How does a physician’s clinical experience become the blueprint for systemic change? What does it take to pivot from the exam room to the C-suite of a health tech company? This episode is a masterclass for any physician who believes the healthcare system is broken and wants to be part of building the solution.
We're joined by Dr. Melissa Welch, Chief Medical Officer of Sprinter Health, a physician innovator whose 40-year career provides a playbook for turning clinical insights into scalable, tech-powered solutions. Dr. Welch’s journey is a powerful example of how physicians can drive meaningful change from outside the traditional clinic walls.
In this conversation, Dr. Welch charts her unscripted career path, from her formative years at San Francisco General Hospital during the AIDS epidemic to a pivotal role at Health Catalyst. It was there she learned to leverage data and technology to improve quality outcomes—a skill set that became critical for her next chapter. She shares the core insight that has driven her entire career: simply building a clinic isn't enough if systemic barriers prevent patients from accessing care.
This realization ultimately led her to Sprinter Health, where she now leads the clinical vision for a truly innovative care delivery model. Dr. Welch breaks down how Sprinter is solving the “last mile problem” by deploying a unique W2 workforce of phlebotomists trained as community health workers. Supported by sophisticated logistics and virtual clinical oversight, this team delivers comprehensive, “one-and-done” preventative care visits directly in patients’ homes. Dr. Welch offers an insider’s look at how this model works, why it’s a game-changer for health equity, and provides actionable advice for the next generation of physician innovators who want to build the future of healthcare.
Introduction
Dr. Trevor Royce:
Welcome to Health Tech Remedy. You're tuning in to a special episode in our bonus series on physician innovators. This is where we sit down with doctors who are redefining healthcare by building solutions, leading in tech and biotech, and designing care systems that work for more people through innovation. I'm Trevor Royce, joined by my co-hosts, Tim Showalter and Paul Gerrard.
Dr. Tim Showalter:
I'm Tim Showalter. In this series, we are exploring how physicians are stepping outside the traditional clinic walls to tackle systemic problems and shape the future of care delivery.
Dr. Paul Gerrard:
And I'm Paul Gerrard. We're talking with physicians who have made bold pivots using their clinical experience as a springboard into entrepreneurship, leadership, and innovation.
Dr. Trevor Royce:
Today, we're honored to be joined by Dr. Melissa Welch, the Chief Medical Officer of Sprinter Health. She's had a remarkable 40-year career in public health and community-based care, and she joined Sprinter in 2024 to further its mission of breaking down structural barriers and reengaging people who have long been left out of the traditional healthcare system by making sure the care gets to where they live.
Dr. Tim Showalter:
Sprinter Health is using technology to reimagine in-home care, delivering diagnostic testing and care planning directly to patients right where they live. With Dr. Welch's leadership, Sprinter is addressing one of the biggest challenges in healthcare, how to serve people who are hardest to reach and most often left behind.
Dr. Paul Gerrard:
Dr. Melissa Welch is a fierce advocate for equity, workforce diversity, and the role of community healthcare workers. Melissa, welcome to Health Tech Remedy. We're so glad you're here.
Dr. Melissa Welch:
Thank you all. So great to meet you.
Dr. Trevor Royce:
Really excited for our conversation today. I guess we should probably start at the beginning. We'd love to hear your story and what path in life took you to being on this podcast today. I know you've spent decades working in public health, serving vulnerable communities, but really would love to hear a little bit about what inspired you to start down this path, pursue medicine, and then ultimately what led you to this journey of leadership and real innovation in healthcare?
The Making of a Public Health Leader: Dr. Welch’s Early Career
Dr. Melissa Welch:
Sure. I was one of those nerdy kids who always knew that I wanted to be a doctor. I know that sounds crazy, but I feel like I've been trying to fix peas in the garden or people or my sisters and siblings since as early as I can remember. But my real interest in health actually came from watching my mom, who was an LVN at Kaiser in L.A., where I grew up, nursing oncology patients, believe it or not, at end of life.
And just listening to the stories of how she, the other nurses, the doctors were a part of these people's lives, the patients and their families at such a vulnerable time in their life, I felt like it was something that just always wanting to help people I wanted to be a part of. And my mother, ever the advocate for her children, I said, "Oh, mom, I want to go into nursing." And she said, "No, if you do anything in health care, go for the top, be a doctor." So I guess we're the top of health care if you listen to my mom. But I followed her advice and I grew up in the time of healthcare is a right, not a privilege. You guys are probably as old as me, maybe, to remember that.
