Today we’d like to introduce you to Craig Coleman.
Hi Craig, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My path to entrepreneurship has been anything but linear.
I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and joined the U.S. Navy shortly after high school. What began as an opportunity to find direction ultimately became a 30-year career that took me from being an enlisted electrician to becoming a commissioned officer, aerospace engineer, program manager, and eventually a physician.
Along the way, I earned degrees in applied physics and electrical engineering and later studied space systems engineering. I spent several years working in the national security space community and served overseas, including during the Iraq War. Then, in what probably seemed like an unusual career change to many people, I went to medical school.
But looking back, there was actually a common thread through all of those experiences: I have always been interested in complex systems, how they fail, and how we can make them work better for the people who depend on them.
Medicine gave that interest a very human dimension.
As a physician, I began to recognize how much of healthcare happens—or doesn’t happen—between appointments. A patient may see a physician for 20 or 30 minutes and then go weeks or months before the next visit. During that time, medications change, symptoms develop, social circumstances shift, and small problems can quietly become larger ones.
That observation became part of the foundation for Coleman Health Services.
I started the company to explore better ways of extending healthcare beyond the traditional office visit while preserving something I believe is essential: the human relationship at the center of medicine. Today, our work is developing across healthcare services, physician support, and responsible uses of technology and artificial intelligence.
My background in cybersecurity and AI governance has also shaped how I approach this work. I am excited about what technology can do, but I don’t believe innovation should simply mean adding more technology. The real question is whether we are solving a meaningful human problem and doing it responsibly.
Entrepreneurship has brought me back to many of the lessons I first learned in the Navy: build a good team, understand the mission, prepare carefully, remain adaptable, and don’t be afraid to enter spaces where you still have a lot to learn.
At this stage of my life, that last lesson may be the most important. After 30 years in the Navy and careers in engineering, medicine, and cybersecurity, I could have chosen a more predictable path. Instead, I decided to build something.
And in many ways, I feel like I’m just getting started.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No, it definitely has not been a smooth road. But I think the obstacles make more sense if I start long before I became an entrepreneur.
I grew up in the housing projects in Richmond in the 1970s. I remember being bused to school beginning around 1973, during a period when Richmond and much of the country were still struggling with what school integration actually meant in practice. I also remember getting an egg sandwich in the morning through the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program. They recognized something that seems obvious today but was profound at the time: a hungry child is going to have a harder time learning.
As a child, I didn’t understand the politics or history surrounding any of that. I just knew someone was making sure children had something to eat before school.
Looking back, I realize those experiences probably shaped me more than I understood at the time. They taught me that outcomes are often influenced by things happening outside the places where we traditionally look for them. Education isn’t affected only by what happens in the classroom, just as health isn’t determined only by what happens in the doctor’s office.
I also learned something else that I appreciate much more now: our circumstances can limit not only our opportunities, but our ability to imagine what is possible. We make choices, but we make them from the choices we can see.
When I joined the Navy after high school, my world began to expand dramatically. I entered as an enlisted electrician. From there, one opportunity exposed me to another. Eventually I went to college, became a commissioned naval officer, studied engineering, worked in the national security space community, served overseas, became a physician, and later moved into cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
Written as a paragraph, that progression sounds almost intentional. It wasn’t.
There were failures, wrong turns, doubts, and periods when I genuinely wasn’t sure I belonged in the room. I have had to reinvent myself several times, and almost every reinvention required becoming a beginner again after finally becoming comfortable with who I had been before.
That has probably been one of the recurring challenges of my life.
When I entered engineering environments, I had to grow into being an engineer. When I entered medicine, I was starting over again. The same happened in cybersecurity. And now entrepreneurship has humbled me in an entirely different way.
Starting Coleman Health Services later in my career meant voluntarily becoming a beginner again after decades of accumulating credentials and expertise. Being a physician doesn’t teach you how to build a sales pipeline. Being an engineer doesn’t teach you how to win a government contract. Being a military officer doesn’t automatically teach you how to find product-market fit, raise capital, price a service, or build a company from nothing.
There are days when I know exactly what I’m doing and others when I discover how much I still don’t know.
But I’ve become comfortable with that.
One of the most important things I’ve learned is that confidence doesn’t mean believing you already have all the answers. Sometimes confidence is simply believing that you can figure out the next step.
