Zach Dyce, MBA ’25: Empowering Community-Based Behavioral Health Providers

Zach Dyce spent his childhood in a troubled home in Orlando, Florida. His parents both experienced substance use disorder (SUD), and the family frequently went without food, electricity, and health insurance. Even if his parents had considered addiction treatment, such help was out of financial reach.

When he was 16, Dyce got a call from the police that his father, who had lost his driver’s license, had been hit by a car while biking intoxicated. Though he emerged from the accident unharmed, his father was threatened with arrest unless Dyce could pick him up and take him home. That day proved the last straw; Dyce decided he wanted a different life for himself.

Now, with support from the Stanford Impact Founder Fellowship program through Stanford Graduate School of Business, Dyce is building Penguin Health: a platform for community-based behavioral health providers. It streamlines Medicaid compliance and provides insights and analytics, informing their work to help people break the cycle of SUD through treatment and recovery. “I’ve seen the impact that addiction and behavioral health services can have on families and communities, and more support and innovation are needed for these providers than ever, especially amongst the Medicaid population,” he says.

Sharpening His Focus

Initially, Dyce thought a job on Wall Street was his ticket to upward mobility. While putting himself through Florida State University and studying for his degree in finance, he scoured LinkedIn to build his business network, cold emailing some 1,000 investment bankers and setting up scores of meetings. After graduation, he secured an investment banking job but soon realized finance wasn’t his passion; he craved more opportunities for strategic, operational thinking with companies on the ground.

He left investment banking and instead took roles where he could further develop his interest in strategy and operations while also exploring ways to effect change. After a stint at Boston Consulting Group, Dyce worked in Kenya for Jumia, an online retailer in Africa, to support the CEO in a push for simultaneous growth and profitability; he then led Jumia’s 20-minute grocery delivery business to launch across 10 countries in Africa. After that experience honed his operational skills, Dyce wanted to lay the foundation for entrepreneurial opportunities, and he hoped to apply his life and early career experiences into starting his own business. He applied to Stanford GSB with a sole focus on becoming an entrepreneur.

Two weeks after he was admitted to the MBA program, his mother died from an opioid overdose. That experience was catalyzing for Dyce. “Seeing the end game of addiction fundamentally shifted something inside of me,” he says. “It made me realize that I spent so much time building an opportunity for myself that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t use my platform to fight for people I could have become.” His first year at Stanford GSB allowed him to explore the possibilities.

Turning Ideas Into a Business Plan

Before coming to Stanford GSB, Dyce had never imagined he would become a social entrepreneur — he hadn’t considered how he could build a business that drives positive social impact. Through the business school’s Impact Design Immersion Fellowship — an eight-week summer entrepreneurial program of the Center for Social Innovation — and courses such as Impact: From Idea to Enterprise (taught by lecturers Russell Siegelman and Laura Hattendorf, MBA ’93), Dyce came to realize that his lived experience combined with his professional skills and aptitude to do hard things gave him a unique point of view, especially around healthcare and SUD treatment. He began exploring ways to identify a business opportunity that leverages technology within a system that millions of Americans rely on, with the goal of improving their lives. “Being at the GSB made me feel empowered to serve a market that traditional ventures and capital overlook, even though it serves millions of Americans,” he says.

Through his coursework and collaboration with an MD/MBA classmate, Dyce learned that the U.S. healthcare system fails to provide adequate support for Medicaid patients with SUD, a population disproportionately affected by poverty, stigma, and systemic inequities. More than 12 million Medicaid beneficiaries experience SUD annually, yet less than 33% transition to continuous care after treatment. These challenges are compounded by social determinants of health, such as housing instability, transportation barriers, and employment challenges, all of which exacerbate health disparities. The gaps lead to a 40 percent relapse rate, untold preventable deaths, and $60 billion in extra healthcare costs, Dyce says.

Dyce used his Impact Design Immersion Fellowship to gain experience in healthcare and addiction services in New York City. There, he worked with Robin Hood, the city’s largest poverty-fighting organization, and collaborated closely with community-based organizations (CBOs) providing addiction services. He found these critical providers of SUD care underfunded and overwhelmed, often managing unwieldy patient case loads without the scalable tools to engage or coordinate care effectively. This hampered their ability to deliver personalized, continuous care, leaving patients vulnerable to disengagement and relapse.

At the end of the fellowship, Dyce knew his future business idea lay at the intersection of Medicaid, behavioral health, and social determinants of health. “That’s where I really fell in love with these organizations and found these are the most resilient, scrappy, caring people, and they provide such exceptional care with so few resources,” Dyce says.

Initially, he considered a patient-engagement platform when creating Penguin Health, but quickly realized that Medicaid insurance providers would want his business to become a provider, hiring doctors, assuming patient risk, and providing care. That wasn’t something Dyce was comfortable doing. “Who was I to think that I could provide better care than the organization in East Harlem that’s been doing it for 50 years?” Dyce says. Instead, he decided to develop a product that would help make these CBOs more financially resilient, so that they could continue their important work.

Half of all community health centers operate at break-even or negative margins. With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (officially H.R. 1 and Public Law 119-21) in July 2025, these CBOs now face a series of Medicaid cuts to their already stretched resources. When Dyce interviewed more than 50 organizations, he found that compliance and quality improvement issues were recurring problems across these safety-net organizations. Providers were spending four to five hours a day manually reviewing clinical notes to ensure compliance with program-specific rules and billing regulations. Dyce noted that if processes were automated, not only would these providers be able to optimize their revenue and be ready for audits, but they would also gain back hours each day to focus on patients.

Focusing on Impact and Scale

Penguin Health aims to seamlessly integrate into CBOs’ existing workflows. “We’re figuring out how to better package existing technology, large language models, and AI in a way that is cheap and easily scalable across the thousands of organizations in the safety net,” Dyce says.

While there are other products on the market, very few focus on Medicaid. Most are designed for commercial solutions, and their price points are cost-prohibitive for lean-running CBOs — or they don’t meet the unique workflow needs of typically underfunded, understaffed, and underresourced safety net providers. Penguin Health’s goal is to create an affordable platform that’s hyperspecific to the needs of behavioral health CBOs serving primarily low-income populations.

“Every organization cares about revenue, but when you’re not worried about profit, you value different things. We’re trying to figure out what is the small set of product features that they actually care about, and how we can deliver it in a way that works for them, and maybe give up some of the bells and whistles that don’t meaningfully move the needle,” Dyce says.

Dyce also plans to use technology to help providers achieve efficiencies. “Quality improvement is what these organizations are most excited about, because they have so much qualitative data in their electronic health records, and they don’t have the time or capacity to really do much with that right now,” he says. Tailored AI applications will allow CBOs to visualize how each patient is progressing and how well they’re meeting organizational goals. These insights and analytics will help them provide better care, even with a shrinking set of resources.

Most people equate Medicaid with complexity and fragmentation. As a federal program, Medicaid is the largest payer for behavioral health in the country, but it’s not a monolith. Each state and territory administers the program differently and has its own reimbursement rates and billing codes. Dyce sees segmentation as an opportunity for innovation.

“Just because there’s complexity doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways that we can make the system work better for program staff and patients by helping these providers do more with less and shift margin from administration to care,” Dyce says. “We’re trying to show that you can build tech specifically for these organizations, and they will pay for it — and it can have impact.”