community-health
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Meridian Built a $2.5 Billion Medicaid Machine - Here’s the Local Playbook Health-Tech Founders Can Steal
A Detroit physician and his family turned a small Medicaid plan into a $2.5 billion acquisition. Inside Meridian’s enduring formula: win the public contract, build the provider plumbing, and treat food, housing and transportation as part of the product.
The Healthcare Holding Company Building a Front Door That Opens at Home
True Ventures Group is assembling home care, remote monitoring and virtual medicine under one roof - a practical bet that the hardest part of healthcare is often what happens between appointments.
Grapevine Health
Grapevine Health is a Washington, DC-based digital health media company founded by physician and epidemiologist Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick. It creates culturally relevant, plain-language health content and delivers it through trusted messengers, street-level conversations, and an SMS platform called HealthText to raise health literacy and build trust among Medicaid enrollees and other underserved communities.
Red Rabbit
Red Rabbit is the largest Black-owned K-12 school food management company in the United States. Founded in 2005 by former Wall Street trader and MIT graduate Rhys Powell, the company runs full-service cafeteria programs that cook made-from-scratch, culturally relevant meals for students in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania - treating good, diverse food for children as an act of social justice.
Untold
Untold, formerly CARE for AIDS, is an Atlanta-based faith-driven nonprofit that runs a nine-month, church-based program helping HIV-positive men and women across East and Southern Africa build a life beyond AIDS. Working through local churches with indigenous staff, its integrated model addresses physical, spiritual, emotional, and economic health at once - producing 97% viral suppression among clients and more than 50,000 program graduates.
Toyin Ajayi
Toyin Ajayi is a board-certified family medicine physician and the co-founder and CEO of Cityblock Health, a New York-based company that builds neighborhood-rooted care for Medicaid and dually eligible patients - the people most health systems treat last. She co-founded the company out of Google's Sidewalk Labs in 2017, took the CEO seat in 2022, and has grown it into a roughly $6 billion business serving hundreds of thousands of members. Trained at Stanford, Cambridge, and King's College London, she practiced in safety-net hospitals and ran a clinic in Sierra Leone before deciding the system itself needed rebuilding. Her current obsession: making the most vulnerable patients the proving ground for AI in medicine.
CommuniCare+OLE
CommuniCare+OLE is a nonprofit network of federally qualified health centers serving Napa, Solano, and Yolo counties in Northern California. Formed in 2023 by the merger of OLE Health and CommuniCare Health Centers - two organizations that both opened their doors in 1972 - it delivers comprehensive medical, dental, behavioral health, substance use, nutrition, optometry, and pharmacy care to more than 70,000 patients across 17 sites, regardless of insurance status, immigration status, or ability to pay.
El Camino Health
El Camino Health is a not-for-profit healthcare system that has served Silicon Valley and the South Bay for more than 60 years. Born from a 1950s community vote and a tax that residents levied on themselves, it runs two acute care hospitals in Mountain View and Los Gatos plus roughly two dozen care locations across Santa Clara County. With 471 beds, about 4,480 employees and 1,585 physicians, it blends a community-rooted mission with the technology-forward instincts of the valley it sits in.
Alicia Hardy
Alicia Hardy (Alicia Ferguson Hardy) is the CEO of CommuniCare+OLE, a federally qualified health center serving 70,000+ patients across Napa, Solano, and Yolo counties in California. A licensed clinical social worker turned executive, she rose through the ranks of OLE Health over more than a decade before becoming CEO in 2018, then engineered the landmark 2023 merger with CommuniCare Health Centers - a project she developed as her capstone during an Executive MBA at Yale School of Management. Named one of Yale SOM's 2023 Best & Brightest EMBA graduates, Hardy is a passionate advocate for health equity, multilingual care, and expanding access for underserved populations.
David Werdegar
Dr. David Werdegar, MD, MPH is the former President and CEO of Institute on Aging (IOA), San Francisco's leading nonprofit dedicated to helping older adults and adults with disabilities live with dignity and independence. A physician trained at New York Medical College and UCSF, Werdegar transformed IOA from a community program into a comprehensive elder-care organization serving thousands annually across the San Francisco Bay Area. Under his watch, IOA opened a landmark 50,000-square-foot campus on Geary Boulevard in 2011, consolidating programs spanning home care, dementia day enrichment, and the 24/7 Friendship Line warmline. He retired in 2022 after steering the organization to nearly $100 million in annual revenue with a staff of around 900.
Jane Garcia
Jane Garcia has run La Clínica de La Raza since 1982, growing a scrappy storefront clinic in Oakland's Fruitvale into a $150M federally qualified health center serving more than 86,000 patients across Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano counties. She walked in as a Berkeley public health intern in 1978 and never left, building a Bay Area institution while suing two federal administrations over immigrant care.
Pedro Toledo
Pedro Toledo is the CEO of Petaluma Health Center, a federally qualified health center serving more than 40,000 patients across Sonoma County and West Marin. The son of a Bracero-program farmworker, he holds degrees from Stanford, Cornell Law, and Georgetown, and was one of 14 Californians chosen for the 2020 Citizens Redistricting Commission.
Reymundo Espinoza
Reymundo C. Espinoza is the CEO Emeritus of Gardner Health Services, the San Jose community clinic network he ran for 37 years before stepping down in January 2024. The son of a single farmworker father from Coachella, he carried a Stanford political science degree and a Berkeley public health degree into a small nonprofit serving Mexican farm and cannery workers, and left it a 10-site, $90 million system caring for more than 46,000 of Silicon Valley's poorest residents.
Josh Rose
Josh Rose is the CEO of Hawthorne Health, Inc. (formerly Hawthorne Effect), a Walnut Creek-based company building the largest community-based clinical trial site network in the U.S. A clinical research industry veteran with over 20 years of experience, Rose previously led decentralized clinical trial strategy at IQVIA and CVS Health before taking the helm at Hawthorne Health in early 2024. Under his leadership, Hawthorne has expanded to 75+ community locations, partnered with 40+ pharma sponsors, and pioneered a model that embeds certified clinical research staff inside independent pharmacies and patients' homes - bringing trials to communities that traditional research networks have long bypassed.