We sat down with Varsha Ayyalapu, commercial strategy intern, to catch up on her summer experience and why she was excited to work at Zus.
Who are you?
I’m originally from New Jersey, lived in Nashville during college, and have been exploring Boston these last couple of months. Outside of work and school, I spend a lot of my time outside (if it’s warm), working on new arts and crafts projects, or trying new recipes.
Why did you join Zus?
I’ve known for a bit that I wanted to work in the healthcare space. Coming from a physician-heavy family, I have always been exposed to the flaws in the healthcare system. In college, after some health economics classes and my own bouts of annoying doctor’s appointments, my interest in getting involved in healthcare data and interoperability was further cemented. I spent some time looking around for startups working with healthcare data and health spending and, luckily enough, Zus was hiring. It’s been the perfect place to learn more about the healthtech space and to work on the really interesting problem of data interoperability.
What have you enjoyed working on this summer?
The summer has flown by and I’ve been able to work on some really interesting projects. So far, we’ve been working on bolstering our ideal customer profile while we continue to shift towards serving value-based care. A lot of the summer has also included doing a lot of research about the market and value-based care more generally – much of which is going into the blog series we recently published.
If you could have dinner with 3 people (dead or alive) who would you invite? And why?
1: Raj Chetty: He’s an economist whose work I’ve been following since high school. For a while I wanted to get my PhD because of the work he was doing; that’s not my current path, but I would still love the chance to talk to him and learn more about his work.
2: Robert Pattinson: I’ve seen a lot of videos/interviews of him and find him hilarious.
3: My grandma: She’s in India and I haven’t gotten to see her in a while.
