Founders Everywhere: Alex Harb
Alex Harb is the founder & CEO of Lena Health, a company scaling care staff with an AI Coordinator that handles routine calls and admin tasks.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Care teams are entrusted with managing a patient’s overall health and treatment, but much of their time is spent trying to reach patients on the phone. Lena Health enables health systems and payers to scale care coordination and navigation support to patients that need it most, improving access to care and community resources. They simplify healthcare navigation by combining human expertise with AI. Over the first few years, they used human-led interactions to train their AI, enabling it to augment care coordinators and to handle routine tasks more efficiently. Lena’s AI agent can make calls, enroll patients in programs, do wellness check-ins, answer questions, log consent, and either complete the call entirely or hand it off to a human care staff for the actual conversation. This saves 40-50% of time, allowing care teams to focus on meaningful, high-value interactions, while seamlessly coordinating with clinics, pharmacies, insurers, and community-based organizations.
Founder and CEO Alex Harb was on track to become a doctor, but he realized he loved building things more. He left medical school to study computer science, became an engineer, and eventually pursued entrepreneurship, combining his technical skills with a passion for solving real-world problems. Prior to Lena Health, Alex worked at the Texas Medical Center (the largest medical center in the world) where he was part of the Innovation Institute and later a fellow in the Biodesign program. These experiences shaped his vision for Lena Health, named in honor of Elena, a community clinic worker known for helping patients navigate care and access resources. She was beloved by patients and embodied the spirit of what Lena Health is building, an incredibly helpful and connected support system for patients.
What’s the inspiration behind Lena Health?
The idea came during my time at the Texas Medical Center, where I saw how many high-need patients were being hospitalized again and again for reasons that were completely avoidable, such as not refilling an oxygen tank in time, missing transportation to an appointment, or having a procedure delayed. These weren’t medical failures as much as logistical ones, and with too few nurses or care managers to support them, patients were left to navigate the complexity of healthcare on their own. I became obsessed with the idea of giving these patients a personal assistant to help with the everyday challenges of care. At the same time, as health systems faced staffing shortages and shifted to value-based care, the need for scalable solutions became even clearer. We started with human support to prove the model and are now using AI to help patients stay on track and improve outcomes at scale.
What’s Lena Health’s North Star?
Our North Star is patient outcomes. What matters most is whether engaging patients and scaling care teams with our platform and AI truly reduces hospitalizations and improves overall well-being.
Tell us about some recent milestones that Lena Health has crushed.
Launched our AI-augmented care coordination at the end of last year.
Expanded to nine customers nationwide, including three major health systems.
Enabled tens of thousands of patients to engage with our AI weekly.
Continually developing additional AI agents to handle more types of care coordination.
What sets Lena Health apart?
What sets us apart is our “Agent-native” platform. Unlike competitors that focus on automating calls with AI, Lena makes calls, monitors patients, tracks care tasks, takes inbound calls, completes notes, and escalates urgent needs to the top of the navigator’s view. Our Agent-native platform scales staff and has already proven improvements to clinical outcomes. Lena offers a “human-in-the-loop” solution that pairs Lena human navigators with the Lena AI platform. A recent statistically significant study showed that Lena reduced unplanned hospitalization, saving $3,116 per patient within 6 months.
What’s exciting is that our “human-in-the-loop” offering is now reimbursable by Medicare, Medicaid, and many other commercial payers. Our model allows health systems to deliver this care, with costs lower than the reimbursement, creating a revenue-generating opportunity for providers. AI-only vendors cannot enable reimbursement out of the box, which makes Lena an attractive and differentiated solution to scaling care coordination.
What drives you as a founder?
Early in my career at the Texas Medical Center, I saw elderly patients navigating complex health challenges entirely on their own, and it touched my heart because I have grandparents. I was raised in Latin America, where families are very close, especially with their elders. I didn’t want anyone to face illness or recovery alone. That’s why I fell in love with the idea of using AI to augment human care. I want to help patients feel supported while simplifying complex healthcare tasks. Building Lena Health is both a deeply personal mission and an intellectually exciting challenge, and it’s the vision I want to pass on to my children.
Fun Fact:
I was born in Brazil, raised in Bolivia, and grew up in Ohio. I enjoy playing tennis, hiking, and traveling.
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