About Us
Our mission
Founded by two Stanford University professors committed to improving healthcare, Prealize uses machine learning to transform care from reactive to proactive so that more people can live healthier lives.
Our approach
Prealize uses AI-powered predictive analytics to help payers and providers reduce healthcare costs and improve clinical outcomes earlier, more accurate member-level insights.
Our values reflect how we work, treat each other, and show up for our clients each day.
Commitment to Health
We are driven to improve the health of all people. We bring passion and dedication towards transforming healthcare, and high levels of integrity into the way we work.
Pioneering Curiosity
We continuously strive to redefine what is possible — thinking big, actively pursuing new learning, taking risks, and making novel connections to drive our work, and its impact, further.
Impact Focused
We are here to create change, so we focus only on efforts that yield real impact to healthcare. With a bias for action, we relentlessly pursue excellence.
Courageous Collaboration
We believe the best results come from working across disciplines — new points of view can illuminate new paths forward. We speak up (and encourage others to), proactively seek and explore feedback and encourage diverse perspectives.
Pragmatic Honesty
We treat each other with respect, authenticity and humility. We listen before we speak and engage in constructive debate. We have no time to waste on anything that doesn’t lead to real value.
Kyle Raffaniello
CEO
Niall O’Cathasaigh
CFO
Sri Gopalsamy
CTO
Matt Whitnack
CRO
Dr. Gordon Norman
Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD
Co-Founder
Kyle Raffaniello
CEO
Kyle Raffaniello is a thought leader in the healthcare industry, with an extensive background in leading technology, data, and service companies. With over 25 years of experience, she has demonstrated her expertise in driving business growth and innovation. Prior to joining Prealize as CEO, Kyle served as the President of Sapphire, a division of Zelis, and as the CEO of Sapphire Digital. Throughout her career, she has served in various healthcare leadership roles, including Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President of ValueOptions, as well as Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Consortium Health Plans. Kyle's leadership extends across diverse sectors within the industry, having held positions in regional health plans and medical delivery systems.With a graduate degree in Healthcare Administration from George Washington University and a Bachelor's degree from Mount St. Mary's College, Kyle possesses a strong educational foundation that complements her industry experience. Her qualifications and proven track record reinforce Prealize's unwavering commitment to predictive analytics and AI in healthcare. Kyle's insights and leadership make her an invaluable asset to the Prealize team, driving forward the company's mission with unparalleled expertise.
Niall O’Cathasaigh
CFO
As CFO, Niall O’Cathasaigh is the senior executive responsible for sound fiscal management of all financial operations and human resource activities, as well as overseeing capital raising efforts and financial reporting for board and other stakeholder communications.
Niall has been working as a founder and consultant with startups and growth stage companies in the US, Europe and Africa for over 20 years. He works with Countsy, an innovative professional services firm that specializes in working with venture funded startups to provide end to end strategic and back office services. His experience includes work with over 30 startups in the Bay Area, with a focus on healthcare companies, providing financial transparency and strategic guidance as well as enabling funding rounds and acquisitions.
Niall is also a founder and partner of ManoCap, a private equity fund management company that makes equity investments in small to mid-cap enterprises in West Africa. Prior to that he worked at Apple’s European divisions in Ireland and France.
Niall is a qualified financial professional (CIMA). He holds a postgraduate degree in business from University College Dublin, and a joint BA in History and Classical Civilization from University College Galway and Universite De Poitiers.
Sri Gopalsamy
CTO
Sri Gopalsamy is responsible for company’s technical direction, deliver features to build out Prealize’s product eco system, develop a system-level approach for keeping its ML models current, and scale infrastructure to handle massive amounts of healthcare data to be analyzed in real time. He leads engineering and data science teams to build a scalable data platform and sophisticated ML algorithms to deliver market-leading product features to transform healthcare from reactive to proactive.
Prior to joining Prealize, Sri was with Enlighted, where he led engineering and product teams to develop real-time location service SaaS product for healthcare vertical. Enlighted was successfully acquired by Siemens in 2018 to integrate with its large healthcare business. Prior to that, he held VP of Engineering and Data Science role at an ad-tech startup company PubMatic with petabyte scale data volume, and more than 40 billion ad impressions per day.
He spent many years at Walmart eCommerce in variety of engineering leadership roles and helped grow the company from $70M to over $2B in revenue. While there, he led teams to launch new eCommerce businesses in China and Canada.
