Ro Innovation, Technology & Agility

Tell us about a recent product your team launched. How does it drive Ro’s mission forward?

A big part of the culture at Ro is keeping our eyes and ears open to patients’ needs and the gaps in their healthcare. Launching Ro Sparks was a huge step in patient-centric innovation at Ro, maximizing the ease and efficacy of erectile dysfunction treatment.

We heard what patients were saying about the shortcomings of traditional ED meds, such as how it “kills the mood” to have to plan ahead and take a pill so far in advance. So we launched Ro Sparks, which are designed to dissolve under your tongue where the active ingredients absorb directly into your bloodstream for faster results, lasting up to 36 hours. At the end of the day, organizations have to remember the people behind the numbers and the important role we play in the lives of those who choose us, trust us, bring us their problems and ask us for help.

What obstacles and challenges did your team encounter — and overcome — while launching Ro Sparks?

There’s no innovation playbook for a full-stack telemedicine company. From developing new products to launching them on our integrated platform, we have to take into account — and optimize for — the specific needs and experiences of providers, pharmacists and, most importantly, patients. Product launches are a herculean effort even under the simplest of circumstances, but we’re also a hybrid team that’s spread all over the country. In the end, we just kept soft knees and a positive mental attitude while leaning hard on the three “Cs”: communication, collaboration and camaraderie.
 

How has the launch of Ro Sparks changed the way your team operates?

Each week brought new challenges, but we crossed every bridge and jumped every hurdle as a team. It wasn’t always graceful, but we always made it over. Critically, to increase the ROI of our launch project efforts, we turned every hard-earned problem resolution into a newly unlocked capability that we can operationalize and leverage again in the future. We also developed a new level of rigor and commitment to ruthless prioritization of day-to-day tasks and timeboxing of major decisions. Ultimately, the success of the Ro Sparks launch, and any launch at Ro, is fueled by the team’s unwavering grit and dedication to doing right by our patients.

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025? 

Our team is working on an exciting LLM-based pipeline to triage the millions of incoming patient messages we receive each year. The goal is to help our incredible team of nurses, providers and patient advocates by intelligently routing messages to the person most qualified to help with that specific question or need. This will give our care teams more leverage and save them time while supporting our patients. This is compelling because it directly solves an immediate, real-world problem.

What does the roadmap for this project look like? 

Our goal is to streamline response times for patients while reducing manual triage time for our care teams. We’ll start with classifying and routing patient messages to the correct team of responders. From there, we will develop a series of LLM prompts designed to identify situations and route them with high accuracy to specialized teams. We’ll also focus on using LLM to enable context gathering, to pull in relevant details to summarize the issue concisely for the responder. This will reduce time spent searching for information and allow for quicker, more informed decision-making. 

To bring this vision to life, we will collaborate with multiple teams across the organization — from back-end and front-end engineers to designers to operations specialists to data analysts. This highly cross functional group will play key roles to ensure this new capability provides a seamless user experience. We will continuously review patient messages with human experts to refine the model’s accuracy. Coordinating these audits is a critical part of the feedback loop that will inform our iterative improvements to deliver a better experience for both patients and our care team members.

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

Over the past decade, I’ve worked on a wide range of machine learning projects, spanning natural language processing and computer vision. However, my deepest focus has always been on NLP — originally working with small language models and continuously pushing the limits of what was possible.

I identify strongly as a prompt engineer, having engaged in some form of prompt engineering as early as 2016, long before the term was widely recognized. My experience working with early deep learning architectures gave me a strong foundation in understanding model behavior, and an intuition for crafting the inputs and harnessing the outputs of models to coax out new product possibilities. These skills have only become more relevant and valuable today with the rise of powerful transformer-based architectures.

Through this project, I hope to refine my ability to bridge the gap between AI capabilities and real-world operational needs. Ultimately, this work will shape how I approach AI-human collaboration, not just in healthcare but in any domain where AI needs to function as an assistant rather than a replacement.