About the Schutzblog
I’ve been very fortunate in my travels through the working world to pick up experience in clinical care, product, technology and my real passion – tackling the biggest problems an organization faces. Through this problem solving, I’ve seen repeated patterns across companies and have organized them to make sense – to master chaos so that we can make progress. The Schutzblog is my attempt to capture the tools, frameworks and strategies I’ve developed over the years to be as helpful as possible to others who find themselves building companies and navigating challenging problems.
If you like what you read, please subscribe and comment – feedback on my work keeps me going.
If you find value in what you’re reading and think it might make sense for your company or organization, reach out to inquire about ways to work with me via Schutzworks (as an advisor, coach, project-basis, etc.)
Briefly about me:
I was born in NJ in the 80s, grew up there in the 90s. I completed undergrad at Penn, majored in Neuroscience with a minor in Psychology because I find humans fascinating and wanted to learn more. From there, I did medical and public health school at Tulane, which started as an excuse to hang out in New Orleans that then turned into love at first sight. During my second year in New Orleans, Katrina hit. My part in the recovery was migrating Tulane to Houston (thank you Texas Medical Center!!), which was thrilling, complex, chaotic and a major achievement for all involved. And the most notable thing to me during that time was that the chaos made me feel incredibly calm.
My wife, Whitney, and I met in college, married in med school and then came up to Boston for residency to get “closer to but not quite” home. I trained in Internal Medicine & Primary Care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and found my field: Solving the most important problems for my patients, whatever they were. Credit to Ben Tuttman for calling me as a primary care doctor in our senior year of college. Happy as I was to find a fit, I found the field broken. I started writing about it in the SGIM Forum and in 2010, the Schutzblog was born! Reading back it started mostly as an outlet for my frustration with a strong clinical focus. Over time it has morphed into a place where I can capture my learnings more generally from my work and share them to hopefully be as helpful as possible.
With the guidance of great mentors, I enjoyed hundreds of conversations that finally led me to Rushika Fernandopulle (and a ton of wonderful friends and mentors along the way). We hit it off, he wanted to start a company to restore humanity to healthcare and let me tag along. He couldn’t have shaken me if he tried. In the decade I spent at Iora (2010-2020), I got to do pretty much everything – design the clinical model, build software, design spaces, see patients, manage clinics, order and stock the medical equipment, sell to payors, run markets, become an executive, lead technology, run security and compliance, etc. My real passion remains that which I discovered in residency: Helping people solve their biggest problem, whatever it is and even better if the solving of that problem leads to an even bigger one, which it always does. After 10 years at Iora, COVID hit and we rebuilt our operations from physical to virtual in about five weeks. I realized how much I missed taming that chaos, and with great deliberation and reverence for the organization that raised me, I left in search of an earlier stage company.
Enter Cricket Health in 2020. I spent two years as Chief Product Officer, split evenly between getting the company developing more quickly through focus, fundraising and then selling the business. During that time, people started offering to pay me for my advice, so in 2021 with the blessing of Bobby Sepucha, CEO of Cricket (now Interwell), Schutzworks was born. Credit to James Chaukos for predicting my next steps when he frustratingly commented, “I keep asking for help and you keep giving me advice!” Later that year, SCAN Group offered me a chance to run Schutzworks at scale in a portfolio of startups they incubated. There my partner Binoy Bhansali quipped that I should, “just do product strategy, for like 100 companies.” Taking it all together, I think he was onto something, so in May of 2023 I decided to commit to Schutzworks full time and here we are!
I currently live in Cambridge, MA with my wife Whitney, the “real doctor” in the family and our three lovely children Max, Madalyn and Asa.
