My mother, sitting in a hospital room, nodding along to a doctor she didn't understand, because nodding felt safer than admitting she was lost.

We did what millions of families do in that moment: we guessed, we nodded, we pieced together what we could between the beeping and the fear. My mom is healthy and doing great. Not every family, sitting in hospital rooms all across this country, is that lucky. That memory is the reason HolaVida Health exists today.

I wish I could tell you this was rare. It isn't. It's every day, in emergency rooms all over the United States, for any of the 74 million people here with limited English proficiency. That's one in five Americans, quietly getting sicker because the system was never built to hear them.

I'm a proud Latino, the son of immigrants, and I've spent over a decade in digital health. I've seen this exact scene play out from every angle: as a family member, and as an operator who knew the technology to fix it already existed. Nobody had built it end to end. So a year ago, I decided we would.

HolaVida Health is an AI company that delivers personalized care in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, tailored to each patient's medical history, clinical data, preferred language and patient preferences.

Our team is made up of seasoned digital health veterans with decades of experience — all of us immigrants or the children of immigrants, who understand this problem firsthand and weren't willing to rush a fix that didn't actually work. So instead, we spent the year heads-down, building a proprietary EMR entirely in-house, a true AI-native stack layered on top of it, a culturally-centered care model, and a continuous 360° feedback loop connecting our patients, clinicians, and Health Navigators.

Today, on our first birthday, here's what we've accomplished:

• →1,600% YoY growth
• →Patient NPS of +80.2 and CSAT of 9.29/10 — world-class by any healthcare benchmark
• →4 core chronic care categories: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, mental health
• →We launched Vida AI, our proprietary AI platform, built on top of our proprietary EMR, purpose-built to understand the cultural and linguistic nuance our patients need

I'll be honest about why this feels urgent to me right now, beyond the mission. Immigrant communities in this country are increasingly afraid and that fear is keeping people out of the doctor's office, even when they desperately need care. Add a language barrier on top of that fear, and you get a healthcare crisis hiding in plain sight, getting worse, not better. None of that is a reason to slow down. It's the reason we exist. A system that finally hears every patient isn't a someday idea — we are building it right now, and it takes all of us.

If any of this sounds like your fight too, come join our community.

— Eric Xavier Macias, Founder & CEO