Greg Peters

The Profile

The founder who made healthcare's front door easier to open

Greg Peters runs a company that most patients never see but many have quietly benefited from. His job, for close to a decade, has been the unglamorous work behind a single click: getting a person who needs care connected to a provider who can give it, without the phone tag, the faxed referrals, or the waiting.

That company is BetterHealthcare, the New York firm Peters co-founded in 2016 as BetterPT. In January 2025 it was acquired by HealthBus, a digital healthcare delivery platform backed by the TRCM Fund. The BetterAccess platform that Peters and his team built now runs inside HealthBus's musculoskeletal program, promising patients appointments within 48 to 72 hours across one of the country's largest physical therapy networks. "We're thrilled to join the HealthBus family and extend our mission of improving healthcare access for all," Peters said when the deal was announced.

The mission has stayed remarkably consistent. From the first version of the product to the last, the pitch was the same: booking care should be as simple as reserving a table. In the early days Peters described BetterPT as "the OpenTable of physical therapy," and the analogy stuck because it was honest about the size of the ambition. This was not a moonshot to reinvent medicine. It was a stubborn, focused effort to fix scheduling, referrals, and the flow of a patient's information between the people who need to see it.

The Path

From the gym floor to the C-suite

Peters did not arrive at healthcare software through the usual doors. He was born in Manhattan and went to Marist College, where he studied finance and played Division I football. When he graduated, he had a Wall Street offer in hand. He turned it down. His interest was in health, sports, and fitness, and he followed it to a job as a personal trainer at La Palestra, one of New York's high-end fitness centers.

That choice looks less surprising in hindsight. More than fifteen years working in and around health and fitness gave Peters a close, ground-level view of how people move through the care system - and where they get stuck. Physical therapy, in particular, sat at an awkward intersection: medically important, frequently prescribed, and yet strangely hard to book. Patients would leave a doctor's office with a referral and then stall out on the logistics of actually finding a clinic that took their insurance and had an opening.

To build the fix, Peters partnered with Dr. Stephen Fealy, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery. It was a deliberate pairing. Fealy brought clinical credibility and a surgeon's understanding of what happens after an operation, when rehabilitation determines whether a patient recovers well. Peters brought the operator's instinct for product, growth, and the consumer experience. Together they set out to apply a familiar internet model - the marketplace - to a corner of medicine that had never really had one.

The Build

Nine years, one idea, held long enough

BetterPT launched in 2016 and grew the way patient-and-provider marketplaces have to: one clinic and one appointment at a time. By 2019 the company had passed 3,000 clinics and generated more than 35,000 appointments, and it raised a $5 million Series A led by 5Lion Ventures, with the Hospital for Special Surgery and others taking part. Across its life the company raised more than $12 million.

Along the way the company grew past its original name. BetterPT became BetterHealthcare, and the product widened from physical therapy into a broader patient-access platform, BetterAccess, aimed at scheduling, provider matching, and the interoperability that lets a clinic actually receive a patient's information rather than re-collect it. The vocabulary got more technical - EHR integration, bi-directional data exchange, real-time analytics - but the underlying goal did not change. Peters kept betting that if you removed the friction at the front of the system, everything downstream got better.

The 2025 acquisition reads as a continuation rather than an exit. Diane Koontz, HealthBus's CEO, framed it as building "on our shared vision of transforming the healthcare journey for patients and providers alike." Peters, characteristically, kept his own comment focused on the work still ahead: "Together, we'll create transformative opportunities to enhance patient and provider experiences." For a founder whose product was always about making a single connection happen faster, joining a larger network was a logical next move - more providers on one side, more patients on the other.

What stands out in Peters's story is the restraint. There is a version of the healthtech founder who promises to overhaul all of medicine and then struggles to ship anything. Peters picked one problem - the moment a patient tries to book care - and stayed with it for the better part of a decade. The candor helps too. His line about fundraising being "many NO's and a few YES's" is the kind of thing founders usually say only after they have made it, and it captures a temperament suited to long, unglamorous work: keep asking, absorb the rejections, and count the wins that matter.

The result is a career with an unusual through-line. A finance graduate who chose the gym over the trading floor, a personal trainer who ended up running healthcare software, a co-founder who paired with a surgeon to build a marketplace, and a CEO who sold his company into a bigger one so the mission could keep going. Across all of it, the question Peters kept trying to answer was small and practical, which is probably why it was worth answering: how do you get a person to the care they need, faster.

Watch

In his own words

Peters joined the Slice of Healthcare podcast to talk through BetterPT's model, the physical therapy market, and the company's approach to patient access.