The challenge

Before 2020, a Catapult Health checkup happened at work. Our health techs set up in employers’ offices, and employees stepped away from their desks for a full preventive exam, one appointment after another.

Then COVID emptied those offices. The rooms went dark, the schedules went blank, and the model the company was built on stopped.

The question was no longer how to grow. It was how to survive.

Our patients were losing something too. People stopped seeing their primary care doctors, and the problems a checkup catches early were going unchecked. Preventive care was needed more than ever, just as the usual way to get it disappeared.

So we flipped the model. If people couldn’t come to the checkup, the checkup would go to them: a kit delivered to their home, a lab we stood up to process the samples, and a video visit with a clinician to walk through the results. That idea became VirtualCheckup.

What we were up against

To the patient, VirtualCheckup had to feel like one simple thing: get a kit, take the test, talk to a clinician, get answers.

Behind that were five systems that had never worked together: at-home diagnostic testing, a laboratory, kit fulfillment, video consultations, and electronic health records. Each had its own data, its own timing, and its own ways to fail. And every piece had to meet healthcare’s privacy and security standards from day one.

My role

I led the technology and product development of VirtualCheckup from concept to nationwide deployment. My job was to turn a survival question into a product plan: what to build, how to build it, and how to get it to patients in nine months. That meant owning product strategy and technology architecture, and partnering with executive leadership on the business model and growth.

A home kit sounds simple until you follow one:

  1. Warehouse
  2. Doorstep
  3. Kitchen counter
  4. Mailbox
  5. Lab
  6. Clinician

Every handoff is a place where a kit, and a patient, can get lost.

So the job wasn’t building an app. It was building a system, and getting three teams to run it as one:

  • Product and technology, the teams I led, built the patient experience and the platform underneath it.
  • Marketing and I worked out how to get people to finish, not just sign up. A kit sitting unused on a counter helps no one.
  • Operations needed to see every kit at every step. We built the software that tracks each one from warehouse to lab to results, so the team could spot a stuck kit and fix it before the patient noticed.

Decisions and tradeoffs

Build or buy

Buying would have given us a faster start, but it would have given us a collection of tools, not a product. We needed one experience connecting patients, a lab, fulfillment, and clinicians, and we needed to keep improving it as we learned what worked. We were also about to ask people to collect their own blood and put it in the mail, something almost no one had done before. If any step felt confusing or careless, they wouldn’t do it.

So we built the core platform ourselves. It was a deliberate tradeoff: more to build and more to own, on a nine-month clock, in exchange for control of the experience and the freedom to change it quickly. In a business being reinvented in real time, that freedom was worth more than a head start.

What to measure

Sign-ups were easy to count and easy to celebrate, but a kit that never comes back is a cost, not a checkup. We made completion rate the number that mattered, and that one choice shaped everything else: how we wrote each message, when we followed up, how simple the box had to be. It put product, marketing, and operations behind the same finish line.

How to decide without knowing

We made most of these calls without knowing whether they would work. Would people trust a lab kit in the mail? Would the operation scale? Could we launch in nine months? We couldn’t answer those questions up front, so we didn’t wait to. We made the best call we could, launched, watched what happened, and changed course quickly. The goal wasn’t to eliminate uncertainty before acting. It was to learn faster than the deadline arrived.

Execution

We had nine months. A traditional, sequential development process would never have worked. So I organized the project into parallel workstreams, each moving toward the same launch date.

I stayed deeply involved in the patient experience, reviewing the critical interactions and challenging anything that introduced unnecessary friction. We were asking people to do something unfamiliar, and every detail mattered.

And I had to keep the team together. This was a time of deep uncertainty, for the company and for the country. Everyone was carrying the weight of COVID at home and at work. Part of my job was to rally people around a goal worth working for, and to help a team under real pressure work as one.

We spent an extraordinary amount of time on details that might have seemed small, because for a patient, those details were the experience:

  • The box. How it was designed, and what someone feels when they open it at home: clear, calm, nothing intimidating.
  • Every message. Each word of every text, and how and when to send it, so patients always knew the next step.
  • The results moment. A text the moment someone’s labs were ready, with a direct path to book their consultation.
  • The scheduling. We built a scheduler that integrated with our providers’ calendars and matched each patient to a clinician based on consult length and real availability, so getting from results to a conversation took a tap, not a phone call.
  • The clinician conversation. What our nurse practitioners should focus on in a short video visit, so every patient left with something to act on.
  • The data. Which data points to collect, and which to leave out.

Nine months later, a checkup that used to require an office worked from a box on the doorstep to a conversation with a clinician.

Outcomes

On day one, almost 1,100 patients signed up for a VirtualCheckup. We were shocked.

It took off from there. Within three years, VirtualCheckup grew to more than half of Catapult Health’s revenue. What started as a way to survive became the core of the business.

The technology mattered, but the bigger result was strategic. The threat to the company’s original business model became the foundation of its next one.

Lessons

A few things I carry from VirtualCheckup into every new product:

A crisis is a gift of focus

When the old model stopped, every debate that usually slows a company down disappeared. We had one problem and nine months. The lesson isn’t to wait for a crisis. It’s to create that same clarity on purpose: one problem, one deadline, everyone pointed the same way.

When you ask for trust, the experience is the strategy

We chose to own the core experience because we were asking people to do something unusual. The more you ask of a customer, the more important it becomes to control the experience you deliver.

You’re building a system, not an app

The software was only part of the challenge. The harder work was connecting product, marketing, operations, the lab, and our clinicians into one coordinated system. Give every team the same number to care about and the same view of the work, and they start acting like one team.

Leadership is about people, first

Strategy, architecture, and deadlines all mattered, but none of it happens without the people doing the work. In the middle of a pandemic, with uncertainty at home and at work, this team committed to building something no one had built before. My most important job wasn’t any single decision. It was giving them a reason to believe, the support to do their best work, and the trust to own their part of it.