So being shaped by public health was a part of that journey for me in health care. And growing up in the low-income communities in L.A. that I grew up in, L.A. Compton, we access care in community-based clinics. And that just left an impression on me that I'd never forgotten and really was the journey that led me into public health and primary care.
Dr. Tim Showalter:
Just for clarification, I'm by far the oldest one out of the three of us, so I can probably relate to that. And I will also add that oncology nurses are amazing. Trevor and I are both oncologists, so you certainly lucked out as far as mothers go. But one question, I was just really curious in looking at your background, what your end of med school to first career transition was like, because it seemed like you were really heading towards making a public health impact right away. And I was just curious, what were the experiences you had in medical school that got you in that direction?
Dr. Melissa Welch:
Well, I went to Harvard Medical School, which people probably ask, "Well, how did you end up there?" It was actually a bet with my dad that I'd get in. And if I got in, he'd pay. So off to Harvard I went.
Dr. Trevor Royce:
Did he hold up his end of the deal there?
Dr. Melissa Welch:
Well, he sort of did. The first year after that, it was all on me to get loans and all the other things that we have to get to get through medical school.
But I loved going to Boston, first of all. I was homesick for the first year, but there was something very different about just being on the East Coast, the seriousness to some extent that contrasted with California. And obviously, just my learning curve in health care went through the roof. It was a time actually when throughout my four years there, primary care was becoming a big thing, needing more primary care doctors. I trained under Allan Goroll, who was one of the gurus of primary care. I still have my signed book, `Primary Care Medicine`, to this day, hopefully my grandkids will inherit it and want to keep it.
I was very much influenced by that, the need to serve the community, which is something that maybe people don't think about as part of Harvard, but very much is the essence. A very small minority community of medical students there who I think we relied on each other. All of us went into different backgrounds, but I was really influenced by the communities in medical school around Boston and wanting to serve the community. I did not want to go and do surgery at the Brigham or Mass General. I wanted to do it at Cambridge Hospital, where the surgeons let me take care of all the primary care patients. So that was just a very huge influence. And we had a big conference, actually, in medical school my fourth year that was all on celebrating primary care and the legacy of primary care and public health.
And I just remember we all who were in advanced primary care clerkships got to be a part of that. And I still have a wonderful picture of primary care in the late 1950s and what that was like that I put in every office when we had offices that I ever had. And so that was a big influence. I knew I wanted to come back to California after medical school. I love the East Coast, but I was a California girl. And I knew I didn't want to go back to L.A. because it was overwhelming to me. It was too big. I wanted something that was quaint and smaller. So I came to San Francisco.
I matched at the primary care internal medicine program at San Francisco General Hospital, smack dab in the AIDS epidemic. So I had infectious disease attending. And of course, they put the Harvard medical students on the hardest rotation at San Francisco General in the middle of just a rampant AIDS pandemic. And that was where I started my journey in public health, managing AIDS patients in San Francisco General, learning about the community, working with just gurus at the time in health care that influenced me a lot.
And then we did clerkships, obviously, in the communities as part of our primary care training. And one day I did a clerkship at a community-based clinic in San Francisco. I walked in the clinic and literally saw everything I wanted to do to change it and make it better as a resident. And when I finished my residency, an opening came up in that clinic to actually be a staff physician, which I applied for. And then the medical director quickly was ill. And I basically compelled the then director of public health that without any experience, I could run that clinic and he gave me a chance. And that was my first job out of training. So that's my journey to my first public health job.
Dr. Paul Gerrard:
It sounds like you ended up in a leadership role relatively early in your career. And since then, you've held leadership roles in a number of settings. And one of the other things that we're really hearing about nowadays is the role of health systems. We can talk about how individual physicians do things or individual nurses and people remember the impact of individual care providers. But one of the big things that I think lots of people in America have concerns about are the health systems broadly. Are there any takeaways that you've picked up in your time on how health systems really impact health outcomes and how they may either help the individual providers or work against the individual providers.
Breaking Down System Barriers to Access to Care
Dr. Melissa Welch:
I think two things for me. One, just because you see a vision of how you think care should be delivered in a community-based clinic doesn't mean that your vision is necessarily the vision that gets realized. And I learned very early that health systems have to appreciate the value of people who are doing things already with populations and communities. You have to understand the community from the community's perspective, and I call it added value.
Everybody brings added value to a point of view, a system change, a challenge, whatever you're trying to solve. I learned that in trying to create that vision of primary care in a community-based clinic that had no idea what the hell I was talking about. "What does she want?" I still remember them saying that in my head. So that added value of different perspectives is something that I ended up naming my consulting work with what's the differences around and really has helped me, I think, in my journey to helping health care systems wherever I went.
