Company leader
Robin Clarke
Co-founder and CEO
Ursa Health
Dr. Robin Clarke is a primary care physician and the co-founder and chief executive of Ursa Health, a Nashville, Tennessee, company that builds analytics software for accountable care organizations and other value-based care groups.
Training in Medicine and Research
Clarke studied at Princeton University and earned his medical degree at Cornell University. He completed his residency in internal medicine at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, and is board certified in internal medicine.
He went on to the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at UCLA and RAND and earned a master's degree in health services from the UCLA School of Public Health. He became a PCORI-funded principal investigator and published on medical home transformation, quality measurement and population health delivery systems.
The UCLA Health ACO
UCLA Health recruited Clarke to support performance improvement across the system. As a physician executive for its accountable care organization, he built and led the care transformation program, which grew to include hundreds of clinicians across all specialties and sites of care and dozens of redesign projects.
The work exposed a basic problem. Off-the-shelf population health tools gave standard metrics that did not match UCLA's contracts, provider networks or payer mix, and leaders kept needing to carve out encounter types, drop certain claims or change attribution logic. With Andy Hackbarth, a veteran of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, CMS and RAND, he developed reusable ways to govern data and write measures.
From Analytics Shop to Software
Clarke and Hackbarth saw that their methods could be built into software, and brought in Steve Hackbarth, a full-stack engineer, to complete the founding team. The result was Ursa Studio, a no-code analytics tool in which clinicians and analysts can see how every measure is built and change it.
Ursa Health has since added a documented healthcare data model, an AI layer called Compass and intervention programs for guideline-directed heart medication, chronic kidney disease and end-of-life care. Its customers include Wellvana, HarmonyCares and agilon health.