Why we run HealthView this way.

My grandma was very special to me, and she had a very unspecial death in a hospital. That’s when I knew this had to change. It’s why I’ve put everything I’m good at into the end of life, and I’m not stopping until it changes how we deliver that care.

I was born in 1983, the same year Medicare started paying for hospice. Think about everything that’s changed since then. I carry a phone that can answer almost any question in seconds, in almost any language. And too often, a family sitting up with their mom at 3 AM, watching her breathing change, is still flipping through a binder trying to figure out if what they’re seeing is normal.

I want us to change what dying looks like in this country, starting with that night. I know that’s a big thing to say from an office in Cerritos. I’m saying it anyway. We work backwards at HealthView, starting from the last room, and for the first time in my life the tools exist to build what that room needs. We’re building them ourselves, with the nurses who take those calls. I want that family to know what they’re seeing in seconds, in their own language, with a nurse who already knows their mom on the way.

By 2031 we want HealthView to be the highest quality home health, hospice and palliative care provider in California. We don’t need to be the biggest company in the state to get there. When the quality is right the size follows, and when the two pull against each other, quality wins.

HealthView has cared for families in Southern California since 1967. When I became President and CEO in 2022, we kept the name and the families and started rebuilding everything else from first principles. Every rule needs a reason we can defend, and if nobody can defend it, it goes. We’re not where we want to be yet, and I won’t pretend we are. Quality in this work takes years to build and longer to prove.

This work keeps me close to the end of life, and it’s the best education I’ve ever had. I’m not the expert at the bedside, our nurses are, and most of what I know about the end I learned from them and from the letters families send us. At the end, everything that doesn’t matter falls away, and what’s left is the same, family after family: people, time, and whether there was kindness in the room. Nobody talks about their title.

That’s why kindness is the first of our four values, and it’s why culture is the most important clinical variable in care. Every visit is one of our people, alone in a family’s living room, carrying everything we say we are. Nobody from the office is in that room, so the way we treat our people is the care your family gets.

We were told culture and taking care of people were too expensive for a home health company. We were told nurses couldn’t be business people. Our nurses lead home health and hospice together, most of our leaders are nurses who still see patients, Monica Cutia, a nurse, runs operations with me, and the sales team we’re building will be led by a nurse too. In 2026, 98% of our people said HealthView is a great place to work, and we made the Inc. 5000 at No. 97. The numbers say the opposite of what we were told.

Our mission went through the same deletions as everything else. Monica and I questioned every word until two were left: We stay. We stay with your family when it gets hard, which in hospice means staying to the last hour, when there’s nothing left to bill for except being there. And we stay with our people.

Trust is what makes this work. When people trust each other you need fewer rules, and fewer rules means faster answers for the families who call us. My rule with our team is short. I don’t quit on you, and you don’t quit on me. And we don’t quit on our patients. That’s why we stay.

We built CultureAI inside HealthView so we keep those promises as we grow. Every manager walks into every one-on-one prepared, and every commitment to a caregiver is tracked until it’s kept. Culture first, AI second.

Seeing life from the end is also why I care so much about the years before it. What people want at the end is more good years, and those are decided long before the last room. If what we build gives people more of them at home, some families will need less of us, and that’s ok with me.

A lot of this industry turns over its people every year and sells itself every three to five years, and you can’t build trust on that clock. We’re building HealthView for a lot longer than that.

One day the people in my own last room will be the ones who score how I did. I’m human, and I’ll try my best.

Steven GonzalezPresident and CEO

The idea behind this letter comes from my field note Working Backwards, in The Culture Lab. Read it, 15 minutes (opens in a new tab) · Listen to it, 22 minutes (opens in a new tab)