From the Diary of Deepti Bahel

What a data engineer learned about patient-facing technology by becoming the patient, and the question she puts to anyone about to place AI in front of one.

The usual way to help a patient is to add something: another portal, another reminder, another round of automated messages. The patient on the receiving end may already be managing medications, laboratory results, appointments, dietary restrictions, insurance questions and symptoms, often while exhausted, frightened or physically unwell. Each addition is one more piece for that person to connect to the rest.

The pieces have multiplied. In 2024, 59 percent of individuals nationally had more than one online medical record or patient portal, according to the federal Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, and only 7 percent used an app to bring them together in one place.

Deepti Bahel has been on both sides of that arrangement. She is a senior data engineer with more than 12 years of building analytics systems, particularly in healthcare, and she has been through kidney failure, dialysis, a transplant and recovery herself. Out of that she is building MediMate Foundation, a patient-driven nonprofit whose work includes a searchable directory of approximately 190 patient support organizations and Agent Kidney, an AI-powered tool designed to help people find kidney-health guidance based on the stage they have reached. Her case to the people who decide what patients receive is short. “The mistake is designing around the healthcare workflow while expecting the patient to adapt to it,” she says. “Technology should reduce the patient’s cognitive burden, not digitize it.”

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Information Without a Next Step

Healthcare organizations, in Deepti’s account, often assume that more information, reminders, portals and automated messages will automatically help. “But patients are rarely suffering from a lack of information alone,” she says. “They are overwhelmed by information that arrives without enough context, at the wrong time, or without a clear next step.”

The sentence she wants under her name comes from a post on a different subject. She had been receiving automated sales messages congratulating her on “building an agency” through a community she belongs to, which is a nonprofit and not an agency. She wrote that “automation without context is simply faster noise,” and closed the post on two sentences.

“Relevance is not a cosmetic layer added after automation. Relevance is the strategy.”

Deepti Bahel, Founder and CEO, MediMate Foundation

Asked where the line came from, she traced it to living through kidney failure, dialysis, transplantation and recovery while also understanding technology as a data engineer. “When patients are already managing medications, appointments, lab results, symptoms, and uncertainty, generic information delivered faster is not innovation, it is simply faster noise,” she says. Technology becomes meaningful, in her words, only when it “recognizes where someone is in their journey, understands what they need in that moment, and offers a clear, safe, and useful next step.”

That is also where she tells builders to start.

The First Thing She Tells Builders

Deepti has one opening instruction for anyone who wants to put AI in front of patients.

“Do not begin with the model, begin with the moment in which the patient will use it.”

Deepti, Founder and CEO, MediMate Foundation

“Is the person newly diagnosed, starting dialysis, searching for a living donor, waiting for a transplant, or adjusting to life afterward?” she asks. “The same information may be useful in one moment and overwhelming, or even unsafe, in another.”

She describes her own approach as lived experience applied with the discipline of a data engineer. On any build she considers data quality, privacy, safety, accessibility, explainability and potential failure points. A habit goes with it, one she says colleagues would recognize: “I keep asking questions until I understand who might be left out.” Whether she’s reviewing a data pipeline, designing a patient resource or organizing a program, she rarely stops at whether it works. “I ask: Who can access it? Who can understand it? What happens when it fails? And who will be most affected if our assumptions are wrong?”

The readers she has in mind are the ones who decide: healthcare leaders, clinicians, funders, technology partners and those designing patient-facing systems. What she wants them to see is three perspectives that, as she puts it, “rarely sit in the same room”: a patient who has lived through kidney failure and transplantation, a data engineer who understands how technology is built, and a nonprofit founder working to make healthcare easier to navigate. “I do not want sympathy for my experience,” she says. “I want people to recognize the value of building with someone who has experienced the gaps firsthand and has the technical ability to address them.”

Her time as the patient has a date.

April 2024

Deepti calls the day she was diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease the page of her diary she would tear out. “I had walked into the hospital not realizing how critically ill I was,” she says. “My hemoglobin was 3.5, my creatinine was around 30, and suddenly my life was reduced to words I was not prepared to hear: kidney failure, blood transfusions, and dialysis.”

Arriving at that point without knowing is not rare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about one in three adults with severe chronic kidney disease do not know they have it.

For her there was a second weight. “I had already watched my father live with kidney disease and lost him in 2013,” she says. “I understood enough to know how serious the road ahead could be, but not enough to understand why it was now happening to me.”

“There was no inspirational breakthrough the next morning. I was still frightened. I simply began learning, one laboratory result, one medication, and one dialysis session at a time.”

