My father was diagnosed with Parkinson's 16 years ago.
For the first several years, I made a choice that seemed right at the time: I treated him as if he didn't have the disease. In many ways, I think he wanted that too. We didn't dwell on it. We didn't let it define our relationship.
But Parkinson's doesn't stop. It's progressive. Degenerative. And as the disease advanced, that stance stopped working. The problem is, I couldn't step out of that mindset. I was stuck in it.
What haunts me most isn't that I didn't know enough about Parkinson's. I knew the symptoms, the treatments, some therapies. But I never sat down with a doctor to truly understand it, to build the framework for empathy. I never developed the emotional understanding to meet him where he was.
Part of what kept me there was distance. My father sought treatment everywhere: Mexico, the Mayo Clinic in Florida, the United Kingdom. But I wasn't there with him. I wasn't in the room at Mayo when the doctors explained what to expect. No physician ever sat me down to help me understand the disease, to truly grasp what he was feeling, to prepare me for what was coming.
I never built that knowledge base. And without it, I stayed emotionally distant.
Then came the practical reality.
My father's inability to navigate the healthcare system isn't just the disease, though Parkinson's doesn't help. It's that the system is fundamentally broken. Navigating CVS phone menus. Accessing pharmacy systems that require VPNs from Mexico. Coordinating across time zones and borders and incompatible platforms. These are technology problems masquerading as healthcare problems.
So that operational burden fell to me.
I coordinate his medications across borders. Amantadine from a Mexican pharmacy when it runs out. Carbidopa-levodopa through CVS in the United States. I've spent countless hours on hold, speaking to (admittedly very kind) pharmacists about whether they can have a prescription ready by 3 PM because someone is flying out that night. Can you do a six-month supply? Which location has it in stock? I've placed orders at pharmacies in Palo Alto, San Diego, Colorado, New York. Wherever I can find someone willing to hand-carry pills across a border.
And here's the thing: if I can barely navigate this, with resources, with technical literacy, with people traveling between countries, who can?
The medical fragmentation is even worse. My father has accessed care in different countries. But at each location, they started from scratch. Same questions. Same examinations. No continuity. The doctors in Mexico didn't have his records from Mayo. Mayo didn't have his history from the UK. Every interaction reset to zero.
His case is particular. He's worked hard to have resources and access that most people don't. But if the system fails us with every advantage, what does it do to everyone else?
A year ago, after graduating from Stanford GSB, it all crystallized.
I'd always been obsessed with technology. Every new tool, every emerging platform, every experimental feature. I need to try it, understand it, build with it. My friends tolerate my AI-generated songs, the videos I make of them, the Photoshops where they're . I build websites for everything. I can't help myself.
I was born at the right moment. AI is the Iniesta to my Xavi, though let's be honest, I'm probably more of a Busquets. Either way, we click.
And suddenly I could see it: AI was making something fundamentally new possible. Not just information retrieval, but understanding. Multimodal models that can read medical images, transcribe and analyze doctor's notes from voice recordings, translate complex medical terminology into context that makes sense for you. Systems that can maintain continuity across fragmented records, that can be there at 2 AM when you're trying to understand a new symptom, that can help build the empathy and knowledge base I never developed.
I was watching incredible companies being built that leveraged this technology. Amazing teams in the US building the future of healthcare AI. But my fear was growing: no one was building it for Latin America.
Three months ago, I went to Radar Healthtech, a large healthtech conference in Mexico. Not one person mentioned LLMs. Not one.
That's when I knew: if this is going to exist for Latin America, I need to build it. It's up to me.
The gap I'd experienced, between diagnosis and understanding, between scattered records and continuity, between institutional systems and actual patient needs, could finally be bridged.
Not by making information available. Information has been available. But by making it accessible in context, personalized, continuous. By building patient-driven tools that put power where it belongs.
I've done this before. As an early employee at Bitso, I helped build the financial rails connecting Latin America to global markets. We gave people real ownership of their finances, breaking down the gatekeepers who profited from complexity and opacity. I watched what happened when you put control directly in users' hands. When someone in Mexico City could access the same financial tools as someone in San Francisco, not through institutional permission, but through infrastructure that worked for them.
The parallels to healthcare are striking. The same gatekeepers, the same fragmentation, the same opportunity to build systems that put control where it belongs.
I've spent the last year understanding everything there is to understand about AI: vector databases and embeddings, RAG pipelines, context engineering and context windows, attention mechanisms and fine-tuning, multimodal architectures that handle text and images and voice simultaneously. The timing is perfect. The technology is here.
But more importantly, I know why to build this.
Because I've watched someone with every advantage struggle against systems designed for institutional convenience rather than human need. I've played pharmacist coordinator across international borders. I've felt the gap between medical knowledge and accessible understanding, between diagnosis and empathy, between scattered records and actual continuity of care.
This is what AI abundance will change. The power belongs in the patient's hands. Information that meets you where you are instead of requiring you to be in a specific room at a specific appointment. Understanding that's accessible at 2 AM when symptoms change, not just during office hours. Control over your own health journey, regardless of which doctor you're seeing or which system you're navigating.
The AI revolution is here to change healthcare. I'm building the engine that actually delivers it.
Not because healthcare technology is interesting (though it is). Not because there's a market opportunity (though there is). But because I've seen what's broken even with every advantage. Because if the system fails those with resources, technical literacy, and cross-border mobility, it's catastrophically failing everyone else.
AI is making medical intelligence abundant. Now we need to build the systems that put that abundance where it belongs: in the hands of patients and the people who love them.