mPATH wasn't built in a startup accelerator. It was built by physicians who spent 20 years studying why patients don't complete cancer screening — and engineering a way to fix it.
In 2005, Dr. David Miller was a physician at Wake Forest with a background in computing. He kept seeing the same pattern: patients who needed cancer screening weren't getting it. Not because they didn't want to — but because the systems designed to reach them weren't working.
Letters went unopened. Portal messages reached the already-engaged. Patient navigators could close the gap one person at a time, but at $80K–$100K per navigator handling 200–300 patients, the math didn't scale. The patients most overdue — low-income, low-literacy, rural — were the hardest to reach and the least served by existing tools.
Miller started asking: what if we could build something that did what navigators do, but at population scale? Something grounded in behavioral science, not just messaging?
In 2015, Miller and colleague Dr. Ajay Dharod built the first mPATH prototype — an iPad-based decision aid that identified patients due for colorectal cancer screening and guided them through education, risk assessment, and a screening decision at the point of care.
It worked. But it only reached patients who showed up for visits. The patients most overdue weren't coming in. So Miller and Dharod rebuilt mPATH to work via SMS — reaching patients between visits, on their phones, wherever they were.
The National Cancer Institute funded the research. Over 15 years, more than $8M in NCI grants supported the development, testing, and refinement of the behavioral science engine at the core of mPATH.
The results were published in the journals that clinical governance committees actually trust. A randomized controlled trial of 26,000+ patients, published in JAMA, showed mPATH increased lung cancer screening completion by 57% over usual care. An earlier trial in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed 2x completion in low-income, low-literacy populations — with 53% of patients self-ordering their own screening.
In 2026, the Digital Medicine Society awarded mPATH its DiMe Seal — third-party validation for evidence, usability, privacy, security, and equity. mPATH has now served over 100,000 patients across lung, breast, and colorectal screening programs.
In 2022, Miller and Dharod spun mPATH Health out of Wake Forest, securing NCI grants and venture funding to bring the platform to health systems and FQHCs nationwide.
Today mPATH deploys in 2–3 days, works with any EHR, and guarantees 10:1 ROI in year one. The platform handles what patient navigators do — at 100x the scale, with published proof that it works across every demographic.
We'll walk you through the evidence, model the impact, and design a solution for your organization.