How I got here
I spend most of my days trying to make clinical documentation suck less.
I'm Ryan Yannelli, CTO and co-founder of Nextvisit AI. We build ambient AI that writes clinical notes for behavioral health providers so they can stop typing and start listening. I've been writing software for about 15 years, mostly because I keep running into problems I want to fix.
The early years
I started building websites at 12. My first business, in 2009, was tiny and mostly embarrassing in hindsight, but it taught me that technical skills only matter if someone will pay for the thing you made. By 16 I was a network engineer at CSDNET, wiring up infrastructure for hospitals, schools, and one or two places that really should have known better. Most kids that age were learning to drive. I was learning that when a hospital network goes down at 2am, nobody wants to hear about your weekend plans.
Technical evolution
From 2018 to 2020 I was a professional services engineer at LISS Technologies, running VoIP rollouts, Exchange migrations, and M365 deployments through their nSpeak subsidiary. After that I took over operations: data centers, engineering teams, and the infrastructure underneath a telecom service.
My stack has shifted a lot. I started in PHP and JavaScript, picked up TypeScript and Vue.js along the way, and now spend a good chunk of my time on LLMs and speech models. The tools change; the job doesn't. You still have to understand the problem before the framework can help you.
Building Nextvisit AI
In 2021 I teamed up with Dr. Faisal Rafiq, a practicing psychiatrist who had been complaining about documentation for roughly his entire career. We decided to build what he wished existed: software that handles the notes so he could go home at a reasonable hour. There's a longer write-up over on the Nextvisit AI page if you want the founding story and metrics.
Today, Nextvisit helps behavioral health providers cut documentation time by 70% and reclaim a few hours a day. Practices on our platform see about 30% more revenue from same-day billing and noticeably better patient retention. In 2025 we joined the LAUNCH Accelerator (Cohort LA35) and kept building.
Living with Type 1 Diabetes
In November 2023, at 26, I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. I was already two years into Nextvisit, and suddenly I was the patient. Building tools for clinicians is one thing. Sitting in the chair on the other side of the desk teaches you something different: how quickly a distracted doctor can miss the thing you actually came in for.
I run DIY Loop with Omnipod and Lyumjev every day. It's open-source diabetes tech built by people who refused to wait for the FDA to catch up, and it quietly keeps me alive. The lesson stuck: people die when they can't afford insulin. Good healthcare software should give people more life, not just move paperwork faster. More on the advocacy page.
Philosophy
I try to build things that matter and avoid things that don't. That's harder than it sounds. Most good products come from understanding the user well enough to know when they're wrong, iterating past the version you're proud of, and not mistaking "clever" for "correct."
When I'm not working I'm probably reading about AI, poking at one of my open-source projects, or doing something T1D advocacy-shaped. You can also catch up on what I've been writing on the blog. If you're a fellow founder, a clinician, or a diabetic who wants to nerd out about Loop, I'd love to hear from you.