Why Tuva Started
Aaron and Coco had both rebuilt the same healthcare data platform at multiple organizations. Each time, teams repeated the same foundational work from scratch, and everyone lost time rebuilding plumbing instead of doing high-value analytics.
At the same time, off-the-shelf platforms were often costing millions of dollars, while still limiting flexibility and transparency.
They also realized almost no one was truly building for healthcare data and analytics practitioners. So they started Tuva: an open foundation that lets teams stop reinventing the wheel and focus on the analytics that actually improve care.
Why the Name Tuva
Aaron and Coco are massive Richard Feynman fans. Feynman embodied the kind of intellectual honesty, curiosity, and rigor that the Tuva team tries to bring to healthcare analytics every day.
Tuva is an allegory for Feynman. Tuva was formerly a country in the Soviet Union. For more than a decade before his death, Feynman and his friend Ralph Leighton tried to travel to the country of Tuva. What started as a joke became a mission - and it was challenging. Getting a visa to Soviet Russia during the cold war was next to impossible. Ultimately Feynman died a few weeks before their visas came, but Ralph traveled to Tuva and chronicled the trip and their adventure trying to get there in his book Tuva or Bust.
Ralph helped pen a number of other books about Feynman which the Tuva team highly recommends. For readers new to Feynman, a strong starting point is Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.
The Tuva Project is Tuva's attempt to fix healthcare data - Tuva or Bust.
