Meena Mallipeddi comes from a family full of physicians. Her relatives practice medicine all over the country and the world. She calls herself the black sheep because she did not become a doctor, spending more than 15 years in finance instead, analyzing technology and healthcare companies at firms including Bain & Company, Wyper Capital, and Royce & Associates. All the while, she kept hearing the same complaints from the doctors in her life about a system that made it too hard for people to get care.

Access was the one she could not shake. Across much of the country, seeing a specialist can mean waiting seven months for a neurologist or four months for a psychiatrist, and that is only if you are insured. Mallipeddi wanted to change what she describes as a world where your ZIP code can determine your healthcare. In 2018, she and her husband, Anand Nathan, founded AmplifyMD to do it. They run the company together, which she finds funny in its own right. If the two of them have not killed each other yet, she likes to say, they must be onto something.

AmplifyMD keeps no clinics and puts no staff on the ground. Instead, it gives hospitals a ready group of specialists in cardiology, neurology, psychiatry and other fields, working through a platform that connects to the records a hospital already uses. Mallipeddi wanted to strip away the parts of remote practice that wear doctors down, like the logins, the paperwork and the scheduling, so the physician can spend the visit treating the patient. She built the company around the clinician instead of the software, hoping specialists would treat AmplifyMD as the place where they want to practice.

Hospitals have paid attention because the numbers hold up. At some sites, AmplifyMD has cut inpatient transfers by more than 80% and brought readmissions down by 30 to 40%, which keeps patients and their care inside communities that would otherwise lose both.

AmplifyMD is not a clinic, and Mallipeddi is not a doctor. Still, the company puts more specialists in front of more patients, which may be its own kind of medicine.