The second thing is when I went to that clinic, this is a lesson that has stayed with my career throughout to this day. I learned that just building it doesn't mean they're going to come. So I got really curious as to why we created all these resources and people were not using it. And that led me to really inquire about system barriers to access to care for vulnerable populations and what it took to try to break down those barriers. What were some of the cultural, ethnic barriers? One of the big ones that physicians were not really trained in dealing with diverse populations, which led to a whole side consulting career for me. But those were the two things that have stuck with me is access for vulnerable populations. And then secondly, just the added value of different perspectives.
Dr. Tim Showalter:
Well, I think that's a great near complete setup for talking about your role at Sprinter Health and what you're up to. But before we move into that, and I really want to hear about that, I'd also like to hear a little bit more about your time at Health Catalyst. And just reading about that stint in your bio, what occurred to me is that may shape some of your perspective on innovation and the use of technology within healthcare. And I'm just curious if you could maybe just give us some comments about your time there and what that provided to you in terms of additional skills and perspective.
A Pivot to Tech: How Health Catalyst Shaped a Data-Driven Perspective
Dr. Melissa Welch:
Health Catalyst is really a pivot point, actually, for what I call my pre-retirement years. A lot was happening during that time. This is now after the pandemic. I had done a lot of work taking care of almost 7,500 elder people across the country with the PACE program, InnovAge. And my husband actually recently died of end-stage bladder cancer. And that was happening during that time.
And I needed to pivot to, I was in Colorado, I needed to pivot to a role that did not require me to run operations, but still allowed me to add value and to drive quality care and prevention and do access. So I left voluntarily. I resigned from InnovAge to largely be a caretaker for my husband at the end of his life, but also to look for a role that allowed me the flexibility to add value without running operations. And Health Catalyst appeared. And I just love what they were doing, using data to improve systems and quality outcomes for systems of care across the country.
Turned out some of the people who were working there were people I'd worked with before during my multiple journeys at Aetna. And I absolutely love working there. I got exposed to really some great thinkers around technology and AI and how to work within systems to improve care delivery and quality, how to think about risk profiles of populations and the like. And it was my first entree into working with a tech company to drive clinical and quality care improvements.
Dr. Trevor Royce:
And then I guess building upon that as it relates to what you're doing today and your journey to Sprinter Health, I'm a firm believer that there are good jobs and there are bad jobs. And which of those is which depends on who you are as a person and what your skill set is and how good ultimately is the fit for the job. So tell us what brought you to Sprinter Health, what resonated with you about their mission or why it was a good choice for you and your next step.
Joining Sprinter Health: A Culmination of a 40-Year Mission
Dr. Melissa Welch:
So Sprinter now occurred after my husband passed. It's three months after he passed. I'm literally laying in bed thinking maybe I should just retire. I've had a good career. Maybe I should just retire and take a pause. And there are many recruiters who've known me over the course of the year. So a friend of mine who's a recruiter calls me and he says, "Well, Lisa, are you ready to go back to work?" I'm sitting there thinking to myself, "It's time for me to be challenged again to do some stuff."
And Sprinter came along. So you think about Sprinter Health and you think about a more efficient way to help people access care in a way that they can pick when it's convenient. We go to where they live, which can be a home or could be someplace else that's not necessarily the traditional home. We personalize the delivery of care to them. So they're only going to get the things that their clinical history says they need. We're focusing on prevention. We're using a different model of delivery of care to broaden primary care reach. And you think of my career and you think, oh, my God, this is a match made in heaven. And so that's how I thought about Sprinter Health. And I absolutely have loved working here from the day I got here till now.
Dr. Tim Showalter:
Just from the outside, of course, no one's career arc is really linear. There's all these parts, but it just looked to me like you knew going back from when you finished medical school that you were just building the career arc to be ready for Sprinter Health, which is so fascinating to me.
Dr. Melissa Welch:
You would think that, but honestly, my career was unscripted. The thing that was the same thread throughout was really trying to focus on primary care prevention, improving quality of care and access for vulnerable populations every place I went. Those were the tenets of, okay, did this job check those boxes? The fact that they were convenient for my family life. I have three kids that I raised and a husband who was a surgeon. That was crazy. But if it didn't fit those basic values for me, it wasn't the right fit. And so in some ways, I do think that Sprinter is a journey for me that is just a nice complement to a 40-year career.