That philosophy also influences how I think about the work we’re doing today. With our Physician Extender Service, for example, we’re focused on what happens to patients during the weeks and months between traditional medical appointments. In some ways, I see a connection to that egg sandwich I received as a child. The Black Panther breakfast program recognized that what happened before a child entered the classroom could affect what happened once that child got there. In healthcare, what happens between physician visits can profoundly affect what happens at the next one.
Different problem. Different era. Same underlying lesson: **the spaces in between matter.**
So no, the road hasn’t been smooth. But I don’t think I would want it to have been. The difficult parts expanded my world, forced me to adapt, and taught me that what looks like a wall from where you’re standing may actually have a ramp somewhere.
You just have to keep looking for it.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
The easiest way to explain my work is with a simple idea:
**The space between visits matters.**
I’m the founder and CEO of Coleman Health Services, a Virginia-based healthcare and technology company. Much of our work begins with a problem I encountered repeatedly as a physician: healthcare is largely organized around encounters, but patients don’t experience their health in encounters.
A patient may see a primary care physician today and not return for three or six months. During those months, blood pressure can change, medications can stop being taken, shortness of breath can worsen, a spouse can become ill, transportation can disappear, or a patient can simply become confused about what he or she was supposed to do.
The healthcare system often doesn’t discover those changes until the next appointment—or until something happens that forces the patient into an emergency department.
We call that period **clinical invisibility**.
One of the things I’m most excited about building is our Physician Extender Service, or PES. The concept is straightforward: create structured human contact with patients between traditional medical visits, identify meaningful changes earlier, and make sure the right information reaches the appropriate clinical professional.
Importantly, we’re not trying to replace the patient’s physician. We’re trying to make the physician more effective by helping illuminate what happens when the patient isn’t sitting in the examination room.
Technology and artificial intelligence can help us capture, organize, and prioritize information, but I believe strongly that technology should support human judgment rather than quietly replace it. That philosophy comes partly from being both a physician and an engineer, and partly from my later work in cybersecurity and AI governance.
Those different careers allow me to look at healthcare problems from several perspectives simultaneously. The physician in me asks, “Is this clinically meaningful?” The engineer asks, “Can we design a reliable system around it?” The cybersecurity professional asks, “What can go wrong, and how do we manage that risk?” And the entrepreneur has to ask the most unforgiving question of all: “Will anyone actually use it?”
I think that combination is what sets our work apart.
Coleman Health Services also works in healthcare workforce services and responsible AI governance, particularly as healthcare organizations begin incorporating increasingly powerful AI systems into clinical and administrative environments. Across those areas, the common theme is trust: creating systems that help people make better decisions without losing accountability, human judgment, or the relationships that make healthcare work.
What I’m most proud of, though, isn’t a credential, technology, or company milestone.
It’s that we’re attempting to build solutions around problems I’ve actually seen.
I spent much of my career working inside large institutions—the military, medicine, engineering, national security, and cybersecurity. Now I have the opportunity to take lessons from all of those worlds and ask a different question:
**If we were designing this from scratch around the person who actually needs the system, what would we do differently?**
That’s the question behind much of what we’re building today.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
One book I return to again and again is ***As a Man Thinketh* by James Allen**. It’s a very small book, but its central idea—that our thoughts ultimately shape our character, choices, and circumstances—has stayed with me for years.
I don’t agree with every idea in any book without qualification, but I appreciate books that make me stop and examine how I’m thinking. At this point in my life, I’ve become increasingly interested in the relationship between our thoughts, the choices we believe are available to us, and the lives we ultimately create.
I also read across disciplines. Medicine, technology, artificial intelligence, psychology, history, business, and leadership all interest me. Some of the most useful ideas come from connecting something learned in one field to a completely different problem in another.
And although they’re not apps or books, two of my most important resources are **walking and quiet time**. I walk regularly, often while thinking through a problem, and meditation has become an important part of how I begin my day. Some problems benefit from more information. Others benefit from enough quiet to actually hear yourself think.
Technology gives me extraordinary access to information, and I use AI extensively as a tool for research, exploration, and challenging my thinking. But I’ve also learned that having access to more information isn’t the same thing as having greater clarity.
Sometimes the most useful thing I can do is read something slowly, take a walk, and think.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.colemanhealthsvcs.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drcraigcoleman/
