Meet the Engineers of Pomelo Care: Julia Dai

At Pomelo, we’re scaling a virtual value-based care model to improve access and eliminate gaps in care for families nationwide. Our technology is a crucial aspect of how we scale.

We sat down with software engineer Julia Dai to learn about the engineering team at Pomelo. 

Visit our Careers page to learn more about open roles if you're interested in becoming part of our team.

Why did you decide to join Pomelo?

After starting my career at big tech companies, I was looking for a smaller, tighter-knit team and a mission aligned with my interest in healthcare. Pomelo is addressing a very real, worsening maternal and newborn health crisis in the US. That really resonated. After I met the engineering team – who were so smart, kind, and excited about their work – I knew it was the right next step for me.

Now that I’ve been at Pomelo for almost a year, I feel truly fortunate to be a part of the team. Everyone at Pomelo – from engineering to outreach, clinical, and beyond – is so talented and excellent at what they do. We’re constantly collaborating to reach our goals and set the bar even higher for what we can achieve. Every day, I’m excited by the tangible impacts of our products. For me personally, it’s also been so valuable to learn from experienced engineers who are team players and strong mentors.

How does the engineering team power Pomelo’s mission?

At Pomelo, we keep our patients at the center of everything we do. On the engineering team, this means we’re building products and features that streamline how we deliver care to improve patient outcomes and deliver a top tier patient experience.

Grove is our clinical team’s central command center. Our clinicians use it to communicate with patients, coordinate across care teams, and deliver evidence-based care to improve patient outcomes. Grove’s intelligent workflows and design enable our clinicians to provide timely, personalized care based on each patient’s individual risk factors.

Our data engine powers our care model by identifying individual risk factors and proactively surfacing those risks to our clinical teams in Grove. We ingest and synthesize data from claims, lab, pharmacy, and electronic health record data. It’s exciting to see how the combination of our data and software have such a meaningful impact on our patients’ care and our clinicians’ experience. 

What Pomelo project are you most proud of?

One of my first projects at Pomelo was actually born out of a mini-hackathon at our company-wide offsite. My team’s hack used GPT-4 to enable efficient and comprehensive clinical documentation.

I worked with one of our clinicians, Kat, to build a feature that leveraged generative AI to automatically create summaries based on recent clinical interactions. After an impactful demo at the hackathon, I was able to spend the rest of the quarter developing and launching the feature. It’s been a huge win for patients and clinicians alike. Our patients are heard, and their whole care team has the full context on their care needs and goals. Our clinicians can focus on delivering care, rather than documentation. 

I’m really proud of this collaboration between engineering and clinical teams. As a more junior engineer, it was super rewarding for me to have led the project end-to-end, working cross-functionally to deliver meaningful improvements for our team and our patients.

What makes the Pomelo engineering team special?

One of the most unique things about my day-to-day is how closely I work alongside our clinicians. Engineers regularly shadow clinicians to understand product pain points, and see firsthand how this impacts clinicians’ workflows. This direct feedback channel allows us to quickly iterate on meaningful product improvements.

Engineers are also deeply attuned to the impact we have on patients’ lives. We hear anonymous patient stories from our clinical team at our company-wide all-hands meetings, and it’s a powerful reminder of each patient’s unique journey. I love hearing how our team’s combined efforts have a positive impact on our patients and their families.  

Even though our engineering team is distributed all across the US, we stay connected throughout the week to problem solve, share updates, and get feedback. Some team members in New York and San Francisco like to meet up in person regularly, and the whole team gets together for offsites several times a year so we can build relationships, co-work, and have some fun. Pomelo is very big on karaoke.

What excites you about Pomelo’s future?

So many things! It’s been a very exciting past few weeks as we’ve launched health plans in new markets, serving more high-risk and non-English speaking patients. This gives us the opportunity to deliver our care model and improved outcomes to even more patients. As we grow, we’re also thinking about interesting challenges that come with scale, like standardizing patient care for our growing clinical team, surfacing higher-risk patients for care as early as possible, and integrating massive amounts of heterogeneous data. I’m energized by what’s ahead!

If you’re interested in becoming a part of our team, check out our website to learn more about open roles.