Sri holds MS degree in Operations Research.
Matt Whitnack
CRO
Matt Whitnack leads the commercial team at Prealize Health, responsible for driving the growth of the company, aligning all revenue-generating activities, and building strategic partnerships. Matt and his team are key to the ongoing satisfaction of Prealize’s customers, with successful implementations and onboarding of the company’s solutions, expansion into new markets, and targeted opportunities.
Matt is a senior executive with over 27 years in direct sales and sales leadership roles, culminating in success over the last 13 years within the healthcare industry. Before joining Prealize, Matt was Regional Vice President of Sales at Icario – a member engagement company. Prior to that, Matt led Sales and Marketing at Dynamic Healthcare Systems – a provider of Medicare Advantage enrollment and risk adjustment Software-as-a-Service solutions.
Matt holds a BS in Business Administration from the University of South Carolina and a Master’s in Business Administration from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Gordon Norman
Dr. Norman brings extensive population health management and value-based care expertise to his role as Chief Medical Officer for Prealize Health. He gained this experience over 25 years in executive roles in the provider, hospital, health plan, employer, and supplier sectors of healthcare focusing on quality and value improvement. He has focused on supporting provider & health systems, ACOs, health plans, and large employers as they pivot to the value-based care era where cost efficiency, quality outcomes, and experience of care are balanced to formulate the overall value of health care delivery.
Previously, Dr. Norman leveraged this background at Willis Towers Watson to lead their Health System Consulting practice working directly with health systems transitioning to value-based care while also serving employer clients as a Senior Consultant in Health Management helping them to obtain higher value health care. Previously, Dr. Norman served as Chief Medical Officer for xG Health Solutions, where he adapted and disseminated the value-based care know how and tools developed by Geisinger Health System for other delivery systems transforming from fee-for-volume to fee-for-value care models. Before that, he held executive leadership roles at Alere Medical and PacifiCare Health Systems focused on quality improvement and population health innovation.
Dr. Norman received AB, MD, and MBA degrees from Stanford University. Following family medicine residency training in Maine and New York, he practiced in rural upstate New York and southern New Hampshire prior to pivoting to the business side of healthcare in mid-career.
Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD
Co-Founder
Dr. Shah’s research focuses on combining machine learning and prior knowledge in medical ontologies to enable the learning health system.
Dr. Shah is Associate Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) at Stanford University, Medical Director, Research Informatics, Stanford Health Care, Co-Chair for Analytics, Center for Population Health Sciences, Stanford and a member of the executive committee of the Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program, which trains future research leaders to design and implement novel quantitative and computational methods to solve challenging problems across the entire spectrum of biology and medicine.
He is also the Assistant Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at Stanford, dedicated to advancing the state of the art in semantic technology, biostatistics, and the modeling of biomedical systems to benefit clinical and translational research as well as patient care.
Dr. Shah received the AMIA New Investigator Award for 2013 and the Stanford Biosciences Faculty Teaching Award for outstanding teaching in his graduate class on “Data Driven Medicine.”
Dr. Shah holds an MBBS from Baroda Medical College, India, a PhD from Penn State University and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University.
Associate Professor of Medicine, and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University
Associate Professor of Medicine, and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University
Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD
Co-Founder
Arnold Milstein, MD, MPH
Co-Founder
Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD
Co-Founder
Dr. Shah’s research focuses on combining machine learning and prior knowledge in medical ontologies to enable the learning health system.
Dr. Shah is Associate Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) at Stanford University, Medical Director, Research Informatics, Stanford Health Care, Co-Chair for Analytics, Center for Population Health Sciences, Stanford and a member of the executive committee of the Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program, which trains future research leaders to design and implement novel quantitative and computational methods to solve challenging problems across the entire spectrum of biology and medicine.
He is also the Assistant Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at Stanford, dedicated to advancing the state of the art in semantic technology, biostatistics, and the modeling of biomedical systems to benefit clinical and translational research as well as patient care.
Dr. Shah received the AMIA New Investigator Award for 2013 and the Stanford Biosciences Faculty Teaching Award for outstanding teaching in his graduate class on “Data Driven Medicine.”
Dr. Shah holds an MBBS from Baroda Medical College, India, a PhD from Penn State University and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University.
