health-equity
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Kendra Canton Has Been Building a Seat at the Table Since College
Before the degree and the policy roundtables, there was a Spokane teenager doing homework first and everything else second. A decade later, Kendra Canton's work still follows the same practical rule: earn your place, then use it to bring more people into the room.
Del Smith Is Building the Missing Layer in Clinical Research: Trust
The former business-school dean turned a neglected business input - community trust - into Acclinate's operating system for more representative clinical research.
Ikenna Okezie Built the Care Company His Industry Was Missing
A physician with an economist’s eye left a billion-dollar operating role to redesign care before the crisis. Ten years later, the original thesis is still visible - only the scale has changed.
Sheena Menezes
Sheena Menezes is the co-founder and CEO of Simple HealthKit, a Milpitas, California digital health company delivering accurate, affordable at-home diagnostics, treatment, and follow-up care. A biochemist with a PhD from UC Santa Barbara, where she discovered a novel tRNA methylase, she built her career in in-vitro diagnostics before founding Simple HealthKit to close socioeconomic gaps in healthcare access. Born and raised in Kuwait with Indian-Portuguese roots, she has been recognized by Fierce Healthcare as one of its Most Influential Minority Executives in Healthcare and named to Inc.'s 2025 Female Founders 500.
David Stein
David Stein is the co-founder and CEO of Ash (formerly Ash Wellness), a New York-based B2B platform that lets healthcare organizations run their own at-home testing programs. He launched the company out of Cornell Tech's MBA program in 2019 after a frustrating personal experience getting sexual health testing, first building a direct-to-consumer brand for the LGBTQ+ community and then pivoting to white-label infrastructure for providers and payers during COVID-19. Today Ash handles kit design, a CLIA/CAP-certified lab network, logistics, and patient-facing software across all 50 states, and has shipped more than a million test kits.
Adrianne Nickerson
Adrianne Nickerson is the co-founder and CEO of Oula, a New York maternity company that fuses midwives, OB-GYNs and technology into one hybrid clinic built to give pregnant patients a calmer, more personal, evidence-based birth experience. A Columbia biology grad with a Harvard master's in global health, she decided she could help patients more by not becoming a doctor - and instead builds the systems doctors and midwives work inside. She co-founded Oula in 2019, opened it while pregnant alongside two pregnant co-executives, and has raised tens of millions to expand care that reduces unnecessary C-sections and centers patient voices.
Girisha Fernando
Girisha Fernando is the CEO and co-founder of Lyfegen, a Basel- and Boston-based healthtech company building software that helps payers, hospitals, pharma companies and medical device makers manage value-based drug pricing, access and rebate agreements. After nearly a decade at Roche in market access, pricing and IT, he left in 2018 to build technology that ties the price of medicine to how well it actually works for patients. He splits his time between Switzerland and New York as Lyfegen pushes into the US market.
Tatiana Fofanova
Tatiana Fofanova is the co-founder and CEO of Koda Health, a Houston-based B2B enterprise SaaS company that helps health systems and payers scale advance care planning. Trained as a molecular-medicine PhD at Baylor College of Medicine and a former HHMI scholar, she left bench and pediatric work after concluding that patients needed access and good information more than newer drugs. She built Koda out of the Texas Medical Center's Biodesign Fellowship in 2020 with co-founders Desh Mohan and Katelin Cherry, describing the product as 'TurboTax meets Duolingo' for the hardest conversations in medicine. The company now supports more than a million patients nationwide and raised an oversubscribed $7M Series A in October 2025.
Robbins Schrader
Robbins Schrader is the co-founder and CEO of SafeRide Health, a San Antonio-based technology company that runs non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) for the country's largest Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and provider programs. A former US Navy officer and Boston Consulting Group project leader with a Wharton MBA, he started the company in 2016 with his brother Whit Schrader and Ben Salter to fix healthcare's hardest mile: getting vulnerable patients to the care they need. Under his leadership SafeRide now coordinates more than a million rides a year and Schrader was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 Gulf South Award winner.
Jaspal Sandhu
Jaspal Sandhu is a designer, educator, and social entrepreneur who became President and CEO of Hopelab, a social innovation lab and impact investor focused on the mental well-being of young people ages 10 to 25, on January 1, 2026. Trained as an engineer at MIT and as a designer at UC Berkeley, he built his career around human-centered design in global health, co-founding the pioneering social impact design firm Gobee Group and teaching public health innovation at Berkeley since 2010. At Hopelab he has led investments in youth-focused mental health startups, raised millions for youth-led technology work, and built research and fellowship programs centered on Black, Brown, and Queer young people.
