My Mission

Creating a healthcare system people love

When most people think of improving health, they think of patient care or research, not the boring part of health insurance or even more removed, the systems by which we buy insurance. Our CEO, Chris Ellis, originally was an MIT cancer researcher—but he realized that he might have more impact on people’s health by fixing the US’s broken health insurance system. And that’s why he co-founded Thatch, a modern insurance market place that puts individual members first.

In the US, most people get their insurance via their employer. This means you’re tied to your job for insurance. It also means that the insurance company typically only has you “on their books” for 2.5 years, the average tenure of an employee at a given job. Insurers thus rationally only care about your cost to them for 2.5 years—while you care about your life-long health. Your time horizons are misaligned: they don’t care about keeping you healthy; only about minimizing your costs from sickness, now.

At Thatch, we want to fix that. We do that by building a platform that allows individuals to buy a wide range of insurance products and take insurance with them when they switch employers. Technically, this happens under what’s called an Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA) whereby an employer gives an employee a fixed amount of money they can then spend on insurance and other qualified health expenses. This gives people more choices and empowers them to do what’s right by them, vs. being stuck in a one-size-fits-most employment based insurance system.

My specific role as a product designer is to make it simple for our members to choose the right insurance plan among the many choices they suddenly have. I want to make sure you know all the tradeoffs when you choose a plan, so you can have access to the doctors and facilities that matter most to your health. After all, it doesn’t matter that the US has the best doctors and hospitals, if the wrong insurance plan or a lack of access keeps you from doing what’s best for your own health.

We’re not going to fix this broken system in a year, of course. But I think my work of putting our members first and designing an enrollment flow that empowers them to pick a better insurance goes a long way. Over time, more informed and choosy members will change the incentives for insurance companies, which down the road will improve the system for all.

My Path

Canadian tech person working at US healthcare fintech start-up

I grew up in Toronto, Canada, and thus didn’t know much about healthcare in the US. We have a single-payer system that has its own problems, but nothing like the complexity of the US system.

At my high school, I was surrounded by people interested in software technology and entrepreneurship, but when I went off to university, I didn’t know yet what I wanted to do. I enrolled in a rather general systems design engineering program, figuring that it would help guide me toward something I could focus on. While at university, I got to know peers just a bit ahead of me who worked on visual interfaces and helped me get my first internship at a fintech company. I also took classes on general design principles, and found it fascinating to learn about how people interact with the world around them via interfaces and technology.

Fintech and healthcare are a great challenge for a product designer. They involve archaic systems, which often aren’t great to interact with. Users know they are painful, but don’t know what greatness would look like.

I found my first job out of college at Thatch kind of by luck: I was scrolling through a VC job board, liked Thatch’s mission of creating healthcare system that people love, and thought that by joining a small org (20 people when I applied) I could make a real difference. I became product designer #1 when Thatch had 32 employees. 1.5 years later, we’ve grown to 150 people, and I’m now on a team of with soon four product designs