Associate Professor of Medicine, and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University
Associate Professor of Medicine, and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University
Arnold Milstein, MD, MPH
Co-Founder
Dr. Milstein is nationally recognized for his leadership in discovering less costly paths to high quality health care across large populations. He is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford and directs the University’s Clinical Excellence Research Center. The Center is a collaboration of the Schools of Medicine and Engineering to design and demonstrate in multi-state locations new health care delivery models that safely lower per capita health care spending and improve patients’ experience of healthcare.
Before joining Stanford, Dr. Milstein’s career of applied research spanned private and public sector healthcare delivery and purchasing strategy. After launching a healthcare performance improvement firm subsequently acquired by Mercer and expanded globally, he co-founded two nationally influential public benefit initiatives, the Leapfrog Group and the Consumer Purchaser Alliance.
Dr. Milstein served on the faculty of UCSF’s Health Policy Institute and was appointed to a six year term as a Congressional MedPAC Commissioner. Since its inception, he has been the Medical Director of the Pacific Business Group on Health, the largest employer-led regional healthcare value improvement coalition in the U.S. Citing his nationally distinguished innovation in health care policy and healthcare delivery, Dr. Milstein was selected for the highest annual award by both the National Business Group on Health and of the American College of Medical Quality.
Elected to the National Academy of Medicine, Dr. Milstein received a BA in Economics at Harvard, MD at Tufts, and an MPH in Healthcare Evaluation at UC Berkeley.
Profess of Medicine, Stanford
Director Clinical Excellence Research Center, Stanford University
Member, National Academy of Medicine
Thomas McKinley, MS, MBA
Kent Marquardt
Mark D. Smith, MD, MBA
Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD
John Doerr
Thomas McKinley, MS, MBA
Tom McKinley has over 35 years of venture capital investment experience with a successful track record of helping entrepreneurs create significant and successful enterprises. Tom joined Cardinal Partners as an advisor in 2008, and since January 2009 has served as General Partner. Utilizing his over 35 years of technology investment expertise, Tom’s investment focus at Cardinal is in healthcare information technology, technology-enabled services, AI, ML, and blockchain in healthcare. Most recently, Tom has been the founding CEO and chairman of Prealize Health, a project in conjunction with Dr. Arnold Milstein and Dr. Nigam Shah at Stanford University. Tom led the firm’s investment in 2009 in virtual care company, Teladoc Health (NYSE: TDOC), a telehealth services provider of doctor consults to consumers. At Opala, a data automation partner that makes payer-provider collaboration radically easy, Tom was the founding CEO and helped spin out a team from Premera Blue Cross. Tom has served on the boards of U.C. Berkeley’s Entrepreneurs Forum and the Western Association of Venture Capitalists (WAVC). As an alumnus, Tom maintains close ties with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, as well as Harvard University, where he serves as class secretary and started the Harvard College i3 Innovation Challenge, an undergraduate startup competition. Tom received his AB degree in Economics from Harvard University, MS in Accounting from the Stern School of Business at New York University, and MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Partner, Cardinal Partners
CEO, Prealize
Kent Marquardt
A healthcare management executive with broad and deep experience, Kent Marquardt is today the CEO of Maverick Advisors, LLC which specializes in innovation and strategy with healthcare companies using analytics and customer engagement to attack inefficiencies in healthcare costs.
Kent has been Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Premera Blue Cross where he was responsible for the Premera family of companies finance, actuarial, corporate informatics, underwriting, and healthcare economics departments. He also had responsibility for the Innovation Program and Strategic Investments and was part of the Executive Leadership Team that drove overall strategy and long-term direction.
Prior to Premera, Kent was CEO of American Dental Specialist Inc., and COO as well as CFO of western operations of MedPartners, Inc., the nation’s largest publicly held physician practice management company. He is also the former CFO for PriMed Management Consulting, Inc. (Hill Physicians management company).
Kent Marquardt was formerly with KPMG Peat Marwick and a partner in the Los Angeles and Phoenix offices.
Kent holds a MA in business administration from the University of Wisconsin where he also earned his BA.