Linda Finkel
Linda Finkel is a healthcare technology executive who runs OutcomesAI, a Boston-based company pairing AI voice agents with licensed nurses to expand nursing capacity through its Glia engine. Before OutcomesAI she spent over a decade building AVIA into the country's leading digital transformation partner for health systems, first as president from 2014 and then as CEO from 2020. A Stanford BA and Harvard MBA, she earlier ran large international services companies including Bowne Business Solutions and Donnelley Business Services, and pivoted to healthcare after watching her father's 91-day ICU stay reveal both the heroism and the gaps in modern care. She has been named one of the Top 50 Women Leaders in Healthcare.
Lisa Fitzpatrick
Lisa Fitzpatrick is an infectious-disease physician, medical epidemiologist, and founder and CEO of Grapevine Health, a Washington, DC digital health media company that uses street interviews, plain-language video, and text messaging to build trust and health literacy in Black and brown communities. A former CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, Caribbean health diplomat, and chief medical officer for DC Medicaid, she became known as 'Dr. Lisa on the Street' for standing on sidewalks to answer real people's medical questions and bust misinformation.
Daniel Wexler
Daniel Wexler is the co-founder and CEO of EatWell, a Boston public-benefit startup that turns dinner into a doctor's prescription. He maps food deserts the way logistics planners map warehouses, then ships affordable one-pot meal kits into the neighborhoods that grocery chains forgot. Trained in public health and behavioral economics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Wexler reframed groceries as a 'Food is Medicine' tool that health insurers can prescribe to fight food insecurity and prevent diet-related disease while lowering healthcare spend.
Edith Elliott
Edith Elliott is the co-founder and co-CEO of Noora Health, a global nonprofit that turns hospital waiting rooms into classrooms and trains family members to care for their loved ones after discharge. What started as a Stanford design class project at a Bangalore hospital in 2012 has grown into an organization that has trained more than a million family caregivers across India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia. A TED speaker, Audacious Project winner and Skoll awardee, Elliott has built her career at the intersection of research, policy and design, betting that the most overlooked resource in any health system is the people already sitting at the bedside.
Sanjay Prasad
Sanjay Prasad, MD, FACS spent nearly three decades as a neurotology and skull base surgeon in Washington, D.C. before turning entrepreneur. In 2014 he founded SurgiPrice, Inc. and its subsidiaries SurgiQuality and SurgiConnect to fix what he saw as a broken surgical referral system - helping patients find best-in-class surgeons, avoid unnecessary operations, and compare quality on procedure-specific metrics. The platform now lists tens of thousands of surgeons and partners with hundreds of surgery centers. He is also an author and health-equity advocate who founded the Race and Health Foundation.
Bill Henderson
Bill Henderson is a healthcare growth executive with 35+ years across dental, vision, Medicaid, Medicare, and chronic care management. He spent 15 years at LIBERTY Dental Plan, where he grew the business to more than $900 million in sales and over 6 million covered lives across all 50 states. After serving as Chief Growth Officer at Vheda Health, he was named Strategic Advisor to the CEO of LightSpun, the AI-powered dental insurance administration platform formerly known as 32Health, in April 2026, where he leads national growth strategy and payer partnerships.
Colby Takeda
Colby Takeda is the co-founder and CEO of Pear Suite, a digital health company that gives community health workers the software, billing tools, and data infrastructure to be recognized as a foundational part of the healthcare system. A fourth-generation Japanese American from O'ahu, registered community health worker, and former senior living executive, he built Pear Suite during the pandemic on Google Sheets and Typeform before turning it into a care navigation platform that supports thousands of frontline workers. In October 2025 the company raised a $7.6 million Series A led by Rock Health Capital to expand its reach into Medicaid and Medicare markets.
Patricia "Trish" Henwood
Patricia "Trish" Henwood, MD, FACEP is an emergency physician who runs quality and safety across an 18-hospital system as Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer of Jefferson Health in Philadelphia. Before the C-suite, she carried a portable ultrasound probe into an Ebola treatment unit in Liberia and built training programs that put imaging in the hands of clinicians in Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania and beyond. She founded the nonprofit PURE to bring point-of-care ultrasound to resource-limited settings, published her bedside Ebola work in the New England Journal of Medicine, and now applies the same systems thinking to closing care gaps for vulnerable populations at home.
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.
Akili Hinson
Akili Hinson is the founder and CEO of Juno Medical, a technology-powered family medical practice he opened in Harlem in April 2020 with three patient rooms. A physician trained at Weill Cornell with an MBA from Columbia and a stint at McKinsey, he set out to build modern, family-centered primary care for what he calls 'the 99%' in neighborhoods that big health systems skip. Juno now runs clinics in Harlem, Brooklyn, East Atlanta, and Tulsa's Greenwood District, backed by a $12M Series A led by NEXT VENTURES and Serena Williams' Serena Ventures. He was named a 2024-2025 Obama Foundation USA Leader.
