Ben Orozco - Cover Letter for NextPatient

Dear NextPatient team,

I spent four years building the kind of software you are replacing. At Ecaresoft I led Nimbo, a cloud EHR and practice-management product for clinics in Latin America, and before that the wider hospital systems portfolio. I sat with physicians and front-desk staff, watched them fight fax machines and screens designed in 2004, and shipped scheduling, records and billing workflows against that reality. Your description of the doctor's office experience as "dated and terrible" is not a marketing line to me, it is what I saw every week.

I am applying as an individual contributor on purpose. I have been a VP of Engineering and a CTO, most recently leading an organization that grew to 140+ engineers, and I am glad I did it. But the work I keep coming back to is owning a slice of product end to end: writing the code, talking to the people who use it, and staying accountable for whether it actually made their day better. Today I am a hands-on lead building a greenfield admin platform in Python and FastAPI with a React frontend, while keeping the legacy system it replaces alive — the same two-track reality I would expect at NextPatient.

The rest of the fit is straightforward. Python, JavaScript and Postgres on Linux is the stack I have worked in for most of my career. I have built the notification layer you describe as interactive reminders: a multi-channel SMS, voice, push and email service on Twilio and Sendgrid that scaled from tens to thousands of messages per minute in multiple languages. I have run AI enablement for an engineering organization, where adoption of tools like Cursor and Claude improved productivity by 10% and cut code review time by 60%, and I use agentic workflows daily rather than as a demo. And I have started three companies, one of which I built alone and sold in 2024, so ambiguity and rapid change are the conditions I am used to, not an adjustment.

What made me want to write this letter, though, was the "smaller by choice, self-funded" part. I have worked inside a VC-funded scale-up and seen how much energy goes toward the next round rather than the customer. A profitable 40-person company that is the top-rated product in its category is a much better place to do careful work that ships. I would be glad to talk about which slice of the product you need owned.

Best regards,

Ben Orozco