Why I'm building Libby
I'm Ras Patel, and I'm building Libby Health. Libby is a product from Zebra Diagnostics, the company I founded in 2025.
Where this started
I studied biochemistry at NYU on a pre-med track. While I was in school I worked as a medical assistant at a clinic in New York City. Much of the job wasn't medicine. It was scheduling visits, sending faxes and emails, and coordinating with other providers, so that each patient carried as little of the burden as we could manage.
I remember sitting with a patient, shuffling through his papers and making small talk. I asked him what he did for work. He told me, “Work? Just staying alive is a full-time job.”
What I did before
After school I spent a decade across the startup stack: design, product, growth and engineering. I was a full-stack engineer at MyBankTracker. At Shoptiques I went from lead platform engineer to engineering director to senior director of growth. I co-founded Bravely as CTO, then worked as a software engineer at Google from 2019 to 2023.
Why I came back to healthcare
In 2023, close family friends of mine went through the nightmare scenario in the American healthcare system. After watching everything they went through and seeing the inefficiency, I realized not much had changed since my time in the medical field.
In 2025 I started Zebra Diagnostics to work on diagnosis and clinical reasoning full-time. Zebra's goal is to save 200,000 lives over the next 8 years via improved access, reduced friction, and precision medicine. And if our back of the napkin math holds, we hope to save a lot more.
Now I've started Libby Health to fix the structural friction that gets in the way of people living healthier and more fulfilling lives. I'm planning on working in this space for the next 40 years, and I don't think we're ever going to run out of things to fix.
What Libby believes
Patients have a right to their own data. In fact, they are the ones in healthcare who have that right. The law says your health history is yours, but the systems that hold it were built for institutions, and your records end up scattered across every office you've visited.
Whatever we build, your records stay yours. Export them, share them, bring them to a doctor, or use them with the tools you trust.
Why we're starting with the record
Rapid progress in artificial intelligence means everyone can have clinical superintelligence for free. AIs may soon surpass top experts in their domain.
AI can think and reason and apply civilization's understanding of medicine, but that understanding is meaningless without knowing you. That real person and your story about life in the messy world is what needs to come together for care. We see the medical record and health data as your story. If we can combine your story with clinical superintelligence you can have the best care in the world. Instant, accessible, affordable.
Libby makes it easy to tell your story. We bring all of your health data together in one place and act as your champion. We import your data from wherever it lives, clean and structure it, and protect it for you. We make every task to better health intuitive and automatic.
We're on our way to realizing the promise of precision medicine. And we're unraveling the fragmentation of American healthcare's tens of thousands of institutions to bring it to you.
So Libby starts as the record. Today you can upload lab PDFs from Quest, Labcorp or anywhere else. Libby extracts the values, tracks them over time and overlays functional reference ranges on the standard lab ranges, so you see trends, not snapshots. You can ask about your results in Libby's chat or in Claude and ChatGPT, and export them with your own notes for your clinician.
Next we're working on pulling your full record from the national network and patient portals, and then on an agent that handles the admin of healthcare for you, starting with booking, insurance checks and refills. None of that is live yet.
More about me and the other things I've built is on my personal site, raspatel.com.
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