Marissa Fayer
Marissa Fayer is a 25-year medtech executive who runs DeepLook Medical, an AI diagnostics company that helps radiologists spot breast cancer earlier in women with dense breast tissue, which she took from concept through FDA clearance into global commercialization. She is also the founder of HERhealthEQ, a nonprofit that has reached over 128,000 women across 12 countries by deploying medical devices for cancers, maternal health, and cardiovascular disease. A partner at women's-health fund Goddess Gaia Ventures and author of the forthcoming book 'Undervalued to Unavoidable,' she argues women's health is not a charitable cause but economic infrastructure that has been systematically underestimated.
Dr. Alicia Garcia-Cisneros
Dr. Alicia Garcia-Cisneros is a Doctor of Nursing Practice, Nurse Executive, and Certified Caritas Coach serving as Chief Nurse Executive at Valley State Prison within California Correctional Health Care Services (CCHCS). Born to Hispanic migrant agricultural workers, she climbed from Certified Nursing Assistant to the highest levels of nursing leadership over two decades, championing caring science, peer support programs, and staff wellness inside California's correctional health system.
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.
Andrew Toy
Andrew Toy is the CEO and Board Member of Clover Health (NASDAQ: CLOV), a Medicare Advantage insurer using AI to help physicians identify and treat chronic conditions earlier. A Stanford-trained computer scientist who immigrated from Hong Kong at 16, Toy built Divide (acquired by Google for $120M in 2014), led Android Enterprise at Google, then joined Clover Health in 2018 as CTO before ascending to CEO in 2023. Under his leadership, Clover achieved 51% year-over-year membership growth and its first GAAP net income in Q1 2026, powered by the Clover Assistant AI platform that diagnoses diabetes three years earlier than conventional methods.
Cecilia Aviles
Cecilia Aviles, MBA, BSN, RN, is the Chief Executive Officer of LifeLong Medical Care, a Federally Qualified Health Center serving over 55,000 patients across Contra Costa and Alameda Counties in the East Bay. A native San Franciscan who started her career as a trauma nurse, she brings more than 20 years of healthcare leadership experience — including 11 years at Sutter Health and earlier stints at Kaiser Permanente, UCSF, KPMG, and McKesson — to lead one of the Bay Area's most vital safety-net providers. A Carol Emmott Fellow and recognized among the Bay Area's top Hispanic nurses, she is committed to making healthcare accessible, equitable, and affordable for underserved communities.
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.
Sean Mehra
Sean Mehra is the co-founder and CEO of HealthTap, a Sunnyvale-based virtual-first primary and urgent care platform serving millions of Americans across all 50 states. A Yale biomedical engineering graduate and Stanford MBA, Mehra pivoted from aspiring physician to serial tech entrepreneur—building games companies with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players before co-founding HealthTap during his first year at Stanford business school. Under his leadership as CEO (appointed June 2021), HealthTap has grown to serve over 350 million consumers, partnered with Samsung Health to embed virtual care in millions of Android devices, and launched Dr.A.I., an LLM-powered pre-visit interview system. Mehra also co-founded what is now Yale's TSAI City entrepreneurship incubator.
Eileen Tanghal
Eileen Tanghal is the Founder and General Partner of Black Opal Ventures, a women-led early-stage venture capital firm based in New York investing at the intersection of healthcare and frontier technology. With over 20 years of VC experience spanning corporate venture (Applied Ventures, ARM Holdings), national security investing (In-Q-Tel), and European VC (Amadeus Capital, Kennet Partners), she co-founded Black Opal in 2021 alongside Dr. Tara Bishop - a friend of 30 years from their days as MIT engineering students. The firm raised a $58M debut fund with backing from Eli Lilly, Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan, and invests in companies using AI, bioengineering, and advanced computing to reshape how healthcare is delivered and who can access it.
Genevieve Lemarchal
Genevieve Lemarchal is the Managing Partner of Suncoast Ventures and Head of Healthcare at Expert Dojo, one of Southern California's most active pre-seed venture funds. A serial entrepreneur turned investor, she focuses on early-stage healthcare startups tackling critical gaps in addiction recovery, maternal care, chronic disease management, and digital health. With a portfolio spanning 35+ companies across 7 countries, she champions underrepresented founders - 50% female, 37-43% from underrepresented backgrounds - and hosts the AdVentureous Podcast, where she interviews entrepreneurs and VCs about building companies that matter.
Khanh Nguyen
Khanh Nguyen is the CEO of Cozeva, the operating system for value-based care that manages over 25 million lives across 97,000+ providers. A PharmD from UCSF with 15+ years pioneering payer-provider collaboration, she led Cozeva to a reported $480M merger with Vatica Health in 2025, combining the #1-rated Best in KLAS risk adjustment platform with Cozeva's #1 quality platform - creating the most comprehensive value-based care enablement company in the U.S.