The company teaching healthcare to ask a question it usually skips: why?
In an office on Rhode Island Avenue, a team of behavioral scientists, data scientists, and engineers spends its days on a question most of healthcare politely ignores. Not what a patient did - the charts already hold that. Not what they were prescribed - the claims files know. The question is quieter and far harder: why. Why the follow-up got skipped. Why the prescription sits unfilled. Why the trial site three miles away enrolls twice as well as the one next door.
Surgo Health argues that this "why" is not soft, unknowable, or beside the point. It is, by their reckoning, most of the point - the beliefs, biases, and barriers that drive an estimated 60 to 80 percent of health outcomes while sitting almost entirely outside the electronic record. The company's stated job is to make that layer visible, measurable, and useful. They call the result healthcare's universal "Why Engine."
It is a Public Benefit Corporation, which means the mission is written into the legal charter rather than stapled to a slide. And it is small - around fifty people - carrying an ambition sized for something much larger.
Quantifies the attitudes, barriers, and outside forces shaping health behavior for millions of individuals - turning the intangible into something you can query.
Fuses behavioral, clinical, and social data with provider ecosystems to surface real-world behavior drivers, down to the neighborhood and the individual.
A behavioral-science-powered AI that holds real conversations at scale - the depth of a qualitative interview with the reach of a survey.
An AI platform built to decode the "why" behind women's health - maternal, reproductive, mental - across profiles for 130M+ US women.
"Better health starts with understanding people."- Surgo Health
Dr. Sema Sgaier did not arrive at healthcare by way of spreadsheets. She trained as a neuroscientist, then spent two decades in the field where behavior is a matter of life and death - HIV prevention, maternal and reproductive health, immunization - much of it alongside the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The recurring lesson was inconvenient for anyone hoping medicine alone would suffice: the science was often sound, and people still did not act on it.
During COVID-19, that work scaled. Behavioral and contextual data helped inform how some $2.25 billion in CDC funding was directed - a demonstration that understanding people could move real resources at national scale. Surgo Health grew out of that conviction, incorporated in 2022 as a Public Benefit Corporation and backed by a $5 million seed round.
The bet is simple to state and hard to build: if behavior drives most of the outcome, then behavior deserves the same rigorous, scalable infrastructure that biology already has.
Neuroscientist by training; two decades in global health behavior. Leads a team of behavioral scientists, data scientists, technologists, and health experts building the "Why Engine."
Founded in Washington, DC as a Public Benefit Corporation, spun out of behavioral-science work led by Dr. Sema Sgaier.
Closes a $5M seed round - backers include Springboard Enterprises - to build out the behavioral intelligence platform.
Ships BehavioralPulse, Mosaic, and Derin; reports a ~30% lift in predicting high-performing clinical trial sites.
Launches EchoHER at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, selected as a CGI Commitment to Action.
"EchoHER is the data infrastructure women's health has been waiting for."- Dr. Sema Sgaier, Co-founder & CEO
Return to that DC office and the question it turns over each day. The gap between what medicine prescribes and what people actually do has always been treated as noise - the messy, human residue left after the real clinical work is done. Surgo Health's wager is that the residue is the signal. Decode why a patient hesitates, and you can design the moment so the hesitation never happens.
The proof points are early but pointed: a 298% jump in contraceptive uptake when the intervention understood the person, not just the biology; behavioral data steering billions in pandemic funding; a women's-health platform listening to 130 million people the system tends to rush past. None of it replaces a doctor. All of it aims at the follow-up that finally gets made, the prescription that finally gets filled, the trial that finally reaches the people it was meant for.
That is the quiet reframe underneath the company. Not better scans or faster drugs, but a serious answer to the oldest, softest question in medicine - and the discipline to treat that answer as data.
Contact: semasgaier@surgohealth.com / media@surgohealth.com