CEO, Maverick Advisors
Mark D. Smith, MD, MBA
Dr. Mark Smith is a nationally-recognized health policy expert who has consulted for the governments of Kuwait, Denmark, and Singapore, and is a frequent keynote speaker, including for Microsoft, Health 2.0, Kaiser Permanente, and the Library of Congress. Dr. Smith was elected to the Institute of Medicine where he chaired the IOM’s Committee on the Learning Healthcare System, which produced the widely-publicized 2012 report “Best Care at Lower Cost.” He was also a Menschel Senior Policy Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Mark Smith is currently a Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and Visiting Professor at the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley. He is formerly the Founding President of the California HealthCare Foundation, which he led from its formation into a recognized leader in delivery system innovation, public reporting of care quality, and applications of new technology in health care, with a current corpus of approximately $720 million.
Dr. Smith was also the Executive Vice-President of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, where he oversaw programs in HIV, Reproductive Health, and the Health Care Marketplace. Prior to that, he was on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine and of Public Health, and directed the AIDS clinic there.
Dr. Smith is widely published, serves on several Boards and advises several startup companies and venture funds. He has been honored by the California Legislature, the California Hospital Association, Grantmakers in Health, the Society of General Internal Medicine, and others.
Dr. Smith holds a BA from Harvard College, an MD from the University of North Carolina, and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. A Board-certified internist, he maintains an active clinical practice in HIV care at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
Professor, Clinical Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD
Dr. Shah’s research focuses on combining machine learning and prior knowledge in medical ontologies to enable the learning health system.
Dr. Shah is Associate Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) at Stanford University, Medical Director, Research Informatics, Stanford Health Care, Co-Chair for Analytics, Center for Population Health Sciences, Stanford and a member of the executive committee of the Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program, which trains future research leaders to design and implement novel quantitative and computational methods to solve challenging problems across the entire spectrum of biology and medicine.
He is also the Assistant Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at Stanford, dedicated to advancing the state of the art in semantic technology, biostatistics, and the modeling of biomedical systems to benefit clinical and translational research as well as patient care.
Dr. Shah received the AMIA New Investigator Award for 2013 and the Stanford Biosciences Faculty Teaching Award for outstanding teaching in his graduate class on “Data Driven Medicine.”
Dr. Shah holds an MBBS from Baroda Medical College, India, a PhD from Penn State University and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University.
Co-Founder
John Doerr
John is an engineer, acclaimed venture capitalist, and the chairman of Kleiner Perkins. For more than 38 years, John has served entrepreneurs with ingenuity and optimism, bringing ideas worth spreading to disruptive leaders and teams.
John was an original investor and board member at Google and Amazon, helping to create over 650,000 jobs and the world’s second and third most valuable companies. He’s passionate about helping entrepreneurs reimagine the future, from health care transformation to machine learning.
John serves on the boards of Alphabet/Google, Amyris and Bloom Energy, as well as private ventures including health care leaders Lumeris and Nuna.
Outside of Kleiner Perkins, John works with social entrepreneurs for change in public education, the climate crisis, and global poverty. These include the Climate Reality Project and ONE.org. He serves on the board of the Obama Foundation
John earned degrees in electrical engineering from Rice University and business from Harvard and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Chairman, Kleiner Perkins
Ray Bradford, MBA
Advisor
Jeffrey Bailet, MD, MSPH
Advisor
Colt Courtright
Advisor
John Espinola, MD, MPH, MBA
Advisor
David Fields
Advisor
Alan Glaseroff, MD
Advisor
Trevor Hastie, PhD
Advisor
Ken Paulus, MA
Advisor
Ronald A. Paulus, MD
Advisor
Lee Sacks, MD
Advisor
Kevin A. Schulman, MD, MBA
Advisor
Juan Chaluja
Advisor
Chris DeRienzo, MD
Advisor
Julie Murchinson
Partner
Dr. Rishi Manchanda
Ray Bradford, MBA
Advisor
Ray Bradford is a member of the Stanford Medicine Board of Fellows, a past Forbes 30 under 30 designee, and named inventor on multiple patent applications related to scalable data systems.
Ray Bradford is founder and CEO of Spruce Health, dedicated to tackling the challenge of making high-quality healthcare more accessible, scalable, and consumer-friendly with the help of software.
Prior to founding Spruce, Ray was a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers focused on early-stage technology investments for the firm’s digital practice. He was also an early product development executive at Amazon Web Services, where he helped grow the company’s cloud infrastructure business. At Amazon, he was responsible for developing multiple new big data services including Amazon Redshift, and led one of the core product management teams, responsible for the definition, launch, and business growth of many other new database services, including Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS), Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon DynamoDB.
