Handl CEO Tracks Journey from Pharmacy to Tech Startup for Leader’s Edge Podcast

Key takeaways

• Marmoush comes from a family of pharmacists and worked as a clinical pharmacist in a large New Zealand health system
• Overseas, cost and quality transparency were foundational—in the U.S., prices were "commercially sensitive" black boxes
• The Handl platform normalizes and enriches fragmented healthcare data with facility and site-of-care granularity
• Handl operates as an orchestration layer, surfacing the right point solutions to the right members at the right time

Handl Health CEO Ahmed Marmoush didn’t co-found the healthcare tech platform overnight. Handl is the result of his lived experiences – first as a pharmacist, then as a healthcare consultant – and what he learned as a practicing pharmacist in New Zealand and elsewhere overseas.

Marmoush comes from a family of pharmacists – his mother, father and older sister all work in the industry – so it was almost a given that he would go to pharmacy school. He soon found himself working as a clinical pharmacist for a large health system in New Zealand for some time.

“I was working up on the wards alongside physicians and nurses and making recommendations on treatment plans for patients,” he said. “I really enjoyed that experience, but I was frustrated with working in what I considered to be a system that was quite inefficient and broken in some ways.”

What does the Handl Health platform actually do?

The Handl Health platform is purpose-built to transform fragmented healthcare data into actionable intelligence that informs strategic decision-making and continuously improves outcomes. It all starts with opaque, confusing healthcare data that is then normalized and enriched with facility and site-of-care granularity,enabling accurate attribution of cost, quality, and utilization within the context of how care is actually delivered.

It’s designed to integrate with, prioritize, and promote client- and customer-selected point solutions as part of a unified member decision-support experience. Rather than operating as a standalone point solution, Handl Health functions as an orchestration layer that ensures the right programs are surfaced to the right members at the right time.

The end goal? Revolutionizing how health plans are built and managed.

What did Marmoush learn before founding Handl?

Marmoush temporarily left the healthcare world for business school, working soon after for the former director general of the New Zealand health system at a boutique firm eventually acquired by Ernst & Young.

“I learned everything that I know about what constitutes running an effective healthcare system, all the way through from how do you fund care? How do you evaluate population health? What does it look like to create incentive structures for providers that drive outcomes for patients?

Marmoush then moved to the U.S. to make his mark on the healthcare industry. What he learned was a bit of a culture shock.

“There was this ongoing gap in how you could truly define value in the U.S. healthcare system,” he said. “You couldn’t get access to the true cost of care. You wouldn’t understand how much an MRI was. You couldn’t understand how much a tonsillectomy was. There was this black box that was considered commercially sensitive information and that was foreign to me."

“In every other health system that I had worked on, there was complete transparency around cost and quality. You knew exactly how much it cost to do anything in the system, and that’s foundational to driving any value-based medicine system.”

Hear more about Ahmed’s journey, how Handl is working to demystify the U.S. healthcare and insurance systems and why he once thought he might work as a ship captain, in the Leader’s Edge podcast.