Dr. Paul Gerrard:
So maybe we should talk about what Sprinter does and what the visits from Sprinter look like. Our understanding is it uses its in-home visits that are powered by technology. How might you describe that typical visit and how does that address gaps that can often exist for historically underserved populations?
What is a Sprinter Health Visit? Comprehensive, In-Home Preventative Care
Dr. Melissa Welch:
First, while we have created a niche for how to engage historically difficult to engage populations, we also engage everyone else. And so it really is a platform that is in many ways patient agnostic to the characteristics of the patient. And what we basically try to do at Sprinter is to personalize the care to each individual in the home setting. So each of us, all four of us, if we were going to get a Sprinter visit, our goal at Sprinter is to do what we used to call in the health plan world, one and done. We're not going to be like those in-home providers that just draw your blood or just do your blood pressure check. We're going to do everything that you need in that visit to help you close a preventative care gap.
We do a diagnostic study if you need through blood draw, which could be checking your hemoglobin A1C, helping you to coordinate a mammogram screening. And we are able to customize and personalize that during the visit because we have access to health information exchange data that gives us an intent to treat purpose, which is similar to how providers have. That allows us to see a lot more information in the clinical systems than most health plans and thereby see if you've already had your hemoglobin A1c done, we don't have to go out and do it. Or if you have something pending that your primary care provider has not ordered for you, we can do that.
We also do the health assessment. While we're at that visit, if that's necessary, we can do a health risk assessment visit, meaning that if we need to capture new diagnoses or continuing diagnoses to ensure your health plan knows what your risk is, how sick you are, if you want to think about risk in a simplistic way. And then we can make sure to do the follow-through, which is critically important for us, which is to connect you back into care with your primary care provider.
If you have one, with a specialist, if they'd like us to do that, or if you don't have a primary care provider to help you set that up. So it's a full-on, comprehensive visit that does more than just one thing, but does everything you need in one single home stop on your terms, at your time, in the way that you want us to show up. And it's very professional.
Dr. Tim Showalter:
That's great. Thinking about the impact of having sprinters really connect with patients who might otherwise not be receiving care and pulling them back to engage in the health system. I'm sure you've collected a lot of stories of impact along the way. Obviously, as physicians, it's those stories that drive the continued hard work for it. I'm just curious if there are any particular either stories from folks who have been helped by Sprinter Services or even just components of the care offerings that you find particularly inspiring or that help drive you and the team forward.
Dr. Melissa Welch:
We are collecting lots of stories. We have the dramatic stories of getting one of our patients into the emergency room when we showed up and understood that they were about to have an MI and getting all of the necessary support with the ambulance, etc. So we have those kinds of stories.
The stories that really resonate with me, though, are the stories that we get through our, we have a channel where we can see every patient feedback that occurs as an executive team. Actually, anybody in Sprinter can see it and how they score us when they go out. So our NPS scores, net promoter scores, we can see the promoters and the detractors. And I keep looking for detractors every time, but I really can't find any.
And what I love is that people talk about their sprinters, the person that we sent out, how attentive they were, how prepared they were. They had everything. They treated me so well. Those are the things that I think really make a difference. I think what I see when I step back and look at Sprinter and ask, why is this so appealing for patients and for me, quite frankly? And I think that we create a real comforting experience of care that is friendly, that is familiar, and that makes you want to get your preventative health care services done. And that just really resonates with everyone, no matter who you are.
Dr. Trevor Royce:
I think this is a really critical concept for us to spend a little bit of time on. And I love this term sprinters. It's super catchy and it makes a lot of sense and ties things in so nicely. Tell us a bit about or reflect on this last mile problem. Who are these sprinters? How do you find them? What is it that they do? And how is it that they, if they're part of the community or the community health workers, how do they create exactly what you just described, that feeling of personalized care in a very successful way?
Solving the Last Mile Problem with a W2 Community Health Workforce
Dr. Melissa Welch:
So let's talk about the who first. We actually hire sprinters as employees. So they're W2 workforce. We don't use 1099s. I've actually done home care with 1099s. It's quite difficult. There is a value created in creating a team of people who are part of something bigger. So when you hire people from communities and send them back into their own community to serve you create then another level of value. Those are who our sprinters are.
Then you start thinking about well, why aren't you sending nurse practitioners out or doctors? And you start thinking from a health care standpoint that's probably too expensive and we need to be creating alternative models of delivery using other licensed staff going out into healthcare. So phlebotomists are what our founders landed on and they can draw blood and we can train them in how to be community health outreach workers, how to engage populations. A lot of times they can teach us because they're from the population. They speak different languages. They look like the population. And so that's who our sprinters are. We train them in CHW, community health worker outreach skills. We train them in medical assistance skills, and they're already licensed professional phlebotomists. So it's really a very unique service model with a group of people who are very easy to train and deploy.
