We are Ursa Health: Meet Jonika Tannous
March 11, 2026
What’s your role at Ursa Health and what do you do?
Formed by clinical, IT, and healthcare industry veterans dedicated to improving quality and reducing waste in the U.S. healthcare system, Ursa Health is the company behind Ursa Studio, healthcare’s pioneering analytics development platform. Our focus: transforming analytics so you can transform healthcare.
Chief Executive Officer
As a physician executive for UCLA Health’s ACO, Robin developed and led the enterprise-wide care transformation infrastructure, which still includes hundreds of clinicians…
Chief Product Officer
Over the course of a 20-year career in technology and healthcare, he has held positions on both the supply and demand side of data and analytics…
Chief Technology Officer
Before joining Ursa Health, Steve was head of development at xTuple, the world’s #1 open-source ERP software company, managing a diverse development team that spanned four continents…
Chief Administrative & Privacy Officer
Before joining Ursa, Caroline was vice president of partnerships for Aspire Health, the nation’s largest home-based palliative care company, where she was the business and operations liaison between…
Chief Innovation Officer
Before joining Ursa, Aaron was director of operations at Contessa Health, where he worked with payers, hospital systems, and ancillary providers to deploy the clinical services and financial operations…
Chief Operating Officer
Sofiya spent nearly 20 years on the provider side building and scaling value-based care strategy and operations…
Vice President of Growth
Tiffany Wandy is a public health-trained growth and strategy leader with deep experience spanning the payor, provider, and digital health sectors…
Ursa Health began inside one of the nation’s most complex academic health systems, where the promise of data-driven healthcare collided with the reality of opaque, inflexible analytics. Robin Clarke, a primary care physician and PCORI-funded principal investigator, had been recruited to UCLA Health to support performance improvement across the system. UCLA had many of the right ingredients for success: strong physician engagement, meaningful downside risk, and ambitious goals for value-based care. What it lacked was something far more fundamental — clear, trustworthy information to guide change.
Despite being surrounded by data, Robin and his colleagues struggled to answer basic but critical questions. Population health platforms offered standardized, “black box” metrics that were directionally useful but failed to reflect the real clinical and business conditions of UCLA’s ACO contracts, provider networks, and payor mix. Internal IT teams were stretched thin maintaining infrastructure and data pipelines, leaving little capacity to adapt analytics to local needs. What quickly became clear was that meaningful insight required context. An off-the-shelf PMPM measure might spark a question but leaders inevitably needed to go deeper, carving out specific encounter types, excluding certain claims, or refining attribution logic to reflect the unique operational and clinical dynamics on the ground.
To tackle these challenges, Robin partnered with Andy Hackbarth, a veteran of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, CMS, and RAND. At UCLA Health, Andy spent years answering questions that spanned inpatient transitions, ambulatory care, clinical quality, finance, and strategy—working across eight payer claims feeds and the full breadth of EMR data. Together, they supported specialists building centers of excellence, defined books of business, developed novel episodes and bundles of care, and measured outcomes that mattered clinically and financially. From a primary care lens, they tracked longitudinal KPIs for chronic disease populations, processes of care, and the prevention of adverse events.
Through this work, Robin and Andy began to see patterns. They developed reusable conventions for governing data, authoring measures, and iterating quickly as new questions emerged. What started as an entrepreneurial, hands-on analytics shop evolved into a repeatable approach for scaling custom insights without starting from scratch each time. That realization sparked a pivotal idea: if these patterns could be embedded into software, they could help organizations everywhere overcome the same barriers to meaningful analytics.
To bring that vision to life, Robin and Andy partnered with Steve Hackbarth, a full-stack software engineer whose technical expertise completed the founding team. Together, they built what would become Ursa Studio, a transparent, no-code analytics environment where clinicians, analysts, and operators could see exactly how measures were constructed, refine logic collaboratively, and move from question to insight with speed.
Ursa Health was born from lived experience, not theory. It exists because its founders refused to accept that healthcare analytics had to be rigid, opaque, or disconnected from reality — and because they believed that better decisions, grounded in transparent data, could meaningfully improve care.
Behind every great product is an equally great team, made up of people who prioritize game-changing results for clients and the right kind of workplace for employees. We understand that means keeping a critical eye on what we do, how we do it, and why we do it, and being open to feedback and change at every step. Read more about our team on our blog, where each colleague—including our founders—shares more about their background and role at Ursa Health as well as what makes them tick.
What’s your role at Ursa Health and what do you do?
What’s your role at Ursa Health and what do you do?
What’s your role at Ursa Health and what do you do?
Think you might want to join the Ursa team? We don’t blame you! It’s exciting to come to work here every day, knowing you’re part of a movement to help the U.S. healthcare system work a little better for all of us.
