Nirvana

When You Think Health, Reach for Welfie

I wrote our vision down in 2023. The world has changed a great deal since then. Our vision has not.

I want Welfie to be a public health utility. Turn a faucet and water comes out. Flip a switch and the lights come on. I want health to work that way too. When a family has a health question, they reach for Welfie and find an answer they trust — delivered by someone from their own community.

That is the destination. Here I want to lay out why I believe in it, why it matters far beyond us, and why I have come to see this as the most important work I will ever do.

Why this matters to me

I am a physician. I trained at Johns Hopkins, and I still care for patients at UCSD, sitting with people who carry the weight of their physical and mental health at the same time. I am also an immigrant — born into Zambian and Kenyan families, shaped by Canada, building my life now in the United States. I bring those communities with me into every exam room.

From that seat, the pattern is impossible to miss. The people who need care the most tend to live in the places with the fewest people trained to give it. I have watched bright young people — many of them first-generation, many of them young women of color who have always been the backbone of community health — want a career in healthcare and get turned away at the door. One superintendent put it to us plainly: he had forty kids who wanted healthcare careers and ten spots at the local hospital. Thirty of them lost the path before they ever started.

That is the wound I want to close. I know it from both sides — as the doctor inside a system that cannot find enough hands, and as someone whose own family and homelands sit on the far end of that shortage. This work is personal for me because I have lived on both ends of the gap.

Why this matters to the world

The numbers are stark, and they are not improving on their own. The world is short roughly ten million healthcare workers, and the gap is widest in the low- and middle-income countries where access was already thinnest. The United States alone is short hundreds of thousands of mental health workers while demand keeps climbing.

Here is the part most people miss. The shortage and the inequity are the same problem wearing two faces. The communities with the worst health outcomes are the same communities with the fewest pathways into health careers. The people best positioned to care for a neighborhood — the ones who speak the language, know the streets, share the history — never get the chance to be trained. The shortage and the suffering reinforce each other, year after year.

You cannot build a public health utility without the workforce to run it. Water utilities need engineers. Power grids need linemen. Health needs people — community health workers, peer counselors, wellness coaches, nurses, social workers, physicians. The workforce is the bottleneck for everything else, so we decided to start there, at the place where the pipeline breaks: inside the classroom.

That is what Welfie's Health Force Academy does. We turn classrooms into healthcare workforce pipelines and walk a young person from career discovery all the way to a credential and a job — training them alongside AI patients, AI tutors, and AI teammates that no single teacher could provide alone. We open the door where it has always been shut, and we grow with the learner from there.

The path: Now, Next, Nirvana

Now. We built Welfie, Health Force Academy, and Health Force Pro alongside urban communities, learning firsthand what families and workers need to stay well. We have paying customers, renewing customers, and real students moving through real pathways in real schools.

Next. We are building with rural communities, where care is hardest to reach and the need runs deepest. We want to learn what rural families and rural workers need most, and adapt the platform to meet them where they are — in any language, in any local clinical context, anywhere there is a connection.

Nirvana. One day we help families everywhere. With our partners, our customers, and our network, we build and stand behind the people who care for families in every community on earth. A young person trains in their own town, earns a credential, steps into a mission-driven career, and strengthens the very neighborhood that raised them.

Generational health. Generational wealth. Everywhere.

Why this is the most important thing I will ever do

I have spent my career as a doctor trying to heal one person at a time. It is sacred work, and I will never let go of it. One doctor can only reach so many people in one lifetime, though.

Welfie lets me multiply that reach by the thousands, and then by the millions. Every learner who comes through Health Force Academy becomes a caregiver for a community that was waiting for them. Through them, I get to help heal whole communities, in the places that need them most, for generations after I am gone.

That is why I get up for this. A doctor, an immigrant, and a builder, working on the one problem that sits underneath all the others — with a real chance to solve it at the scale of the world. I cannot imagine more important work, and I do not expect to find any.

When you think health, reach for Welfie.

— Dr. Steven Moyo