Deepti, Founder and CEO, MediMate Foundation

Her transplant came in January 2025. After it, complications and nearly three months in the hospital tested her again. “Recovery was not the clean new beginning I had imagined,” she says.

What kept her moving, she says, was the realization that “if this system felt overwhelming to me, despite my education, technical background, and family support, it must be almost impossible for many others.” She goes on: “I could not change what had happened to me, but I could use it to make someone else’s journey less confusing and less lonely. That realization became the beginning of MediMate Foundation.”

A Directory of About 190 Organizations

MediMate began as something for her own use. She has written that it started as “a personal need to organize post-transplant care,” and the first version was built during a Replit Buildathon. Today she describes MediMate Foundation as “a patient-driven nonprofit that uses responsible technology, education, and community voices to help patients and caregivers navigate complex healthcare journeys.”

Its work includes three things. The Patient Navigation Directory brings trusted healthcare resources and support organizations into one searchable place. Agent Kidney is the AI-powered tool, designed to help people find relevant kidney-health guidance and resources. Kidney Talkies gives patients, caregivers, living donors, clinicians and advocates a place to share what she calls “the realities of kidney disease and transplantation that medical records rarely capture.”

The directory shows the approach at work. The starting assumption, she says, was that patients could already find support through search engines, hospital materials and individual nonprofit websites. “What I found was that the information existed, but it was scattered across dozens of places and organized around institutions rather than the patient’s journey,” she says. “Patients often did not know which organizations were credible, what support they offered, or even what terms to search for.”

The Foundation built a structured, searchable directory of approximately 190 organizations covering transplant navigation, living donation, financial and transportation assistance, peer support, education and disease-specific resources. It has begun expanding access across multiple languages, she says, “because information is only useful when patients can understand and act on it.” The directory reached nearly 500 unique visitors within one 30-day period.

More important to her, the project changed the Foundation’s definition of innovation. “We did not need to create another organization or overwhelm patients with more information,” she says. “We needed to connect them with the right existing support at the moment they needed it.”

The Engineer, and the Manager Who Trusted Her

Deepti’s working life is in data. Today she is a senior data engineer, designing and operating production pipelines with a focus on reliability, performance and scale. Earlier she worked as a senior data analyst on experimentation and predictive modeling. She holds an MS in Business Analytics and Information Management from Purdue University and a B.E. in Instrumentation and Control from Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, and she has published machine learning research, including predictive modeling for blood donation analytics. Alongside the Foundation she founded NephroCompass, focused on kidney health analytics, and co-founded Nourishly, a nutrition-focused AI initiative that came out of a hackathon.

The person she credits is a former manager, Tish Craghead. “She saw potential in me before I had fully learned to recognize it in myself,” Deepti says. “She trusted me with meaningful responsibilities, encouraged me to speak up, and treated my ideas as worth hearing.” The lesson she took from it is that leadership is sometimes about “seeing what they could become and giving them the space, trust, and encouragement to discover it for themselves.”

She says she tries to carry that into how she supports students, emerging technologists and young builders. She is active as a speaker, mentor and panelist in communities such as Women in Big Data and Break Through Tech, and one collaborator wrote in a public post that Deepti was “my collaborator before she became my mentor.”

Where Deepti Is Now

Deepti is building the Foundation from San Jose, California, alongside her work as a senior data engineer. “My next chapter is about moving patient-driven healthcare technology beyond prototypes and into responsible partnerships, pilots, and real-world impact,” she says.

The people she most wants to hear from are transplant centers and health systems, kidney patient organizations, and foundations or responsible healthcare-technology partners supporting patient navigation and equitable health innovation. In October she is due to speak at the Grace Hopper Celebration 2026 in Anaheim, and she volunteers with Women in Big Data, Drishtee and ASEI.

Outside work there is Toastmasters, which she says has become an important part of her life. “It has helped me find my voice, become a more confident storyteller, and speak about kidney health in a way that connects with people beyond data and technology.”

To someone starting out in data or healthcare AI, she gives the same instruction in another form: “Do not begin with AI; begin with the person whose life may be affected by it.” And she doesn’t want them to wait. “Start small, listen carefully, test your assumptions, and keep improving.”

Whatever she builds, she says, she always returns to “one deeply personal question: would this have genuinely helped me or my caregiver when we were trying to navigate this journey ourselves?”

Five Lines from Deepti’s Diary

“Context determines whether technology becomes meaningful support or simply more noise.”
“I wish someone had told me earlier that lived experience is also a form of expertise.”
“Learn the technology deeply, but remain humble about what the data cannot tell you.”
“Most importantly, do not wait until you feel completely qualified to begin.”
“Five years of consistent, meaningful work will take you further than chasing every new technology trend.”