value-based-care
(69)
Karen Thomas-Smith Put the Customer Before the Campaign
Long before customer-first became a slogan, Karen Thomas-Smith rebuilt a healthcare marketing team around a blunt question: what does the buyer actually need to understand? The answer changed the org chart, the content, and the numbers.
Andy Dé Keeps Asking AI the Question That Matters: Where’s the Value?
The engineer-turned-marketer has spent more than two decades translating data into decisions. At Lightbeam Health Solutions, his favorite test for artificial intelligence is refreshingly unfashionable: does it produce a measurable result?
Henry DePhillips Put the House Call on a Screen - Then Followed the Data
Before virtual care became ordinary, Henry DePhillips was arguing that convenience still needed clinical discipline. His career traces healthcare's long migration from the exam room to the screen, and from the screen to the spreadsheet.
Benjamin Shaker Built One Market. Then It Became the Operating Manual.
Agilon health began its national field test in Columbus with Benjamin Shaker at the controls. His career since has been an exercise in making a local partnership repeatable without making it generic.
Patrick Nelli Put a CFO’s Spreadsheet at the Front Door of Primary Care
A physics graduate became a healthcare investor, an IPO-era CFO, and finally a founder. His bet is elegantly financial: pay independent doctors for value, give employees a real choice, and let better primary care earn its place on the spreadsheet.
Rachael Jones Found the Fight Hiding in the Spreadsheet
A bruising contract meeting gave Rachael Jones a durable idea: when every side brings its own numbers, even good intentions become an argument. She built Syntax Health to put everyone on the same page - literally and financially.
Joel Theisen Is Building a Company Around the Part of Aging the System Forgot
The nurse-turned-founder spent two decades turning a frontline frustration into Lifespark. His wager is simple: the future of senior living begins with a life, not a list of services.
Farbod Hagigi Has Spent 20 Years Fixing the Hand-Off
The ClinicalBox founder built a career around a stubborn observation: complex systems fail at their seams. His answer has been equal parts policy research, software design, and patient attention.
Robbie Felton Learned the Work Before He Built the Software
Before IntusCare became a nationwide software company, Robbie Felton spent a year inside the care model he wanted to serve. That apprenticeship still explains how he builds: observe the work, earn trust, then make the technology useful.
Isaac Park Is Teaching AI to Read the Fine Print
After building more than 50 products, the Durham founder chose a problem hidden in paperwork. Keebler Health now turns clinical footnotes into usable evidence - with humans firmly in the loop.
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.
Darren Schulte Is Building the Operating System Between the Appointment and the Crisis
The physician-executive spent two decades teaching software to read the chart. At Vynca, he is tackling the harder problem: turning those signals into coordinated action before a routine gap becomes a costly crisis.
Brian Overstreet Is Building the Missing Ledger for Value-Based Care
After two healthcare-data exits, Brian Overstreet returned to the founder’s chair for a problem hidden in contracts, fragmented data and disputed math. His wager is that value-based care needs a shared system of record before it can scale.
Vishnukamal Golla Is Building the Missing Middle of Cancer Care
A surgeon trained to operate on the body turned his attention to the machinery around it - the incentives, handoffs and tools that determine whether specialty care actually works as one system.
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.
Eric Rock
Eric Rock is the co-founder and CEO of Percipio Health, a Dallas-based company using AI and an ordinary smartphone - no medical devices - to collect whole-person health signals for scalable population health monitoring. A serial healthcare and technology entrepreneur, Rock previously founded ProHost (acquired by OpenTable), MEDHOST (a pioneering touchscreen emergency-department EMR), and Vivify Health, which grew into one of the largest remote patient monitoring platforms before Optum acquired it. Percipio launched in 2025 with $20M in Series A funding and a mission to bring proactive, low-cost care to entire populations.
Faris Ghawi
Faris Ghawi is the co-founder and CEO of Vytalize Health, a Hoboken-based value-based care company that partners with primary care physicians to manage Medicare patients through data, analytics, and financial incentives. A Lehigh-trained civil engineer who moved into healthcare consulting at EY and then earned an MBA at Columbia, Ghawi launched Vytalize in 2014 with college friends. Under his leadership the company grew to serve hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries across dozens of states, raised a $100M Series C in 2023, and topped Inc. Magazine's 2024 list as America's fastest-growing private company.
Kate Condliffe
Kate Condliffe is the co-founder and CEO of Diana Health, a network of women's health practices that partners with hospitals to rebuild their maternity and OB/GYN programs around holistic, team-based care. She launched the company in 2020 out of AlleyCorp's healthcare incubator after two decades scaling high-value care models, including roles as COO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative and COO of the birth-center network Baby+Co. Under her leadership, Diana Health has grown to nine locations across Tennessee, Florida, and Texas, cares for more than 80,000 women annually, and has raised roughly $101 million to date, including a $55 million Series C in 2025.
