to this message that's been, you know, four days old, or hey, your medication is ready to be refilled soon. Is that something that you want to to take care of? And to help take some of the mental load off of being your own care navigator.

and your own care coach or case manager and take some of that off your plate and put it into an external cognitive space, like a dashboard.

Monisha Saldanha (27:15) What role should technology play in helping patients tell their story more clearly without forcing them to repeat painful details over and over again?

Tenay Benes (27:27) Well, Having a a central place where our entire health history is consolidated and then using AI to summarize the relevant portions of that health history to a care professional before that first appointment could really save everyone a lot of heartache. It is As a patient, it is painful to repeat my health

history over and over and over again. You know, I've I received twenty treatments in the first year and a half of my healing journey. Twenty ti so so Twenty times I

gave told my health history, my 10-year health history, and all the medications and all the surgeries and all the this and all that. And like We have this data out there. It's just segmented. It's fragmented. So you every person has three my charts. Every time they switch a hospital system or an insurance program or they move.

Now they have three my charts and each one has some portion of their medical history, but not none of them have all of it. People have Apple Health watches. People have sleep monitors. People have, you know, smart water bottles that track their hydration. With a Bluetooth link to an app, you know. So what if we create a place where all this information could be centralized and controlled by the patient?

Not by a hospital system, not by a payer. Patient data should be controlled by the patient, and the patient should have access to all of that in one place in a way that they can use. and then they can apportion to different care professionals to make that human-to-human interaction better for everyone.

I personally believe that t in especially in the care ecosystem, technology should not replace humans. It should improve human-human interactions.

Monisha Saldanha (29:28) So is that your vision for a future product?

Tenay Benes (29:33) Absolutely. So our our MVP has a basic like tell clients will create their or p patients clients. We call them clients because not everyone calls them patients.

Can put us a quick summary of their health history, but a future feature is that they can upload or link, you know, through APIs their different health record sources, and then it automatically generates a health history or health care a lifetimeline that they can then share different pieces and parts of it to different care professionals. And then in the future we have additional

future features that we're going to start writing a federal grant for to enable universal intake to make that process even smoother for everybody.

Monisha Saldanha (30:24) Great. How do you think about privacy, trust, and emotional safety when designing tools for people who may already feel exhausted by the care system?

Tenay Benes (30:39) The weird thing is that when it comes to privacy, most patients don't care. They don't understand what the laws are, what their rights are. they don't understand what compromise of data, health data, the potential consequences that it can have. The average person doesn't. Fortunately, there are

unique individuals who go and they fight for these laws and and they make sure that the rest of us have to build health technology in a way that does provide that privacy, HIPAA, high tech, and all that. What patients do care about is they don't want to have to enter their same information in eight different places. Right? And that's where the HL7 FHAR, the data portability or the API

standards. So normalizing data structures so that any health tech can can share data with any other health tech. That's really, I think, something that the average patient could can understand.

and get behind. And so that should reduce the emotional toll for everyone, also care professionals. They don't want to have to enter their profile into eight different places, right? So why don't we build a profile that automatically updates from their personal URL or their Google business listing or whatever, so that they can just update it on their own personal website and then it gets reflected in our directory. So I think that interoperability, yeah, I didn't

I I meant to say interoperability before, not portability, that interoperability is really important. And then down the line, the EU is h is passing data portability laws. So it's the idea that after we create this interoperability, any person, say they've spent 10 years on Facebook and has Facebook has 10 years of data on them, they want to be able to export their data.

And import it to say Reddit. Maybe they decided I'm leaving Facebook forever, but I don't want to lose the history and my connections. And so I want to upload everything to Reddit and then automatically reconnect with all of my network there. So that portability is coming down the line. It's I think being enacted in Europe in the next couple of years, and then you know America will trail behind, but eventually it will happen here too.

Monisha Saldanha (33:13) You're building this product from Colorado. How has the Colorado Health Innovation and Startup ecosystem shaped your path so far?

Tenay Benes (33:23) It's been in a word wonderful. So I've lived east coast, west coast, north border, south border, and the middle of America. And I would say that the energy and the activity, the the curiosity and the risk taking that is around Boulder, CU Boulder ecosystem, but just

in the in the town separate from CU Boulder. People just they like entrepreneurship, they like innovation, and they have meetups and free things and people wanting to help each other out for no other reason than they enjoy it. Okay? And whenever somebody's doing something out of the sheer joy of it, you're always gonna get a better product than if we're, you know, we gotta make a deadline, we gotta pay the bills or something like that.

So I'll give you an example. Yesterday, you and I were at the CU Innovation Day, which was the kickoff of the Colorado Startup Week. And I didn't know that it was an event for

that included like high schoolers, but they invited high schoolers from the area. And then they had keynote speakers about who were successful, either researchers, CU researchers who were taking things to market, or they were local developers who had taken their company entrepreneurial venture public. And then they, you know, talked to them, they told them how to, you know, different ways their career could go, and they had an exhibit. And at that exhibit, they had a lot of CU programs

for alumni, for students. I ri I ran into a student entrepreneur and I was like, hey, I'm gonna connect you with another entrepreneur I I know because I think you guys could collaborate together. And he was like, awesome.

So all of that was happening. And then I went up to the one of the keynote speakers afterwards and I was like, hey, you took a a company tech a tech company public. Do you know of any resources where CEOs or of tech companies could get together and just ask questions like, should I set up my database this way? Or should I set it up this way? And he goes, actually, I run one of those at my office once a month.

