Dr. Freddy Sotelo
A Doctor Who Knows Your Name
By Dr. Freddy Sotelo, Founder and CEO of Norava Health
I've spent sixteen years as an emergency medicine physician. You see the system at its most honest in that job, the version people turn to when every other door has already failed them.
Night after night, I watched the same story play out. A patient would come in with chest pain, or a diabetic crisis, or a headache that had been building for weeks, and it was almost never a true emergency. It was the endpoint of a slow breakdown: no one tracking the warning signs, no baseline to measure against, no data connecting one visit to the next. So the problem grew quietly until it became a crisis.
I didn't go into medicine to manage that breakdown one patient at a time. I went in to understand the bigger picture, why entire communities end up sicker, not just individuals. That's why, in medical school, I also earned a Master's in Public Health. I already sensed my path would eventually pull me away from the bedside and toward the system itself.
What the ER Actually Taught Me
By the time someone reaches me in the ER, most chances to help them have already passed: the blood pressure that went unmonitored for a year, the lump dismissed instead of scanned, the cholesterol that nobody tested until it became a cardiac event. The ER is where preventable problems become expensive, dangerous, and sometimes irreversible ones.
I spent years working this problem from the inside, running the business and quality side for a group of emergency physicians, chairing utilization and credentialing committees, leading clinical documentation across a five-hospital system. When I could see a patient's health data connected over time, their biomarkers, their trends, their baseline, I made faster, safer decisions. When it was scattered across disconnected systems, I was guessing. Good medicine isn't just about a good doctor. It's about a doctor who has the whole picture.
That insight is what Norava is built on. People leave their doctor's office without their own health data, without a baseline to measure against, and without a way to spot problems before they become diagnoses. Norava exists to close that gap.
The Team Behind Norava
This platform was built alongside two physicians who have shaped this as much as I have.
- Dr. Cordelia Lieberman Sotelo is a family medicine physician who spent her career demonstrating that patients get healthier when their doctor knows their history, tracks their data, and sees them as a whole person over time, not as a series of disconnected visits. She leads New Cadence Healthcare.
- Dr. Bobby Massoudian is an emergency physician and hospital executive who helped build the operational systems that make coordinated, data-driven care work at scale. He leads ContinuEM.
Their groundwork, in family medicine, emergency medicine, and healthcare operations, is the clinical foundation Norava stands on.
Building the Bridge
What we learned, together, is that primary care, urgent care, and diagnostics are almost never built by the same team, around the same patient, on the same record. They are separate systems a person has to stitch together themselves, usually at the worst possible moment.
Norava is what happens when you build all three together, connected by one longitudinal health record, so nothing about your health has to be re-explained and nothing gets missed.
We draw your bloodwork. We track it over time against your own baseline, not population averages. A physician reviews your results and walks you through what they mean. That is what we do. It is specific, it is measurable, and it is the kind of proactive health work that the traditional system does not prioritize.
Why This, Why Now
Catching things early, with real diagnostics, reviewed by a physician, benchmarked against your own data, is the difference between a $200 lab test and an ER visit starting at $2,200. Between a manageable finding and a hospital stay. Between a longer life and a shorter one.
That is not a slogan to me. It is the pattern I watched for sixteen years, from the other side of the gurney.
All clinical services are provided by licensed physicians at ContinuEM and New Cadence Healthcare, each a California professional corporation. Norava Health provides the technology platform and management services. The physicians provide the care.
This is not a pivot from my career in medicine. It is the continuation of it.