Christopher
Skowronek

Most healthcare slogans die in a slide deck. Skowronek runs an entire company on three words: no one left behind.

Start with the people he is paid to think about. They have congestive heart failure or COPD. They wait weeks for a specialist, then drive an hour to see one for fifteen minutes, then end up back in a hospital bed a few months later. The system technically has a plan for them. The plan is the waiting room.

Christopher Skowronek is the Chief Executive Officer of NuvoAir Medical, a Boston company that delivers cardiopulmonary care - heart and lung - the way you would want it if it were your parent: proactive, continuous, and mostly virtual, so the visit comes to the patient instead of the other way around. The company describes itself as the next generation of specialty care. Skowronek describes the job more plainly: get the care to the people who keep getting skipped.

He did not arrive in the corner office from clinical medicine. He arrived from the part of healthcare nobody puts on a brochure - the machinery of how care gets paid for, measured, and operated at scale. Two decades of it. By the time he became CEO, he had already run the company's growth. He knew where the patients were, where the money was, and exactly how far apart those two things usually sit.

Economics first. Patients always.

He read economics at Harvard, finishing in 2002. That is a finance brain, not a bedside one - and it shows in how he talks about care. He treats access as an allocation problem: the supply of specialists is fixed and scarce, the demand is rising and concentrated in the sickest patients, and the default system spends its money in the most expensive place possible - the hospital, after the crisis, not before it.

A decade after Harvard he was inside the North Carolina Healthcare Association, running a center for affordable care and leading strategic initiatives. That is where the policy side of the equation lives: who pays, who qualifies, what a state's hospitals can actually afford to do. He went back to school while he was at it, picking up a master's in healthcare administration from UNC Chapel Hill in 2017. Most executives collect one credential and stop. He collected the one that explains the market and the one that explains the building.

Then came the operating years. At Lumeris, a value-based-care managed-services company, he ran population health services and Medicare Advantage market operations - the unglamorous engine room where you learn whether a care model actually saves money or just claims to. At Bamboo Health, a care-coordination network, he led payer strategy and then corporate-strategy partnerships, learning how the people who write the checks decide what to fund.

Three companies, three different seats at the same table: the platform, the payer, the provider. By the time he joined NuvoAir to lead its growth, he had seen the problem from every side except the one that mattered most to him - running the care company itself. The promotion to CEO fixed that.

Selling a business to sharpen one

In early 2026 he did something that looks, on paper, like shrinking. NuvoAir sold its clinical-trials business - the digital-spirometry and respiratory-endpoint arm that worked with pharma companies - to Strados Labs. Years of validation evidence and operational expertise went out the door in a single transaction.

Read it the other way and it is the most CEO decision he has made. NuvoAir was two companies wearing one name: a life-sciences research operation and a patient-care operation. Skowronek picked one. He called the clinical-trials portfolio a natural fit for Strados' broader respiratory platform, and then said the quiet part out loud - the sale lets NuvoAir Medical focus solely on patients. Growth people add. Operators subtract. He had finally become the second kind.

The thread back to 2024 is clear. That year NuvoAir partnered with Cary Medical Management to bring high-quality cardiopulmonary care to rural North Carolina - the exact place where the waiting-room problem is worst, where the nearest pulmonologist might be ninety minutes away. Rural North Carolina is also, not coincidentally, the state where he once ran a center for affordable care. The career is less a ladder than a loop, returning to the same patients with more power each time around.