Dr. Trevor Royce:
I guess just a quick follow-up question on that. Can you talk a little bit about the areas that you serve, how you scale? It's incredible that you have W-2 workers that can serve this role and get in the communities. How do you broaden your reach to as many communities as possible? This is the classic last mile problem where you have to cover large areas.
Scaling the Model: How Technology Powers Sprinter Health's Reach
Dr. Melissa Welch:
Our chief technology officer has all these very sophisticated things that he's created. One which I just find fascinating is the ability to deploy our sprinters. We're in, I believe, 22 states now across the country. Our partners are health plans. So wherever the health plans, community patients are, that's where we are. But we have this very sophisticated system of GPS tracking and deployment and omni-channel engagement where we can route our sprinters into areas that they're deployed in, specifically down to zip codes. So it's very refined technology that's used to do that.
We know where our sprinters are at any time, so they're not sitting around. We can put them into an open spot that comes up right in their community. So all that is tech-driven. Patients can also schedule directly into our platform. So while we have patient engagement specialists, we also have the ability for the patients to just go in and schedule. So it's very tech-driven. We also overlay for the sprinters licensed personnel. So we have a suite of virtual nurse practitioners, RNs, and then providers, multi-licensed across the country so that they can work clinically, obviously, in different parts of the country. And they're available to sprinters. And that's also all technology-based.
Dr. Tim Showalter:
Great. Thank you. Well, I know we're coming close to the end of our scheduled time with you. So maybe let's ask a few final questions. One question I wanted to be sure to cover with you, since you've seen healthcare from so many different angles, for a lot of our listeners are in early stages in their career or their physicians in clinical practice who are thinking about maybe rolling up their sleeves and hopping into an entrepreneurial endeavor. What advice would you give to physicians or folks early in their career who don't really know where to start but want to make an impact on improving health care?
Advice for the Next Generation of Physician Innovators
Dr. Melissa Welch:
I would say that you first need to have a sense of what your own values are in health care. That really is an anchor for you. And that comes from first practicing. I think it's really hard to be a physician leader if you've not touched patients.
I say that to everybody I counsel. You've got to practice. I practiced for 15 years before I really did any large system changes or I practiced as I tried to do that. So I think you have to understand your own values. You have to have practice to understand the experience of patients from a system perspective. Obviously, we all are patients as well. But I think that those are two of the critical things.
And then one of the things that I did not do well early in my career, I've learned over time, is you have to really network and talk to people that you admire in healthcare and learn from them, see what they're doing, how they did it, particularly if it's an area you're interested in. I had a lot of wonderful leaders and mentors over the course of my career that just looked after me. And I'm very grateful for that. So you do have to broker those relationships. And then the last thing, people don't really think about it as something that is important. But giving back, giving back to the next up and coming leaders is so satisfying. And it's oftentimes where some of your greater lessons come from. So that's something that I've never forgotten to do is to give back.
Dr. Paul Gerrard:
Thank you for that final advice. Well, let me make it not final. The final advice that I will ask about is, is there anything we haven't asked that you think is important for our audience to hear about career development or maybe more broadly about home care, health equity, the physician's role within the health care system?
Final Thoughts: Why the Future of Healthcare is in the Home
Dr. Melissa Welch:
I would say that all of us are going to end up being caregivers. We are probably already that. Many of us who are parents are caregivers. And you cannot underestimate what it is to be able to give support to people in a setting that they feel safe, which is their home. Home care is not novel. It's been a part of our past. It's part of our present. It's going to be a part of the future of health care. And I think all of us need to be prepared to figure out how we will support that.
Dr. Trevor Royce:
Well, Dr. Welch, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your story and your work. I think it's a powerful reminder of how care delivery must meet the patients and the people where they are and where they live.
Dr. Melissa Welch:
Well, thank you, guys. It's been great talking to you. The time goes really quickly.
Dr. Trevor Royce:
Time flies when you're having fun.
Dr. Melissa Welch:
As it did on my career. I appreciate it.
Dr. Trevor Royce:
Absolutely. Well, thanks, everybody. That's it for this episode of Health Tech Remedy, our Physician Innovator series. Be sure to subscribe and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And if you know a physician innovator who we should reach out to, let us know. We'd love to hear their story. Thank you, Dr. Welch.
Dr. Melissa Welch:
Thank you.
