The Healthcare Opacity Problem: How Torben Nielsen Spent 15 Years Understanding It Before Building Uptiv Health

The Healthcare Opacity Problem: How Torben Nielsen Spent 15 Years Understanding It Before Building Uptiv Health

Torben Nielsen didn’t disrupt healthcare because he found a gap. He spent 15 years watching the system fail patients before building the solution. Here’s why the best category creators study problems longer than they build solutions.

Most founders rush to solve. They spot a problem, validate it exists, build a solution, and iterate based on customer feedback. Speed matters. Move fast and break things. Launch and learn. But some problems require understanding, not just identifying.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Torben Nielsen, CEO and Co-Founder of Uptiv Health, revealed a different path: nearly 15 years of watching healthcare fail from multiple vantage points before building the company that would fix it. From payers to price transparency to infusion therapy, each chapter taught him that healthcare’s core problem isn’t clinical—it’s opacity and friction.

This patience seems counterintuitive in startup culture. But the depth of understanding it created became Uptiv’s unfair advantage.

Chapter One: The Payer’s View (2006-2012)

Healthcare found Torben in 2006 when Cambia Health Solutions recruited him from Xerox. The mission was radical for the time: figure out how a payer could be more relevant to its members in the internet age.

This wasn’t about better insurance products or lower premiums. It was about relevance. Payers knew they were transaction processors, not trusted partners. Members only thought about insurance when something went wrong. How do you build a relationship in an industry defined by opacity?

The team decided to focus on provider directories, but with a crucial addition—price transparency. They’d integrate out-of-pocket costs so members could see what it would cost to see Doctor A versus Doctor B, Hospital A versus Hospital B.

“We created a integrated provider directory with a price transparency functionality so that you as a member of this particular health plan could see your out of pocket costs for seeing Dr. A versus Dr. B or Hospital A versus Hospital B,” Torben explained. “And it would allow you as a member to act more as a consumer with pricing in mind.”

This seems obvious now. But in 2006, it was revolutionary—and revealing. “Health care is probably the only industry, I think, where you don’t know what it’s going to cost you until 60 days after,” Torben observed. “It’s incredible that we as consumers don’t ask for that information upfront.”

For five years at Cambia, Torben watched how opacity destroys consumer behavior. Members couldn’t compare. They couldn’t plan. They couldn’t act like consumers because the industry denied them the most basic information: price.

Chapter Two: Commercializing the Solution (2012-2021)

By 2012, Torben saw the commercial opportunity clearly. Price transparency wasn’t just nice-to-have—it solved a fundamental problem for payers trying to be relevant. He pitched management on a spinout, got funding, and took 11 people with him to co-found HealthSparks.

The company would sell price transparency software as a service to health plans across the nation. The growth was explosive—11 people became 100, landing at number 196 on the Inc. 5000 list as the second fastest growing digital healthcare company in 2016.

But scaling HealthSparks taught Torben new lessons about healthcare’s opacity. It wasn’t just that consumers lacked price information. The entire system was built on information asymmetry at every level. Payers didn’t share data with providers. Providers didn’t share outcomes with payers. Patients couldn’t access their own records easily.

“And that’s really important because health care has always been very opaque,” Torben noted. “Health care is probably the only industry, I think, where you don’t know what it’s going to cost you until 60 days after.”

The repetition of this observation across nearly a decade reveals something important: Torben wasn’t just solving a tactical problem with price transparency. He was studying a systemic disease—opacity—that infected every part of healthcare.

HealthSparks was eventually acquired in 2021, but by then Torben had already identified the next chapter.

Chapter Three: The Patient Experience (2021-Present)

Solving pricing opacity gave Torben credibility with payers and deep understanding of healthcare economics. But it didn’t expose him to what patients actually experience. That came through observing infusion therapy.

Most people don’t think about infusion until they need it. But for patients with MS, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s and colitis, and severe asthma, regular infusions define their lives. And the experience is universally terrible.

“Nobody wants to go to a hospital, right?” Torben stated plainly. “It’s very hard to find parking. It’s hard to find the building where you’re going to get the infusion. Once you find the building, maybe it’s up on the third floor. Once you get to that third floor, then it tends to be an open room where chairs are just lined up in a row, where you almost take a number, you take a seat and then you get your infusion over the next couple of hours. There’s absolutely no privacy.”

