Profile
The Operator in the Room
In early April 2020, while San Francisco was ten days into its shelter-in-place order, Abby McGarey did something specific and telling: she joined a giving circle. Not in an abstract, send-a-check way - she joined 100+ Women Who Care San Francisco, nominated Project Open Hand as her first cause, and eventually became a board member. That is a pattern worth noticing. She does not spectate. She joins, and then she leads.
That same instinct has defined her professional arc. Abby McGarey did not fall into healthcare strategy. She mapped it, methodically, from multiple angles: biopharma research in Durham, graduate academic work at UC Berkeley, cancer services administration at UCLA Health, primary care innovation at Aledade in Boston, and finally the full-speed world of digital musculoskeletal care at Hinge Health in San Francisco. Each stop was a deliberate choice to learn the system before trying to run it.
Today, as Chief of Staff to the CEO at Hinge Health, she sits at the intersection of every major decision a fast-moving public health company makes. The role of Chief of Staff is often misread as administrative. It is not. It is intelligence work: synthesizing strategy across product, clinical, commercial, and finance; deciding which issues reach the CEO and which get solved before they do; keeping a 1,600-person company moving coherently while its leadership thinks four quarters ahead. Abby McGarey holds that role at a company that went public in May 2025, at a valuation that made headlines across both healthcare and tech.
The Company
What Hinge Health Actually Does - and Why It Matters
Hinge Health is not a fitness app with clinical branding. It is a digital clinic for musculoskeletal conditions - the back pain, joint problems, and chronic pain conditions that represent the single largest driver of disability and healthcare costs in the United States. Four out of five employers that use any digital MSK solution have chosen Hinge Health. Ninety percent of health plans in that same space have, too. Those are not adoption numbers you generate with marketing. They come from outcomes data.
The company's platform pairs AI-driven motion tracking - via its TrueMotion technology and the Enso wearable device - with clinical care teams: physical therapists, health coaches, and behavioral health specialists. Patients get personalized exercise programs with real-time feedback, delivered on a mobile app without leaving home. The result: measurable pain reduction, avoided surgeries, and reduced opioid use, all quantified and reported back to the employers and health plans paying for access.
By the time Hinge Health filed for its IPO in 2025, it had built a technology stack - React Native, Node.js, TypeScript, GraphQL, Kubernetes, Anthropic Claude, and a data infrastructure running on Databricks, Kafka, Spark, and Delta Lake - that put it firmly in the company of serious enterprise software businesses, not just digital health startups. The company had crossed $587 million in annual revenue and was growing fast. That is the environment in which Abby McGarey serves as Chief of Staff to the CEO.
"Four in five employers with a digital MSK solution have chosen Hinge Health. Ninety percent of health plans in that space have too."
Hinge Health - Company PositionThe Chief of Staff role at a company this complex is a high-leverage position. When the CEO - Daniel Perez - is navigating an IPO roadshow, managing a board, making acquisition decisions, and speaking at industry events simultaneously, the Chief of Staff is the connective tissue. She tracks which commitments are on track, surfaces the information Perez needs before he knows he needs it, manages the executive staff rhythm, and ensures that the company's operating cadence matches its ambitions. Abby McGarey does not appear on the Hinge Health product page. She appears on the investor relations page - listed among executive management. That is the measure of the role.
Career
The Long Way Around - Intentionally
Abby McGarey's career makes sense backwards. From the vantage point of a C-suite Chief of Staff at a public digital health company, every earlier step looks like preparation. But the sequence was too deliberate to be accidental.
She started with the data side of healthcare, working as a Research Associate in the Commercial Department at IQVIA - the data and analytics giant that serves pharmaceutical and biotech companies with real-world evidence, commercial strategy, and market intelligence. Durham, North Carolina. The work is precise, quantitative, and very far from patient-facing. It is where you learn how the biopharma industry thinks about markets and outcomes before it hands off to clinical teams.
Then came UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, where she earned her Master of Public Health. She did not just study there - she served as a Graduate Student Instructor and Researcher, which means she was teaching while learning. That combination - researcher who teaches - produces a different kind of thinker than either role alone. She was also a Graduate Administrative Intern in Cancer Services at UCLA Health during or around her graduate work, giving her direct exposure to how academic medical centers run complex clinical programs.
In 2023, she joined Aledade as Practice Operations Manager, New Ventures. Aledade is one of the most interesting companies in primary care - a company that helps independent physician practices succeed under value-based care contracts. The "New Ventures" designation is meaningful: she was not running a stable operation. She was in the experimental zone, figuring out what works before it is institutionalized. That is a specific skill set: operating in ambiguity, building process where none exists, moving fast without breaking the clinical relationships that make primary care valuable.
By January 2024, she was at Hinge Health as Manager of Strategy and Operations. Less than two years later: Chief of Staff to the CEO. The promotion timeline tells you something. When the company went public in May 2025, her name was on the investor relations page alongside the CFO, COO, and President.
Community
100 Women, One Pandemic, One Cause
The timing of Abby's entry into 100+ Women Who Care San Francisco is worth sitting with for a moment. April 2020 was a strange time to join anything. The city was locked down. Nonprofits were scrambling. In-person gatherings were months away from returning. And yet she joined.
100+ Women Who Care is a giving model that works on elegant simplicity: members gather quarterly, someone nominates a local nonprofit, the group hears a quick pitch, votes, and each member writes a check on the spot. It generates significant unrestricted funding for small Bay Area organizations, pooled from a crowd who have committed to showing up. Abby joined and nominated Project Open Hand - a San Francisco nonprofit that prepares medically tailored meals and groceries for people living with serious illness. The cause is specific, local, and direct. That is the kind of commitment that says something about how someone thinks about impact.
She now sits on the board of 100+ Women Who Care San Francisco. Her community work is not a LinkedIn checkbox. It is a sustained multi-year commitment to an organization that requires real involvement - board governance, recruitment, member engagement, and program quality - alongside a demanding day job at a public company.