How Darden Helped Rohan Boyapati See the Operating Room Differently

In a hospital, one delayed surgery can quickly become everyone’s problem.

A physician waits. A provider stays late. A patient’s schedule is disrupted. An operating room sits unused while costs continue to add up.

Rohan Boyapati (Class of 2027) saw that ripple effect during medical school. Now, the UVA MD/MBA student is working with two University of Virginia Darden School of Business classmates to build OrchardOps, a software platform aimed at helping surgical and procedural facilities run more efficiently.

The early-stage venture is focused on operational challenges such as case scheduling and turnover times between procedures. By giving facilities a clearer picture of where delays happen, the team hopes to help them make better decisions and use already-limited resources more effectively.

“I’ve seen firsthand how much of an administrative burden it can be,” Boyapati said. “It impacts providers, patients and the cost to the health care system.”

Connecting Medicine, Technology and Business

Boyapati came to medicine with a background that was already a little different from many of his classmates. Before starting medical school, he worked as a machine learning engineer and studied data science.

He knew he wanted to work in health care, but he was still trying to understand how his interest in technology could fit into that path.

During his first three and a half years of medical school, that connection started to become clearer. As he moved through clinical rotations, Boyapati saw both the care happening at a patient’s bedside and the larger systems shaping that care behind the scenes.

“I started seeing all of this systems-level decision-making happening,” he said. “There were things that were done really well in the hospital system and also things we could definitely work to improve.”

The MD/MBA program gave him a way to look more closely at those larger challenges. Boyapati began his time at Darden toward the end of medical school, when he already had a better understanding of the kind of physician he wanted to become. He plans to pursue anesthesiology, a specialty that would keep him close to many of the operating-room challenges OrchardOps is trying to address.

At Darden, courses in operations, strategy and leading organizations helped him think differently about the problems he had seen in the hospital.

A surgical delay may seem like one issue, but it can affect patients, physicians, anesthesiologists, nurses, scrub technicians and administrators in different ways. Boyapati said Darden’s focus on stakeholder analysis helped him understand how each person experiences the same system.

“Bringing that approach to the hospital system has helped me shape a lot of these concerns from different people,” he said.

Building a Team at Darden

Boyapati did not have to look far to find people willing to help him explore the idea.

Photo by Alisa Foytik.

His roommate and fellow Darden student Balaji Reddy brought previous startup experience and a background in pharmaceutical operations in India. Boyapati valued his ability to speak with customers and understand the problems they were actually trying to solve — not just the problems the team assumed they faced.

Aaron Talbert, also a Darden student, brought a strong quantitative background and an ability to work through complicated operational questions.

Boyapati knew their skills complemented his own, but it was their friendship that made him comfortable sharing the idea in the first place.

“The best part about it all is they’re my friends,” Boyapati said. “These are people that I trust and love working with. Plus, we can hang out and not talk about any of this stuff.”

The team began conducting customer discovery and learning more about the problem last fall. Boyapati also connected with Darden’s Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, where he found early guidance on funding, product development and the realities of building a company.

This summer, Orchard Ops joined the i.Lab Incubator, an intensive program that supports founders as they work to develop and test their ventures.

Through workshops, mentoring and weekly sprint sessions, the team has been learning from entrepreneurs and experts in areas such as sales, product development and effectual entrepreneurship. Just as important, Boyapati said, they have been working alongside other founders who are facing many of the same uncertainties.

Coming into the MBA program without a traditional business background, Boyapati found value in Darden’s core curriculum and case method. Courses in accounting, finance and operations gave him a foundation he had not previously had, while classroom discussions allowed him to learn from classmates with very different experiences.

He was especially surprised by how much he enjoyed operations.

“I did not realize I would love operations problems as much as I did,” he said.

He also appreciates how willing Darden professors are to continue conversations outside the classroom. When a case or class discussion connects to an idea he is exploring, he can approach a faculty member afterward and talk it through.

“That connection is just as valuable, if not more valuable, than the classes themselves,” he said.

Becoming Comfortable With the Unknown

Even as he builds a company, Boyapati is not entirely comfortable calling himself an entrepreneur.

“I’m just a tinkerer,” he said. “I’m playing around with things and seeing what happens.”

Photo by Alisa Foytik.

For Boyapati, entrepreneurship is less about having a formal title and more about being curious, creative and willing to try something without knowing exactly where it will lead.

That uncertainty has also been one of the most difficult parts of the process. Unlike more structured career paths, there is no set list of steps that guarantees a startup will work. Every founder has to find a path of their own.

“It can be very isolating when there’s not a defined path for you,” Boyapati said. “But that’s also part of the process.”

One lesson from i.Lab helped him rethink those challenges.

“You don’t just face bumps in the road — they are the road,” he said. “You have to be accepting and adaptable to what comes your way.”

His biggest advice to other students interested in entrepreneurship is to stay curious and continue looking for opportunities to learn. Boyapati said he learns from professors, classmates, mentors and physicians, but also from patients and people who may see a problem completely differently than he does.

“Stay hungry,” he said. “The power of wanting to learn is so valuable.”

Keeping Clinical Care at the Center

Even the name OrchardOps reflects Boyapati’s approach.

“OR” is a reference to the operating room, while “Ops” represents the operational problems the team hopes to solve. The orchard itself represents growth — something Boyapati hopes the company, and the people building it, will continue to experience.

He is still figuring out exactly what that growth will look like. His immediate goal is to begin an anesthesiology residency and return to the clinical work he loves.

OrchardOps, he said, did not come from a desire to step away from medicine or pursue a business opportunity for its own sake. It came from wanting to make the hospital experience better.

For Boyapati, becoming a physician and building OrchardOps are not two separate paths. Both are rooted in the same question: How can the health care system work better for the people inside it?