Here was opacity’s physical manifestation. Patients couldn’t see costs before treatment. They couldn’t easily get information after treatment. “And it’s very hard. If you have a question afterwards, you’re at home now, right? You want to know if you can eat or you’re not feeling so well. Who do you actually call, right? Who do you talk to?”

The friction was everywhere—parking, navigation, check-in, treatment, follow-up. Each step created barriers between patients and care. And nobody questioned it because “that’s just how hospitals work.”

The Pattern Recognition

Fifteen years of exposure from multiple angles—payer operations, software sales to health plans, price transparency implementation, patient experience observation—created pattern recognition that rapid market entry couldn’t replicate.

The pattern: healthcare systematically creates opacity and friction at every touchpoint. Not because anyone intends it, but because the system evolved to optimize for providers and payers, not patients.

Pricing opacity served payers by preventing comparison shopping. Physical friction served hospitals by concentrating care in expensive facilities. Information silos served everyone by avoiding accountability. The system worked perfectly—for everyone except patients.

Uptiv Health attacks this pattern at the infusion level. The patient app makes everything transparent—costs, schedules, preferences, communication. The retail locations eliminate physical friction—convenient parking, easy navigation, no hunting for the right floor. The no-reception-counter design removes check-in barriers. The digital intake eliminates clipboards.

“We feel there are enough barriers in healthcare, we don’t need to create yet another one between us and the patient,” Torben explained. This isn’t a tactical decision about furniture placement. It’s a philosophical statement born from 15 years of watching healthcare create unnecessary barriers.

Why Time Investment Matters

Most founders would look at Torben’s timeline and see wasted years. Why spend 15 years studying when you could be building? The answer is in Uptiv’s results: 99 NPS among patients, 87 among referring providers, 150+ provider referrals in 12 months, first center cash flow positive in just over a year.

These outcomes don’t happen from good execution alone. They happen because the solution addresses the actual root cause—opacity and friction—rather than surface symptoms.

A founder who spent one year in healthcare might build better infusion centers. Better chairs, better snacks, better locations. But they wouldn’t eliminate reception counters because they wouldn’t see barriers as the systemic problem. They wouldn’t put all intake in an app because they wouldn’t understand how clipboard culture reinforces opacity.

The 15-year investment gave Torben something more valuable than industry knowledge. It gave him systems-level understanding of why healthcare works the way it does and which interventions would actually matter.

The Framework for Other Founders

Not every market deserves 15 years of study. But the principle scales: some problems require understanding before solving.

If the problem is tactical—better project management, faster payments, easier scheduling—you can learn enough in months to build something useful. User research and iteration will get you there.

If the problem is systemic—the entire market operates on flawed assumptions that everyone accepts as inevitable—you need depth. You need to see the problem from multiple angles. You need pattern recognition that only comes from extended exposure.

Healthcare’s opacity problem is systemic. Fifteen years gave Torben the pattern recognition to see it clearly and the credibility to build solutions others would trust.

The Three-to-Five Year Validation

Looking ahead, Uptiv aims for 50 to 60 clinics proving that hybrid care creates better outcomes at lower costs. “I would love to have optiv with, you know, 50 or 60 clinics across the nation and really prove out that hybrid model of in person care and virtual care creates better outcomes for the patient and will decrease costs in the system,” Torben shared.

If successful, those clinics won’t just prove a business model. They’ll validate that 15 years spent understanding healthcare’s opacity problem led to solutions that actually work.

“I think that’s exactly what we are proving out in the Detroit market and taking that playbook across the nation would be very excited,” Torben explained. The Detroit playbook didn’t come from market research. It came from 15 years of watching the system fail and finally having the insight to fix it.

The Patience Advantage

Silicon Valley celebrates speed. Launch fast, iterate faster, pivot when necessary. For tactical problems, this works. But for systemic problems in complex industries, speed without understanding creates solutions that optimize the wrong things.

Torben’s patient path—five years at Cambia, nearly a decade building and scaling HealthSparks, then founding Uptiv—looks slow. But it created a depth of understanding that shortcuts couldn’t replicate.

The best category creators don’t just find gaps. They study problems until they see patterns that others miss. They build credibility across multiple roles. They accumulate insights that only time and multiple perspectives can provide.

Then, when they finally build, they’re not disrupting blindly. They’re solving the root cause with conviction born from actually understanding it. That’s worth