Learn more about what it’s like to work at Ursa here, or consider subscribing to our News & Insights blog here.
See how Ursa helps healthcare organizations build trust in their data, prioritize the right actions, and turn value-based care opportunities into measurable results.
Chief Executive Officer
As a physician executive for UCLA Health’s ACO, Robin developed and led the enterprise-wide care transformation infrastructure, which still includes hundreds of clinicians, all specialties and sites of care, and dozens of system redesign projects. This infrastructure enables the ACO to achieve its financial and clinical goals, has received national attention, and is a model for other delivery systems. These experiences taught Robin about the critical role of information in successful transformation, from the IT requirements necessary to synthesize data to the preparation of insights that activate clinicians and others. Robin co-founded Ursa Health with a vision that the spread of trusted information can unlock successful, authentic innovation for healthcare organizations.
Robin is a board-certified internist and has published broadly on medical home transformation, quality measurement programs, and population health delivery systems. He received his medical degree from Cornell University and completed his residency in internal medicine at UCLA Medical Center. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree in the science of health services from the UCLA School of Public Health. He also completed the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at UCLA/RAND.
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Chief Product Officer
Andy is a co-founder and chief product officer of Ursa Health. Over the course of a 20-year career in technology and healthcare, he has held positions on both the supply and demand side of data and analytics. He has worked for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the RAND Corporation, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and UCLA Health, in roles ranging from software and database developer to policy analyst and health services researcher.
Andy has taught courses on improvement methods to physician and nurse leaders in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, as well as published a number of papers in the peer-reviewed literature, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. He holds a master’s degree in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School and a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Harvard University.
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Chief Technology Officer
Before joining Ursa Health, Steve was head of development at xTuple, the world’s #1 open-source ERP software company, managing a diverse development team that spanned four continents. Before that, he founded Speak Logistics, a tech startup borne out of his experience in the transportation industry, which introduced the user-friendly and modern sensibilities of the consumer Internet into the enterprise space. His professional passions include JavaScript, open-source software, continuous integration, and scalable code.
Steve holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard University and an MBA from William and Mary. He is a frequent speaker on subjects such as JavaScript, modular architecture, git, open source, and asynchronous programming.
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Chief Administrative & Privacy Officer
Caroline is responsible for supporting Ursa Health’s general operations and ensuring the smooth functioning of its administrative processes. She also manages the company’s vendor relationships, ensuring best-in-class services so the Ursa team can work efficiently and focus on supporting clients. In addition, Caroline is responsible for the company’s privacy policies and procedures, working in partnership with the security team.
Before joining Ursa, Caroline was vice president of partnerships for Aspire Health, the nation’s largest home-based palliative care company, where she was the business and operations liaison between the Aspire clinical team and health plans, provider groups, accountable care organizations, and other types of organizations. Before transitioning to a partnerships role, she was senior director of clinical operations, helping expand Aspire’s clinical care services across the country.
Caroline’s background is in supply chain management, which aids in her role at Ursa by streamlining process improvement. She holds a BS in business administration from the University of Tennessee.
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Chief Innovation Officer
Aaron oversees the development and delivery of all services to Ursa Health customers. His entire career has been in the healthcare industry in matrixed roles spanning strategy, operations, and analytics.
Before joining Ursa, Aaron was director of operations at Contessa Health, where he worked with payers, hospital systems, and ancillary providers to deploy the clinical services and financial operations to provide patients with the essential elements of inpatient-level care directly in the home under a bundled payment. Prior to Contessa, Aaron served as the director of strategic operations at Aspire Health, a national home-based palliative care provider in the country overseeing central analytics for clinical resource planning and provider relations teams. In addition, he was on the population health team at The Advisory Board Company, where he worked with large health systems and accountable care organizations on their population health strategies surrounding data integrations and care management deployment. Aaron holds a BA in sociology from SUNY Geneseo.
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Chief Operating Officer
Sofiya leads the teams that help Ursa’s customers turn data and analytics into real performance — delivery, customer success, and account management. She also partners with the executive team on strategy and scaling as the company grows.
Sofiya spent nearly 20 years on the provider side building and scaling value-based care strategy and operations. Prior to joining Ursa, she spent nearly a decade at Iora Health and One Medical/Amazon Health, leading accountable care strategy and performance, care team development, and change management as both companies scaled nationally. Earlier in her career, she led population health program development and quality improvement at large health systems and federally qualified community health centers, and implemented care management platforms for payer and health system clients at Crimson Care Management/The Advisory Board Company.
These experiences gave Sofiya a ground-level understanding of what it takes to scale a value-based care organization. She brings that full picture to Ursa’s customers as they lead that work today.
Sofiya holds a BA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MS in Health Policy & Management from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
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Vice President of Growth
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