I was seventeen
when I first put
on the uniform.

I was ten years old, walking with my dad, when an FDNY ambulance pulled up on the street.

I'd been watching ambulance shows since I was seven. I walked up to the crew and asked — with the full confidence of a ten-year-old — whether their truck was BLS or ALS. They laughed, said ALS, and showed me the lights. Another ambulance pulled up behind them. I don't remember what the call was. I remember thinking: I want to do that.

I became a lifeguard first, chasing the same thing — being the person who runs toward it. When COVID hit and everyone else was stuck inside, I signed up for EMT school. I was seventeen.

My first shift, my first call: an EDP in the subway. Emotionally disturbed person. By the time we got there, ten NYPD officers were restraining him. I was scared. I was also entirely sure I was in the right place.

I stayed at my volunteer agency through senior year. I missed parties. I stopped swimming. I showed up to school late most mornings — I'd worked a shift the night before — and the dean, a former NYPD officer, cut me slack.

My friends figured out where I was. They gave me space to be there. I liked them. I liked the ambulance more.

At eighteen, I started working for a transport company. In my first few weeks, five of my reports came back. Kicked back by QA. I didn't know what to fix.

No one explained documentation in EMT school — not really. You learn to treat the patient. Nobody tells you that the narrative you write at 3 a.m., on a cheap ruggedized tablet, is the reason your agency gets paid, the reason your truck stays on the road, the reason a lawyer can or can't ruin your day two years later.

I was new. My partner was new. There was nobody to ask.

So I watched what the veteran medics did. They kept templates in their Notes app — copy, paste, edit. Dozens of them. A different one for chest pain, for cardiac arrest, for the fall from standing. I started collecting my own.

That was v0 of CareSwift: a hundred templates, fill in the blanks, get a clean narrative. And I realized something looking at them — the calls we run are not infinite. About fifteen scenarios cover ninety percent of what we see. Once I saw that, I couldn't un-see it.

When AI started to work — really work — in 2023, I rebuilt the whole thing. Narratives got smarter. Billing logic came next.

I never marketed it. I used it on my own truck. Partners would lean over and ask what is that. I'd send them a link. They'd send it to their partners. It went viral in the 9-1-1 system before I'd ever thought of it as a company.

Today, CareSwift is the documentation layer for about four out of every ten 9-1-1 ambulances in New York City. Y Combinator came after. So did a real team. My best friend Jonathan — who taught me to code in ninth grade math class, and who reality-checks me when I get too far out over my skis — joined as co-founder and runs the engineering.

And I'm still on the ambulance. People ask me why. The honest answer is: I can't get away. I love it. The adrenaline, the people, the realness of it. If I'm on my deathbed I'll be trying to get one more shift.

That's not incidental to this company. It's the whole thing. The person who built this tool uses it every week. The problems we fix are problems we still have.

By the time CareSwift had a name, I'd already worked across five-plus ambulance services. Different sizes, different cities, the same broken paperwork.

Before any of this was a company, I spent years inside operations at one of the country's largest ambulance companies — building the ePCR they ran on, and the systems behind it. You see things from the inside that you don't see from the back of a rig: the QA queues, the kickbacks at scale, the way one bad chart in Brooklyn becomes a denied claim in a billing office a thousand miles away.

I still consult across five-plus services today — different stacks, different leadership, the same loop. The medic view is one half of the chart. The operator view is the other. CareSwift is the place those two views finally meet.