I spent thirteen years inside the patient-experience machine: a handful of us deciding how Qualtrics, Press Ganey, star ratings, comments, and incentives worked for more than one thousand physicians, who owned none of it. We met every week. We decided what questions their patients would be asked, and how. We decided how the answers tied back to incentives. We decided when — and whether — they'd be allowed to see their own scores. And the biggest decision of all: whether their star ratings would be published online, with their names on them, for anyone to read.
I was the most junior person in that room, and I couldn't shake one thought. None of us administrators would ever have accepted this for ourselves. Imagine every piece of feedback you'd ever received — every offhand comment, every bad day — published permanently, out of your control, attached to your name. We'd have been horrified. And yet the only physicians who had a seat at that table were a handful of the system's strongest communicators: the highest-rated, the ones with the least to lose. The thousand+ it would land hardest on weren't in the room at all. Even later, once the technology finally let them see their numbers every day, they still had no say over any of it — not the questions, not the incentives, not the public ratings. I learned something in that room I've never been able to unlearn: being able to see your data is not the same as owning it.
So I spent the next decade trying to fix the other half. My team's entire purpose was to put real tools in physicians' hands — coaching, 360-degree feedback, communication programs designed to help them grow, not to grade them. And it worked, measurably: in one study of 636 providers, the training we built improved both patient experience and the physicians' own wellbeing — the two moving together, not at each other's expense. That's not a hunch or a slogan — there's a decade of peer-reviewed research behind it. The signal is real, and it helps both sides.
But none of it was ever the physician's to keep. Everything I built lived on the institution's dashboards, in service of the institution's scores. The person who generated the experience — who earned every number — owned none of the record of it. And the problem has only grown: more practitioners than ever are employees now, with even less control over the instrument tied to their own name.
So I left, and started building the thing that should have existed.
Early on, an orthopedic surgeon saw it. Before the demo was even through, he was naming his own frustrations: “I see 1,800 patients a year, and I have 83 Google reviews. I can't see my own numbers. I can't grow my own name. And when a review is flat-out wrong, there's nothing I can do about it.” We realized we were hearing the other side of that room — the physician who never got a seat, saying out loud exactly what I'd spent almost thirteen years wishing I could hand him. He wasn't asking to be measured. He was asking to own.
That's Harpy: the patient-experience layer the practitioner owns — the feedback that helps them grow, and the reputation that grows with them, built for them instead of measuring them for someone else. It runs on a conviction I proved long before I named it: caring for the practitioner is caring for the patient. The two have never been at odds. Practitioners who feel seen; patients who feel heard. That's the whole idea. It just needed to belong to the people who earned it.