When Lauren Kasper was starting her career as a nurse practitioner, one of her patients, a 30-year-old father who had come to the emergency room for dialysis, died “a slow, horrible death.” The worst part, Kasper said, was that the man’s death was avoidable. “I decided, I can’t sit here, knowing we can do something,” she said “Watching people die like this, it’s so pointless.”