🏥 Healthcare Technology

Better Patient Understanding.
Better Outcomes.

PemaSun is a patient-centered platform that improves healthcare understanding and adherence through personalized, accessible educational content.

Learn What We Do
1 in 3
U.S. adults have low health literacy
40–80%
of clinical info patients forget or misunderstand
Billions
in avoidable healthcare costs annually
↓ Less
preventive care use among low-literacy patients
Our Goal / What We Do

Redesigning How Patients Receive Health Information

Our Mission

The goal of PemaSun is to directly address the gap in patient healthcare literacy by creating a scalable, patient-centered platform that improves understanding and adherence through personalized, accessible educational content. The mission is to move beyond digitizing existing instructions to fundamentally redesign how patients receive and act on healthcare information in real-world settings.

The Current Health Literacy Crisis
📊

Limited health literacy is widespread. About one in three U.S. adults have low personal health literacy, meaning they struggle to find, understand, and use health information needed to make healthcare decisions.

JAMA, 2025
🧠

Patients forget most of what they are told. Studies show patients tend to forget or not understand 40–80% of the information provided in clinical consultations.

Annals of Emergency Medicine, 2020
⚕️

The health consequences are serious. Patients with poor health literacy use preventative health services less, are less adherent to prescribed medications, and are less likely to play an active role in treatment decisions.

Journal of Environmental Health Sciences, 2020
💰

It costs the system billions. Health literacy is consistently associated with higher healthcare costs across all healthcare settings.

BMJ Open, 2025
What PemaSun Provides
🎯
Improve patient engagement with tailored healthcare learning materials
📈
Track adherence and engagement with prescribed instructions
📋
Provide a way to document the provision of necessary patient education
About Us

Clinician-Designed. Patient-Centered.

Our interdisciplinary team is comprised of clinicians and technology experts who have developed a patient-centered, clinician-designed platform built to improve healthcare understanding and outcomes across all care settings.

Our Team
Dr. Justinna Dixon
Dr. Justinna Dixon, Ph.D., RN
Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Justinna Dixon (She/her) is a PhD-prepared registered nurse with clinical and research expertise in psychiatric and mental healthcare. She has provided nursing care for patients with a variety of mental health conditions within inpatient and outpatient settings. She has published over 8 peer-reviewed articles related to healthcare provision and has presented her research at regional, national, and international conferences. She holds positions on national advisory boards for organizations such as AcademyHealth. She received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Rutgers University, honored as the 2025 Rising Star Alumni, and completed her doctoral degree (PhD) in Nursing from Columbia University.
CEO
Jesse Stover
Jesse Stover
Chief Technology Officer
Jess is a full-stack engineer who specializes in building scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant cloud-native applications. She served as Lead Full Stack Engineer for the Penn Ditti project at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, supporting regular insomnia care for 80+ patients. At PemaSun, she leads the deployment of secure cloud architecture to support PemaSun's agentic workflows. Jess has also contributed to research-oriented open-source projects including the FaaSr project at Oregon State University, supporting serverless workflows for ecological monitoring and agricultural water supply analysis. She was a finalist for the Fulbright program in South Korea, where she led a qualitative study on the English learning experiences of North Korean refugees.
CTO
Dr. Nalaka Gooneratne
Dr. Nalaka Gooneratne, M.D., M.Sc.
Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Nalaka Gooneratne is a physician-scientist, entrepreneur, and educator with expertise in sleep medicine, behavioral health, and healthcare innovation. He serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board, helping lead the development of AI-augmented platforms designed to improve patient engagement, health literacy, and adherence through personalized educational content. As an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he has led numerous NIH-funded research and educational programs focused on improving health outcomes through technology and behavior change. His work bridges clinical medicine, translational research, and artificial intelligence to address real-world healthcare challenges.
CSO
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