Physician Builders Spotlight: Elevate X Health CEO Hillary Lin

After the incredible response we received to our post about why more physicians should start companies, we're shining light on MD-entrepreneurs. Each week, we feature someone building a cool product or company that you definitely want to know about. Know someone else who should be featured? Reply in the comments or let us know directly! (theresa@offcall.com)

1. What inspired you to become a physician-entrepreneur?

My journey to physician entrepreneurship was born from a profound sense of moral outrage at what I witnessed in traditional medicine. During my training at Stanford and beyond, I experienced firsthand the burnout and frustration of trying to treat patients in a broken system. Each day felt like Groundhog Day — we were sadly losing the fight to rescue people from illness, working on a never-ending treadmill of disease that seemed to be promoted by the very healthcare system itself.

I found myself treating the same preventable conditions over and over, applying band-aids when patients truly needed transformation. While I loved clinical medicine, the disconnect between what medical science was capable of and what we were actually delivering became unbearable.

My experience in primary care telemedicine with Accolade showed me how technology could expand access to care, but I still saw fundamental limitations. This realization drove me to co-found Curio, a mental health and patient navigation platform that we successfully scaled across five states. That experience confirmed that combining clinical expertise with entrepreneurial thinking could create meaningful change in healthcare delivery.

When I saw the emerging opportunity in longevity medicine — with its fragmented landscape and lack of standardized, evidence-based approaches — I knew there was a chance to build something truly transformative that could address root causes rather than just treat symptoms.

2. Tell us about what your company does and what problem you're trying to solve.

Elevate X Health is building the first AI-powered collaborative intelligence network that connects physicians and health systems to transform healthcare from reactive treatment to evidence-based precision longevity medicine. We're addressing several critical challenges in the rapidly evolving longevity healthcare landscape:

First, there's tremendous fragmentation in the market. With over 800 independent longevity practices nationwide each developing their own approaches, there's little standardization or data sharing. This creates inconsistent care quality and significantly limits the advancement of evidence-based longevity medicine. Our platform connects these isolated practitioners into a powerful network where clinical insights and outcomes are continuously shared and validated.

Second, physicians are drowning in administrative burdens while medical knowledge is doubling every 73 days, making it nearly impossible to stay current with precision longevity advances. Our AI system reduces documentation time by 85% while providing personalized clinical decision support backed by continuously updated evidence. This allows physicians to practice at the top of their license while confidently implementing cutting-edge approaches.

Third, the current healthcare model remains focused on reactive treatment rather than proactive optimization, despite growing demand from patients seeking to extend both lifespan and healthspan. Our platform bridges this gap by continuously collecting and synthesizing real-world clinical data across our network, providing evidence validation for precision medicine decisions with confidence ratings backed by multi-modal biomarker analysis.

Our ultimate vision extends beyond building a successful company. We aim to prove that treating for wellness, not just sickness, is both cost-effective and leads to healthier patients and more fulfilled physicians. By creating the first comprehensive ecosystem where AI technology continuously learns from collective clinical expertise, we're establishing a powerful proof of concept for preventive, personalized medicine at scale.

3. What's your advice for a physician who’s thinking about pursuing entrepreneurship or a nontraditional career in medicine?

The first leap is the hardest one, but it is so worth it. We were all trained from an early age to believe in the system and to stay within the walls of traditional healthcare, but this is the big lie. If we do that, the best we can hope for is to help a few who are drowning in the sick-care system. Instead, we should seek to lead, inspire, and innovate for a new generation of doctors and patients.

Start by deeply understanding the problem you want to solve. Medicine gives us unique insight into healthcare challenges, but solving them at scale requires thinking beyond individual patient encounters to systems.

Embrace interdisciplinary collaboration. Some of our most valuable innovations have come from bringing together clinical expertise with technology, operations, and business perspectives. At both my current company and my previous startup, I've found that diverse skillsets — healthcare operations expertise, AI implementation experience, and clinical knowledge — create powerful synergies that drive innovation.

Don't underestimate the power of your clinical training. The analytical thinking, evidence-based approach, and empathy that you've developed as a physician are invaluable in entrepreneurship. At the same time, be willing to learn entirely new domains — whether that's finance, product development, or team building.

Finally, build a support network of entrepreneurs, not just physician-entrepreneurs (which is a tiny group!). I've found tremendous value in groups like Pepper, Wellness Growth Mastermind, Longevity Docs, Healthtech Nerds, and many others that offer support in countless ways. These communities provide both practical advice and moral support during difficult moments.

Remember that pursuing entrepreneurship doesn't mean abandoning medicine — it's about amplifying your impact and addressing problems you couldn't solve through clinical practice alone.

4. What's one lesson you've learned since building your company about entrepreneurship that wasn't obvious to you before?

The most surprising lesson I've learned is that execution and timing matter even more than the idea itself. We experienced this when we attempted to bring an experiential method of health intervention to reality — psychedelic-assisted therapy — and quickly discovered that the culture of medicine wasn't ready for it. The timing of the market and regulatory headwinds were simply not favorable, regardless of how promising the treatment was.

This taught me that understanding the social and regulatory context is as crucial as the innovation itself. Great ideas can fail if introduced at the wrong time or in the wrong environment.

In healthcare particularly, building trust is currency. We've found that our physician-led approach creates credibility that technology-only companies struggle to establish. Trust accelerates everything from clinic acquisitions to patient adoption to regulatory navigation.

I've also learned that entrepreneurship requires much more comfort with ambiguity than medicine typically does. In clinical practice, we follow evidence-based protocols with relatively predictable outcomes. In building a company, you're constantly making decisions with incomplete information, balancing calculated risks, and adapting to unexpected challenges.

Perhaps most importantly, I've discovered that creating the right team culture is as important as having the right strategy. The technological and business innovations we're implementing are only possible because we've built a team that combines clinical excellence with operational discipline and technological expertise—all united by a shared mission to transform how people experience healthcare in their pursuit of longer, healthier lives.

Connect with Dr. Hillary Lin on her website and follow her work and writing on LinkedIn.