Ray received his MBA from Stanford Business School, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar.
Founder and CEO, Spruce Health
Jeffrey Bailet, MD, MSPH
Advisor
With over 20 years of health care experience, Dr. Jeffrey Bailet is currently Executive Vice President of Health Care Quality and Affordability at Blue Shield of California, a 4-million-member nonprofit health plan that serves the state’s commercial, individual and government markets.
In his role at Blue Shield of California, Dr Bailet is responsible for the management and performance of company’s Network Management, Health Care Services and Wellvolution® teams. He is currently chair of the executive committee of AMGA (formerly the American Medical Group Association).
Prior to joining Blue Shield, Dr.Bailet served as Executive Vice President at Aurora Health Care and President of Aurora Health Medical Group, which includes 1,800 physicians and 900 advance practice clinicians across 180 clinics and 15 hospitals in Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Dr. Bailet was recently appointed to the Government Accountability Office’s new Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee and currently serves on the Board of the Wisconsin Medical Society. He is also a member of the Group Practice Advisory Committee of the American Medical Association.
Dr Bailet is a board-certified otolaryngologist, a Fellow of the American Academy of Otolaryngology and the American College of Surgeons.
He is a graduate of the University of Washington School of Medicine, and completed his residency in Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery at UCLA Medical Center. He also holds a M.S.P.H. in Environmental Health from the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine.
Executive VP of Health Care Quality and Affordability, Blue Shield of California
Colt Courtright
Advisor
Colt Courtright leads Corporate Data & Analytics at Premera Blue Cross, where he is responsible for strategies that impact its 2.1 million members, 38,000 physician network, and self-insured employers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, Expedia, Weyerhaeuser and other household name companies.
Colt brings over 20 years’ experience performing new product innovation, supporting strategic partnerships, and overseeing advanced analytics and data management solutions. Recently this has included initial product deployments for companies such as Landmark, MOBE, Quartet, Vim/BookMD, Collective Medical Technologies, and Prealize. Colt has direct responsibility for real-time EMR clinical data exchange, data warehouse, data lake, data science, and business intelligence production environments, along with sales, marketing, clinical, and operational analytic and reporting teams.
Prior to joining Premera, Colt was Senior Medical Economist for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), where he led international studies in clinical care, cost and utilization, and oversaw evaluations of data management solutions including the $400 million Military Healthcare System data warehouse. Colt has been Senior Scientist for a national physician practice management organization, and co-founder of two start-up companies delivering analytic products and consulting services to Cedars-Sinai, AMGA, Mutual of Omaha, CareOregon Medicaid, and other prominent healthcare organizations.
Colt completed his undergraduate degree in Economics at the University of Essex and earned a Master in Public Administration at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon.
Chief Data Officer and VP, Corporate Data & Analytics, Premera Blue Cross
John Espinola, MD, MPH, MBA
Advisor
As Executive Vice President of Healthcare Services for Premera Blue Cross, John Espinola, is responsible for Premera’s healthcare strategy, corporate innovation and strategic investments. He leads Premera’s efforts to deliver healthcare value to customers.
Dr. Espinola leads both Premera’s collaboration with healthcare providers and other partners, and Premera’s innovation and strategic investments efforts.
In addition to his work at Premera, Dr Espinola has served in various leadership roles at other health plans including as an Executive Director at United Healthcare. He has also practiced geriatric medicine in the Seattle metro area in a variety of settings.
Dr. Espinola is board certified in geriatrics and internal medicine. He trained in internal medicine at Scripps Clinic in San Diego and in geriatrics at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. He earned his MD and MPH from Tufts University School of Medicine, a MBA from the University of Washington, and BA from the College of the Holy Cross.
Executive VP of Healthcare Services, Premera Blue Cross
David Fields
Advisor
David Fields has more than 30 years health plan experience and presently serves as President for Dean Health Plan, a 400,000+ member health plan serving Commercial, Individual and Government markets. Dean Health Plan is also the sole insurance subsidiary for SSM Health and a key part of its growth strategy. Prior to joining Dean Health Plan, David served as Executive Vice President – Markets for Blue Shield of California where he was responsible for management and performance for all lines of business representing $20 billion in annual revenue.
