Christopher Look
Founding Engineer @ Fortuna Health
Founding Engineer @ Fortuna Health
American healthcare is a mess. Built up piecemeal over decades, different players have added processes to provide and extract value from the system. The result has been an institution that is complex, expensive, and fraught with misaligned incentives. One day, I hope to see a system that prioritizes people's health, and players that profit from health rather than sickness.
We need new business models. We need to move away from the traditional fee-for-service model and towards a model where we pay for outcomes. Eventually, with this approach, both payers and providers will be incentivized to get more people participating in their health and will profit from that. Hopefully one day, paying for healthcare will be like paying for a haircut.
Simplicity is king for lowering costs. Legislators and policymakers continuously believe the solution to lowering cost is more rules, more regulations, and more complexity. While they have the best intentions, they cannot foresee how players will find ways to game the system. To avoid the complexity of the current system, we need new players to make their own rules and build from first principles. Incumbents are rarely the best-positioned players to create new business models.
If you have an opinion, differing or similar, on any of these, I'm always trying to learn from others. Please reach out!
Founding Engineer • Oct 2024 - Present
Fortuna Health is a Medcaid eligibility and enrollment improvement platform. We work with Providers and Payers to improve enrollment and renewal so members can get the care they were promised.
Senior Engineer • Nov 2023 - Sep 2024
Software Engineer • Jan 2022 - Nov 2023
Blueberry Pediatrics is an online pediatric concierge care. They provide a team of board-certified pediatricians that you can call 24/7.
SDE I • Sep 2020 - Jan 2022
SDE Intern • May 2019 - Aug 2019
AWS STS is a service that allows you to manage temporary credentials for AWS resources. One of the most called services in AWS, they handle volume for all AWS customers.
Software Engineer Intern • Jun 2018 - Aug 2018
Flatiron Health offers OncoEMR, a platform for oncologists to manage their patients. They use their datastore to gather insights about cancers from real world data.
Synapto was an early stage biotech company revolutionizing Alzheimer's diagnosis through portable EEG and Machine Learning. It has since taken a hiatus and may return in the future. It was awarded over $40,000 throughout its lifetime in various competitions.
If you use Google Meet for work, I'm sure you're familiar with the stress of needing to remember to join the meeting at the right time. You spend the 15 minutes before the meeting not concentrating as well because you don't want to miss it. I made an extension to call you when your meeting starts so you can focus on your work.
Inspired by my time at Synapto, EEGML is a toolkit that simplifies classification of EEG data using machine learning. The user writes preprocessing and feature extraction functions and the library handles the rest.
Senvision was a project to use news based trading algorithms to give millennials trading advice. We developed a trading algorithm that 2x'ed the underlying stocks they traded.
Allostery is the interaction of a non-binding site of a protein with the binding site. Here, I with a team of researchers, investigated mechanism behind the allosteric interaction of BirA and found a novel method of predicting critical amino acids.
The book that changed how I prioritize everything in my life. I now aim to be happier and healthier so I can bring more of that into the world.
My favorite book in the last few years. Pahlka expertly describes how government culture, not the individuals, fails the American people and how to fix it.
A startup fundamental, Ries argues that building is about learning and validating hypotheses. Now I recognize that building without learning is a waste for a startup.
A classic business book. Christensen asserts that incumbents chase higher and higher revenues, ignoring the needs of emerging markets. Startups therefore are best positioned to disrupt the market.
A book about how to build a culture of innovation. Hoffman argues that freedom and responsibility foster more innovation than a process and controls.
A must read for any entrepreneur. Fitzpatrick, an engineer, teaches you how to validate your idea before you build it.
A book that describes culture as the sum of the behaviors of the people in the organization. Leaders must be aware their actions will be emulated.
Jim Collins describes his studies on what differentiates great companies from good ones. It starts with having the right people along with a culture of discipline.
Rosenthal lists many examples of the misaligned incentives in the Healthcare industry. While I agree with many of the problems, I think innovation will come from new business models rather than policy.
From the author of The Innovator's Dilemma, this book is nearly a textbook on how to lower costs and create efficiency in healthcare. It is the best argument for value-based care I have read.
An essential for any entrepreneuer who sells d2c. Ellis teaches a framework for rapidly testing and iterating on growth levers. Jared Flamm used this at Blueberry and saved the company from running out of cash.
A book targeted towards entrepreneurs describing where the problems are in healthcare, and what founders can do to solve them.