Business Insight Journal Interview with Ricardo Johnson II, Chief Executive Officer, Muse Health

Reimagining care delivery with intelligent design, interoperability, and empathy at the center of every health journey.

1. Ricardo, your work at Muse Health is redefining how people connect with care. What inspired your vision to build a human-centered care navigation experience through Oasis?

My grandmother and great grandmother both died from complications of diabetes. Their deaths were not a result of a lack of resources, but frankly a lack of understanding how to care for them. Human centered care begins with an individual and not an algorithm. Care navigation within a human centered care program is interoperable, dynamic, and what is being offered with the Oasis Care Navigation Platform.

2. Healthcare navigation has long been a source of frustration for patients. What gaps in the current system were most urgent for you to solve when shaping Oasis?

Thank you for this question. Healthcare navigation can be “frustrating” first, because it’s vital to how and how well we live our lives and secondly, because it is so unintuitive. It is unfair to blame the early iterations of care navigation. In fact, that we are capable of navigating care utilizing so many fragmented systems at all is a minor miracle. The gaps, as you so correctly discern, are where the greatest challenges are experienced. Systems have been created around models. Those models are designed through algorithms. If you, because of where you live, how old you may be, your access to care, or pointedly your gender or race, find yourself in the gap, your frustrations are understood. Our ability to fill the “gaps“ is not simply how we create value inside of healthcare, but value inside of people’s lives.

3. Muse Health introduces the concept of a Whole Person Care Ecosystem. How do you define that, and why is it critical to modern healthcare delivery?

We define “whole person care” through treating the body, mind, and daily environment as one system. So many times in healthcare point solutions are completely siloed from the daily realities of the individual with whom they’re tasked to treat. Delivering a unified digital physical front door that is data driven toward the user’s stated outcomes provides an impact focused, interoperable ecosystem. This system ensures a culturally concordant and dynamic care environment. This process is critical because once a system digitizes a broken process that broken process becomes codified in the care of everyone using that process.

4. The Oasis platform brings together diverse services under one unified interface. How does this level of integration improve outcomes for both individuals and the organizations serving them?

As consumers we use unified interfaces every day. In our cars, our computers, even some of our homes recognize how one thing unattended can impact everything. In healthcare, however MSK, diabetes, mental health, and nutrition can all be siloed from one another. If something happens in one part of your body, those other programs won’t change unless a practitioner changes it. The capacity to dynamically interact with a care navigation platform ensures that all stakeholders; point solutions, providers, payers, and most importantly individuals have an up-to-date optimal interactive strategy.

5. AI plays a central role in Oasis. Beyond automation, how is it used to guide people through their care journeys in a way that feels truly personal and intelligent?

It is important to underscore that “whole person care” is initiated by people for people. The presence of Agentic AI, however, ensures that all parts of the system are dynamically aware of the priorities of the individual and the resources of the provider. The technical strides that have been made with “nudges“ are not simply reminders to drink more water or to go for a walk, but also to provide recommendations that surround the preferences and demands of our users. One of our greatest priorities in servicing Oasis members is simply giving them good options based on who they are, their capabilities, and their stated goals.

6. Many companies claim to offer culturally sensitive care. What makes Muse Health’s approach to culturally concordant design truly distinct in both strategy and execution?

Admittedly, this topic circles back to your first question. Many, when reading the phrase “culturally concordant care,” think in terms of race, religion, and or nationality. Inside the Oasis platform, however, we spend a great deal of time contemplating daily environments, access to resources, and user priorities when defining true culturally concordant care. Our “whole person care” enrollment process asks questions that get to the heart of an individual’s “why”. These questions aid our point solutions, the models we create and the Agentic AI used to accompany the individual along their care journey, always reminding them, not simply of the healthcare implications for why one would do something or not, but reminding them of why they are doing this using their own words.

7. Tell us more about your “pod partner” model. How do you ensure innovation thrives while maintaining a consistent and trusted experience for users?

We have been very fortunate in being able to partner with leaders across the most complex health solutions an individual faces. Our partners continue to evolve their respective specialties, while Muse Health focuses on improving the process in which those specialties interact with one another to achieve an optimal outcome for the individual. This partnership ensures the user is at all times, engaging with solutions that are wholly focused on their health and that each solution is one of the very best in the industry at their specialty.

8. Empathy often gets framed as a soft value, but Muse positions it as a business advantage. How do you quantify empathy’s impact across clinical, financial, and engagement metrics?

 It is true that the qualification of empathy through the prism of clinical, financial, and engagement metrics is complicated. But we, on a daily basis, invert that question. How does one create an impactful, clinical, financial, and engaging healthcare system with empathy absent? Empathy is the connective tissue of healthcare. It is not only how Oasis delivers its solution to an individual, but it is also how we engage, how we retain, and how we promote new concepts to a user.

9. You’ve created a platform that not only connects services but anticipates needs. What are some examples of how Oasis is already enabling proactive, closed-loop care today?

When launching Oasis we worked with collegiate athletes, recognizing their positions on the team, their individual goals and the team’s goals. Having a process that is interoperable for 18 to 21-year-olds pressed our system to its limits, but being the father of five I expected nothing less. Starting with an athlete’s why and then delivering a closed loop solution, improved initial engagement and long-term utilization. It remains at the heart of every successful engagement. It is our hope that will also create a lifetime of healthy habits.

10. Looking ahead, what’s your broader ambition for Muse Health’s role in transforming the healthcare ecosystem—and how do you see that evolution shaping the next decade of care delivery?

We have global ambitions for Muse Health. They are, however, rooted in some simple truths. We have watched the development of a solution in search of a problem or as I say, the creation of a key and search for the correct lock. At Oasis our future focus will be getting better at asking the important questions and getting better at listening to the answers. In doing this, we hope to continually get better in our ambition to deliver organic, authentic, and personal™ care to all who need it.

A quote or advice from the author           

“Seek what you fear as the greatest opportunity for growth.”