David has also been a senior officer at Aetna, leading the Mid-America Region, and spent more than ten years with Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. He started his health care career at Humana and was a CPA.
Fields earned a bachelor’s degree in Commerce from the University of Louisville.
President, Dean Health Plan
Alan Glaseroff, MD
Advisor
Dr. Glaseroff is a national leader in preventing costly health crises. He is faculty at Stanford’s Clinical Excellence Research Center, Adjunct Professor of Medicine and Co- Founder, Stanford Coordinated Care, for patients with complex chronic illness. He also currently serves as national faculty for the Institute of Healthcare Improvement’s “Better Care, Lower Cost” collaborative.
Dr. Alan Glaseroff works with Dr. Arnie Milstein at Stanford’s Clinical Excellence Research Center to help develop new models of care. He has also served as the Director of Workforce Transformation in Primary Care at Stanford where he was responsible for training the teams for Primary Care 2.0, a radical redesign of primary care. He formerly served as Co-Director of Stanford Coordinated Care, a service for patients with complex chronic illness.
Dr. Glaseroff, a member of the Innovation Brain Trust for the UniteHERE Health, currently serves as faculty for the Institute of Healthcare Improvement’s “Better Care, Lower Cost” collaborative. Dr. Glaseroff was named the “California Family Physician of the Year” for 2009. His focus is on the intersection of the meaning of patient-centered team care, patient activation, and the key role of self-management within the context of chronic conditions.
He received his MD from Case Western Reserve.
Faculty, Stanford University’s Clinical Excellence Research Center
Trevor Hastie, PhD
Advisor
Dr. Trevor Hastie is the John A. Overdeck Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Stanford University, and is a member of the US National Academy of Science. He is known for his contributions to applied statistics, especially in the field of machine learning, data mining, and bioinformatics.
Dr. Hastie has authored five books, including the widely referenced Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, and published over 180 articles in the field. His current research focuses on applied statistical modeling and prediction problems in biology, genomics, medicine and industry.
Prior to his appointment at Stanford, Dr. Hastie was a part of the statistics and data analysis research group at what was then AT&T Bell Laboratories. He interned at the Biomath department at Oxford University; the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; and the Johnson Space Center.
Dr. Hastie earned his MS from University of Cape Town in South Africa (where he is from), his BS from Rhodes University, South Africa and PhD from Stanford University. He has been listed as an “ISI Highly Cited Author in Mathematics” by the ISI Web of Knowledge.
The John A. Overdeck Professor of Mathematical Sciences, Stanford University
Ken Paulus, MA
Advisor
Ken Paulus is a transformative leader with more than 30 years’ experience in the health care sector, building strategic partnerships, integrating payment and delivery systems, and implementing consumer-centric health care solutions. As president and CEO of Prime Therapeutics (Prime), Paulus is responsible for the strategic direction and operations of one of the nation’s premier total drug management companies, with more than 28 million members in commercial markets and government programs.
From 2005 to 2015, Paulus held leadership roles at Allina Health; including CEO, president and chief operating officer (COO). Based in Minneapolis, Allina is one of the nation’s largest, most seamlessly integrated health delivery systems. During his tenure, Paulus led Allina beyond traditional acute care and into improving health, home-based care, retail pharmacy, and management of complicated specialty and chronic disease.
Earlier in his career, Paulus served as president and CEO of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, the staff model partner of Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare in Boston. While at Harvard Vanguard, Paulus led creation of Atrius Health and served as the system’s first president and CEO. Prior to Atrius, he was COO of Partners Community Healthcare, the risk-bearing entity of Partners Healthcare System.
Most recently, Paulus served as an executive advisor with Water Street Healthcare Partners, a private equity firm focused on the health care sector, giving him yet another perspective on value and value creation. Paulus also serves on several boards of directors, including Breg Inc., and Teladoc Health Inc.
Paulus earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in biological sciences from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois., and a Master of Health Care Administration from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
President and CEO, Prime Therapeutics
Ronald A. Paulus, MD
Advisor
Voted one of Modern Healthcare’s Top 50 Most Influential Physician Executives and Leaders, Ronald A. Paulus, MD is President and CEO of RAPMD Strategic Advisors, LLC, and the former President and CEO of Mission Health, a $2 billion integrated safety-net health system serving western North Carolina. He previously served as Executive Vice President, Clinical Operations and Chief Innovation Officer for Geisinger Health System where he managed Geisinger’s hospitals and physician group practice.