And you know, I invite about twelve CEOs in, you're welcome to join. Here's my email. We'll get you on there, you know. He he knew me for two point nine seconds, but

Monisha Saldanha (35:54) Mm.

Tenay Benes (35:55) he's already doing that and paying it forward and you know I'm happy to receive any mentorship and cross-collination from anyone else and offer it as well.

Monisha Saldanha (36:06) Yeah, it's a great community in Colorado.

Tenay Benes (36:09) It is. And people really enjoy themselves, you know.

Monisha Saldanha (36:13) Yeah.

Tenay Benes (36:14) That's my favorite part.

Monisha Saldanha (36:16) You've gone through startup validation work, including user testing and ecosystem programs. What have you learned about turning a personal mission into something scalable?

Tenay Benes (36:28) You have to eat an elephant one spoon at a time. One spoonful at a time. Is that the same? Yes. English is my second language, so I don't do great with things, but I want to tell everyone everything I know and everything I've learned. meditating on this and researching it, and designing it, and testing it, and user testing and all that stuff.

at all at the same time and I want to build it all now and I just have to realize that I have probably a few decades. You know, I'm I'm personally not in it in this venture to build, scale and exit.

You know, make my first billion and and, you know, retire on a horse ranch. Like I'm this is my personal mission. I'm in it to win it for the rest of my life. So and this tech is just one part of a greater suite of non tech solutions that we also hope to bring together to transform the US care ecosystem. So everything from lobbying to different financing structures to reduce profit extraction to educational impacts and certification to bringing

care coordination in as a a valid insurance covered specialty, keynotes, data science work, and so on. So there's like a whole ecosystem we're trying to build outside of the technology. So I ha we have My husband and I ha started this with a 50-year plan.

And we're gonna keep building,

Monisha Saldanha (38:04) Fifty year.

Tenay Benes (38:05) I think. 50, 5-0, 50-year

Monisha Saldanha (38:07) Well

Tenay Benes (38:08) plan. And I think something my husband said has just always resonated with me. He said, people have a midlife crisis when their success surpasses their dreams. And the number one way to avoid a midlife crisis is to have dreams that you can't even fulfill in your own lifetime, to make them that big.

And so they have to be multi-generational plans. And these are, this is something that some other cultures do well. I think, you know, East East Asian, Southeast Asian cultures, and East Asian cultures tend to do much more. They have multi-generational plans like, let's build a the wall of China, you know. This is gonna

Monisha Saldanha (38:49) Mm-hmm.

Tenay Benes (38:49) take 30 generations. but that's okay. So we started with a 50-year plan and we are now on year three.

Monisha Saldanha (39:00) Some ways to go. For a person or family

Tenay Benes (39:04) We got time.

Monisha Saldanha (39:04) dealing Yeah, you've got some time. For a person or family dealing with complex illness, what would be different when the care we need succeeds?

Tenay Benes (39:16) They would have a single place to go to find care professionals who say they treat their symptoms. They would be able to filter by payment option, you know, insurance, direct pay, people who offer discounts to or specialize in in their demographic or population, like farm workers or veterans or post perimenopausal women, right?

and Then they'd they'd be able to filter for people who are accepting patients right now. And then they'd be able to click and schedule their appointment. And being able to do all of that in

Thirty minutes instead of three months is the goal for this first feature that we're releasing as an MVP.

Monisha Saldanha (40:11) And final question for you. What is one book every builder should read and why?

Tenay Benes (40:25) Interesting question.

I have not read a lot of tech development books. I have read a lot of information science research. So

Let me think about which research was the most impactful.

I'm gonna have to send you a link to this because I don't remember the name, but you can link it in the show notes. There was a a research article that was like in the, I don't know, 1920s or something, right? Like before computers were really a thing. But a person imagined the future of automation.

Okay. They imagined the future of robotics, they imagined the future of centralized information processing, they imagined expanded mem expanded external memory.

they called it. Like a person could remember something by putting it in this other place. And then their memories could be linked together. Right? And so this idea of like a hyperlinked internet was something that was really popular and and being pursued for a long time until HTTP took over. So but I thought it was so interesting that somebody could

look at the idea of processing zeros and ones in a base two conversation and look at the idea of like, let's take an on-off switch and let's use that to s encode words, like letters, and then turn letters into words and words into sentences and sentences into memories. And then what c how could we change the world with that? And that was really inspiring to me to say that

A lot of the things that he's talking about are real today, you know, a hundred years later. And, you know, it inspired me to say, you know what, I want to transform US healthcare, US care ecosystem. I probably won't do it in my lifetime, but that's okay. If I cast a vision, a 50-year vision or a hundred-year vision, and I communicate it well, and I get people to buy in.

That's the most important thing. I don't have to actually do the work. I I can just inspire others to continue the work and then I I will have left this planet better than I found it.

Monisha Saldanha (43:08) That's an amazing aspiration. And I'm sure you will do so. Thank you, Tenay, for joining me and sharing the story behind the care we need.

Tenay Benes (43:19) Thanks so much for having me.

Monisha Saldanha (43:19) What stood out in this

conversation is that complex illness is not just a medical problem, it is a systems problem that touches care navigation, family life, mental health, work, finances, identity, and community. Today's work reminds us that better healthcare innovation is not always about adding another app or isolated tool, but about helping people and care professionals see the full picture sooner.

The care we need is a powerful example of technology changing real lives by making fragmented care more understandable, more coordinated, and more human. Thank you again today.

Tenay Benes (43:57) Thanks so much for having me. Bye bye.