Oron Afek
Oron Afek is co-founder and CEO of Vim, a New York-based healthcare technology company that plugs into electronic health record systems to close the gap between insurers and clinicians at the point of care. An Israeli entrepreneur with a background in the IDF's special forces and a summa cum laude degree in law and business from IDC Herzliya, he founded Vim in 2015 with Sequoia Israel as founding investor and has since raised over $100 million from investors including Optum Ventures, Anthem, Walgreens Boots Alliance, and Frist Cressey Ventures.
Danish Qureshi
Danish Qureshi is the founder and CEO of Zarminali Pediatrics, a nationwide pediatric multispecialty group he started in 2024 to fix the fragmented way American children get care. Before Zarminali, he co-founded LifeStance Health, scaling it into the country's largest outpatient mental health provider with thousands of clinicians across dozens of states before it went public. A former Bain consultant and private equity operator who cut his teeth in wound care, Qureshi has raised roughly $150M for Zarminali and grown it to nearly 30 clinics across eight states in under two years.
Matthew Gitelis
Matthew Gitelis is the founder and CEO of PatientIQ, a Chicago-based healthcare analytics platform that automates the collection of patient-reported outcomes and turns them into actionable insight for providers. A former BMO Capital Markets investment banking analyst who then enrolled at Rush Medical College, he founded PatientIQ in 2016 after watching clinicians extract outcomes data by hand. He left medical school in 2019 to run the company full-time. Under his leadership PatientIQ has grown into a national network reaching hundreds of healthcare organizations, thousands of care sites, and millions of patients, and raised roughly $26M in venture funding through a 2022 Series B.
Matthew Loper
Matthew Loper is the co-founder and CEO of Wellth, a Los Angeles digital-health company that pays people small cash rewards for sticking to their care plans. A biological engineer from MIT turned healthcare banker and investor, he built Wellth around behavioral economics rather than technology - the idea that immediate, tangible incentives change what people actually do about their chronic conditions. Under his leadership Wellth has raised more than $73 million, including an oversubscribed $36 million Series C in 2025, and reports steep drops in hospital and emergency-room use among the high-need Medicare and Medicaid populations it serves.
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.
Jan-Felix Schneider
Jan-Felix Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of Arlo, a New York health insurance company rebuilding coverage for small and mid-sized businesses from the ground up. A former Palantir deployment strategist and McKinsey consultant who grew up in Germany, he pairs a Columbia data science background with a plain conviction that people should not go broke while insured. Under his lead, Arlo underwrites its own level-funded plans, supports members directly, and builds its own technology - scaling to tens of thousands of covered lives and hundreds of employer groups, reaching profitability, and raising a $4M seed in 2025.
Chris Johnson
Chris Johnson is the founder and CEO of Bluebird Kids Health, a value-based pediatric primary care company building clinics in 'pediatric care deserts' where children, many of them on Medicaid, lack access to a regular doctor. After scaling Landmark Health's in-home senior care from 12 to 38 states ahead of its acquisition by Optum, Johnson partnered with venture studio Juxtapose and veteran pediatrician Dr. Shannon Fox-Levine to bring the same outcomes-aligned model to kids. Bluebird now serves more than 20,000 patients, raised $31.5 million in 2025, and is expanding across Florida.
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.
Dirk Soenksen
Dirk Soenksen is the co-founder and CEO of Ceresti Health, a Carlsbad, California digital-health company that treats the family caregiver as the unit of care for people living with dementia. An engineer by training, he first reshaped a corner of medicine by founding Aperio, the company that turned the glass microscope slide into a digital image and became the global leader in digital pathology before Danaher's Leica Biosystems acquired it in 2012. A coffee on his last day at Leica sent him into a second act: instead of imaging the brain, he set out to support the overwhelmed spouses and adult children caring for it.
Ian Koons
Ian Koons is the co-founder and CEO of Karoo Health, an Albuquerque-based startup building tech-enabled, value-based cardiovascular care. A former college tennis player who once did post-game radio for an NFL team, Koons turned a personal loss - a best friend's fatal heart attack in 2014 - into a company that pairs on-site and virtual care teams with software to help cardiologists move from volume to value. Since founding Karoo in 2021, he has grown it to dozens of employees, raised seed funding, partnered with cardiology networks across roughly a dozen states, and teamed with Heartbeat Health to assemble a national end-to-end cardiac care solution.
Jack O'Hara
Jack O'Hara is the co-founder and CEO of Translucent, an AI-native financial operating system for healthcare. After eight years running technology and transformation inside multi-billion-dollar provider organizations - including a stint as CIO at value-based care group ChenMed and CIO/Chief Transformation Officer at Springfield Clinic - he started Translucent in 2024 to give every hospital and medical group its own always-on AI financial analyst. The company pairs operational, clinical, and financial data into a single view that surfaces real-time insight and root-cause analysis. Translucent raised a $7M seed in August 2025 and a $27M Series A led by GV in March 2026.