Alex Mastryukov

I'm Alex Mastryukov, founder of Menaela. For 17+ years I've been launching and running clinics, building healthcare software, and fixing the operational mess between physicians, reception, EHRs, labs, billing and patients. I've launched 15+ clinics, managed several, and worked on healthcare IT across roughly 100 organizations. Menaela is the practice manager I wanted when I was the one running the clinic.

Technically, I'm a financial manager who got trapped in healthcare IT.

I started in finance — degrees, financial models, investments, the whole respectable career path. Then, while I was still finishing university, someone asked me to help with the business plan for a new medical center. It sounded like a small project. It wasn't. A short time later I was pitching a full private hospital — MRI, CT, surgery, IVF — to investors, and then became its CFO and first employee.

For the next years I learned healthcare the expensive way: by running it. I helped build a hospital from scratch, opened my own pediatric clinic that grew into a small chain, launched more than 15 clinics, and eventually worked on healthcare IT for roughly 100 organizations.

I built healthcare software because I couldn't find software I wanted to use

When I ran clinics, I hated most of the systems available to me. Some were ancient desktop monsters. Others were tidy cloud CRMs that could schedule an appointment but had no idea what was happening in the rest of the clinic. I wanted one operational picture — reception, medicine, billing, analytics, communications, labs, inventory — the actual business, not one isolated piece of it.

So at 26, with more optimism than sense, we built our own. That internal system became a commercial healthcare platform, and over the following years we built and implemented systems for outpatient clinics, hospitals, laboratories, IVF, genetics, imaging, surgery, psychiatry and rehabilitation.

There is no such thing as a generic clinic workflow. Every clinic thinks its process is normal — then you see another fifty.

Why Menaela

After all these years I've become skeptical of healthcare AI demos. A demo is easy. The interesting part starts when you connect it to a real clinic — physicians who don't want another system, reception with three unofficial ways to book the same procedure, an EHR API written by someone who clearly disliked other developers, and a patient who sends a voice message instead of answering the question.

The clinics I know best — solo practitioners and small practices — don't need an enterprise platform. They need the operational load to stop landing on the one or two people who are also trying to see patients. That's what Menaela is: an AI practice manager that answers patients, manages the schedule, follows up with leads and prepares documentation — through the same validated operations the clinic system uses, not a chatbot bolted on top.

What I do now

I've spent more than 17 years on both sides of the table: the person running the clinic asking why the software doesn't work, and the person responsible for making it work. I'm not especially interested in "AI transformation." I'm interested in finding the expensive, annoying, repetitive part of a healthcare operation and making it stop eating people's time — without breaking anything else. That's the whole idea behind Menaela.