During his tenure, at Mission Health, the system has reduced inpatient mortality by more than half, achieved six-sigma medication safety results, improved patient experience to above the 90th percentile and became the only health system ever designated as one of the nation’s Top 15 Health Systems in six of seven years by IBM Watson Health — despite serving a region older, poorer, sicker and less likely to be insured than state and national averages.
Dr. Paulus has numerous peer-reviewed book chapter and journal publications, serves on multiple boards, and speaks regularly on the topics of health care quality and efficiency, innovation, physician and health system leadership and new models of care.
Dr. Paulus received his MD from The School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, as well as his MBA in healthcare management, and a BS in Economics from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
President and CEO, RAPMD Strategic Advisors, LLC
Lee Sacks, MD
Advisor
Over the course of his distinguished career, Dr. Lee Sacks achieved national recognition for his impact on patient safety, health outcomes, and clinical integration and was recognized by Modern Health Care in 2018 as one of the top 50 physician executives. He is the retired Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for Advocate Health Care, the largest health system in Illinois. Dr. Sacks served on the Advocate Health Care executive leadership team since its founding in 1995, and has been affiliated with Advocate and its predecessors, on medical staff and in other roles, for the past 41 years. At Advocate, he was responsible for health outcomes, patient safety, information systems, managed care contracting, PHO operations, research, medical education, risk management and insurance.
Dr. Sacks served as Advocate’s Chief Medical Officer for over 20 years and was the founding CEO of Advocate Health Partners, a clinically integrated network with over 5,000 physicians, coordinating care for approximately 1 million attributable lives in commercial, Medicare and Medicaid populations. He currently serves as faculty for leadership development of physician executives with the Health Management Academy.
Dr. Sacks is a fellow of the Institute of Medicine, Chicago. Prior to the merger that created Advocate, Dr. Sacks served in a variety of executive roles at Lutheran General Health System and practiced family medicine in suburban Chicago.
Dr. Sacks earned his BS at the University of Pennsylvania and MD from the University of Illinois, College of Medicine.
Former CMO, Advocate Aurora Health
Kevin A. Schulman, MD, MBA
Advisor
With 300 original articles, 80 review articles/commentaries, and 40 case studies/book chapters, Kevin Schulman has had an undeniably broad impact on health policy. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Annals of Internal Medicine. He is a member of the editorial/advisory boards of the American Heart Journal, Health Policy, Management and Innovation, and Senior Associate Editor of Health Services Research.
Dr. Schulman was appointed as Professor of Medicine, Associate Chair of Business Development and Strategy in the Department of Medicine, Director of Industry Partnerships and Education for the Clinical Excellence Research Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and, by courtesy, Professor of Economics at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.His research interests include organizational innovation in health care, health care policy and health economics. Formerly at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, Dr. Schulman oversaw the growth of the health sector management program, graduating almost 1,500 students. He is the Founding Director of the unique Master of Management in Clinical Informatics program, originally offered through the Fuqua School of Business and now housed in the Duke University School of Medicine. He has served as a Visiting Professor in General Management at Harvard Business School, and a visiting scholar. He is also the Founding President of the Business School Alliance for Health Management, a consortium of the leading business schools offering health management programs.
Dr. Schulman is an elected member of ASCI and AAP. He received his MD from the New York University School of Medicine and his MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his residency in internal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and is Board certified in internal medicine.
Professor of Medicine, Associate Chair, Business Development and Strategy, Director of Industry,Partnerships and Education, Stanford University School of Medicine
Juan Chaluja
Advisor
Juan Chaluja is Florida Blue’s vice president of Commercial Markets Analytics and Business Performance. In this role, Chaluja is responsible for establishing strategic direction to enable industry-leading analytics capabilities to drive business value and provide market insights and intelligence, inform tailored solutions to support customers and improve internal efficiencies. Chaluja also has accountability for organizational effectiveness and business performance across the Commercial Market segments.
