Ramona’s Story
Diseases
Cancer
Issues and Challenges
Ramona has encountered: Access to Expert Providers, Access to Medicine, Insurance Issues, Transportation, Invisible Illness, Underserved Community
My Story
From Patient to Architect: Building the Care I Needed but Could Not Find
I have experienced healthcare from every side that matters: as a patient, as a pharmacist, and as a leader in global drug development. Yet none of those roles prepared me for what it feels like when the system fails you personally. My cancer journey, which included a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation, was not defined by a lack of science or innovation. It was defined by fragmentation. I encountered disconnected providers, delays in accessing supportive services, and a system that required me to navigate complexity at a time when my only focus should have been survival. In that experience, I came to a clear realization: the healthcare system is not designed for the lived reality of patients.
In boardrooms, we speak about innovation. In policy conversations, we focus on access. But patients experience something very different. They experience delays that feel like risk, navigation that feels like a full-time job, and clinical decisions made without full understanding of their environment, culture, or daily realities. For Black communities and other underserved populations, these gaps are not occasional; they are consistent and predictable. Too often, patient perspective is absent from the decisions that shape access, affordability, and care delivery, leaving the very people most impacted without a voice in the systems designed to serve them.
That gap is what led me to build differently. Through Onyx Health Collective, we created a model rooted in what I needed but could not find: care that connects community trust with clinical delivery and real-time activation into services. We describe this as an urgent care response to chronic disease management. It is a model designed to move at the speed of the patient, offering same-day access to prevention and treatment, integrating pharmacists, clinicians, and community health workers into a unified approach, and ensuring that data is used not just for reporting but to drive follow-up and outcomes. Because access alone is not enough. Activation is what changes outcomes.
Patients do not need more complexity. They need care that meets them where they are, systems that respond with urgency, and providers who see them as whole people beyond a diagnosis. They need pathways that connect screening to treatment without delay or loss, and a system that recognizes that health does not exist outside of environment, culture, and lived experience. If we are serious about transforming healthcare, patient stories cannot be treated as symbolic gestures. They must actively shape clinical trial design, care models, and policy decisions. We must move from listening to patients to designing with them, recognizing that patient stories are not just narratives, but data with consequence.
I am not only a patient who has navigated the system. I am someone who has seen where it breaks and committed my life’s work to rebuilding it differently. No patient should have to fight the system while fighting for their life. Until healthcare reflects that truth, there is still work to do.
My Motivation and Inspiration
My motivation comes from experiencing firsthand the gap between what healthcare promises and what patients actually live through. During my cancer journey, I faced fragmentation, delays, and a system that required me to advocate for myself while trying to heal. That experience made it clear that care is not truly patient-centered if it is not designed around real lives.
I am driven to ensure that no patient has to fight the system while fighting for their life. That means elevating the patient voice as essential, not optional, and building models of care that are responsive, connected, and equitable. My work is about closing that gap and creating a system that meets patients with dignity, urgency, and support. In
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