Why I love Sidewalks
There's a restaurant a few blocks from my house. For years, we drove to it.
The road between our neighborhood and that restaurant is busy, and there wasn’t a sidewalk. Two, maybe three blocks. In a car. Then the city finally built one, and it changed everything. We walk there now without thinking about it. That's the whole point. Nobody thinks about a sidewalk that exists. You only think about the one that's missing.
Twenty years ago, before health tech was even a glimmer in my career plans, I worked at a regional planning commission. I focused on bicycle and pedestrian initiatives. I sat next to people who spent their days fighting for funding to build sidewalks. And I fell in love with the idea. I wanted to build sidewalks for a living.
If you'd told college-me that I'd end up spending my career in healthtech instead, I would have had no idea what you were talking about. A friend recruited me into my first digital health job when I was about to move to Seattle to wait tables and figure life out. I took the job that paid money. I had no idea what I was getting into. I've been building sidewalks ever since.
That's what interoperability is. When your primary care doctor orders bloodwork and two weeks later your specialist can already see the results, that's a sidewalk. You don't get stuck repeating the test. You don't pay twice. You don't have to retell your entire medical history from scratch to every new clinician while they nod and type. The information just flows, the way a person should be able to walk two blocks to dinner.
I know this as a patient. A couple of summers ago I had surgery for endometriosis. Getting there meant my original doctor, imaging, a specialist, and a string of providers afterward who all needed the full picture. And by and large, they had it. My records followed me. Twenty years ago, that wasn't the reality.
When the sidewalks are there, you barely notice. When they're missing, you feel it in your wallet, your veins, and your patience.
Sidewalks don't build themselves, though. Somebody has to fight for the funding. Somebody has to decide that the gap between the neighborhood and the restaurant matters enough to fix. Healthcare data is the same. TEFCA, USCDI, all the acronyms that make people's eyes glaze over at parties, those are the zoning meetings and budget lines of health information. Unsexy but essential. Invisible when they work.
And right now, concrete is getting poured at a pace I've never seen in my career. Two weeks ago, HHS announced that more than one billion health records have been exchanged through TEFCA. A year ago, that number was 10 million. Take my restaurant story and multiply it across an entire country, deciding, block by block, that patients should be able to get where they need to go. A billion exchanges won't make headlines outside our industry, and you know what, that's okay; that’s fitting. Good infrastructure disappears into daily life. But those of us who remember carrying our printed-out medical records between appointments know exactly how much got built.
There's still plenty of road with no crossing. A record that moves is only useful if the clinician on the other end can read it, trust it, and find what matters in it. Volume is the start, and quality is the next fight.
So no, I never got to build sidewalks for a living. I got to do something better. I get to work on the infrastructure that lets a patient's story travel with them, so nobody has to drive two blocks to get where they were always meant to go.
I'm glad we have sidewalks for healthcare. Let's keep pouring concrete.
Originally published in the July 2026 edition of the Bamberg Health newsletter. Read the original here.