Chaluja has more than 25 years of domestic and international experience in the health insurance industry. Prior to joining Florida Blue in 2007, Chaluja held various roles in underwriting, medical informatics, reinsurance, investigation fraud and Medicare risk adjustment. Chaluja began his career in Central America where he served as a statistician, and then moved back to the United States in 1998. Upon his return to the US, he served as a consultant for the Latin American region at Wakely & Associates. Chaluja holds a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Columbus State University and has completed executive education programs at UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management as well as Fellow, Life Management Institute (FLMI) and is currently a Fellow for America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Executive Leadership Program.
Vice President, Commercial Markets Analytics and Business Performance
Chris DeRienzo, MD
Advisor
Dr. Chris DeRienzo serves as Senior Vice President and System Chief Medical & Quality Officer of WakeMed Health & Hospitals, a nationally recognized, private, not-for-profit, 941-bed health system based in Raleigh, NC. In this role, Chris has senior executive responsibility for quality, safety, clinical transformation, medical staff services and continuous improvement across WakeMed's inpatient, outpatient, ambulatory, and post-acute enterprise.
Recognized by Modern Healthcare in 2018 as one of 15 “Up and Comers” Under 40 and Becker’s as one of healthcare’s “Rising Stars,” Chris has published and presented internationally on leveraging analytics to drive continuous improvement, implementing data science in healthcare, and the intersection of humanity and technology. A frequent keynote speaker and the first ever HIMSS SPARK (TED-style) Speaker, he also advises both state and national governments and companies from early-stage to the Fortune 500 and volunteers as a member of the Mercy Health (Chesterfield, MO) Board Quality Committee and the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly Board.
Board Certified in both Pediatrics and Neonatology, Dr. DeRienzo completed his M.D., Masters in Public Policy, and post-graduate medical training all at Duke.
Senior Vice President and System Chief Medical & Quality Officer, WakeMed Health & Hospitals
Julie Murchinson
Partner
Julie Murchinson joined Transformation Capital in 2020 after 6 years as the Chief Executive Officer of Health Evolution, the premier industry convener of health care’s most influential leaders. Julie built Health Evolution to inspire forward-thinking strategies and scalable solutions in health care, and into an unparalleled brand and growing, profitable business.
During her career, she has held leadership roles in health IT policy and strategy consulting, a growth-stage company through IPO, a private equity firm and a non-profit organization. Julie pioneered early health IT adoption methodologies, built special-interest collaborations, and developed perspectives on privacy, security, and consumer rights in health care delivery, health information technology, community-based health, consumerism, and philanthropy.
Prior to Health Evolution, Julie was Managing Director at Manatt Health Solutions where she concurrently co-founded the Health 2.0 Accelerator, a not-for-profit to advance consumer-centric health care. Manatt acquired Object Health, a boutique management consulting group Julie co-founded and led. Previously, she was Vice President of Services at CareScience, a Senior Associate with Deloitte Consulting and launched her career with Ernst & Young.
Julie serves on the Board of the National Committee for Quality Assurance and Health 2.0 Advocates, and on the Advisory Board for Prealize. She is a Trustee of The Commons Project and is on the Life Science Council of Springboard Enterprise. She is also a member of the Board for Eaglebrook School and on the Leadership Council for Franklin & Marshall College.
Julie received her MBA in Healthcare and Operations Management from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA and her BA in Business Management & Accounting from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. Julie longs for the next scuba diving and travel adventures, loves to continue learning the game of tennis and lives in the bay area with her husband and two children.
Partner, Transformation Capital
Associate Professor of Medicine, and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University
Board of the National Committee for Quality Assurance and Health 2.0 Advocates
Trustee of The Commons Project
Life Science Council of Springboard Enterprise
Board for Eaglebrook School
Leadership Council for Franklin & Marshall College
Dr. Rishi Manchanda
Dr. Rishi Manchanda is a physician, author, and healthcare leader who has spent more than a decade developing novel strategies to improve health in resource-poor communities. He has served as director of social medicine for a network of community health centers in South-Central Los Angeles, as the lead primary care physician for homeless veterans at the Greater Los Angeles VA, and as chief medical officer for a self-insured employer with a large rural immigrant workforce. In his 2013 TED Book, The Upstream Doctors, and 2014 TED Talk, he introduced readers and viewers to the Upstreamists, a new model of healthcare workers who improve care by addressing patients’ health-related social needs, such as food, financial, and housing insecurity. The talk has been viewed nearly 2 million times, and the book has become recommended reading in medical schools and universities across the world.
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