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.
Leadership
Founders
Board Members
Kyle Raffaniello
CEO
Niall O’Cathasaigh
CFO
Sri Gopalsamy
CTO
Dean Noble-Tolla
Chief Product and Analytics Officer
Matt Whitnack
Senior Vice President, Sales
Michele Forlenza
Vice President of Customer Success
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.
Dean Noble-Tolla
Chief Product and Analytics Officer
Dean Noble-Tolla is the Chief Product and Analytics Officer at Prealize Health where he oversees the development of the most advanced AI model in healthcare. Throughout his career Dean has leveraged his deep understanding of data throughout the healthcare system to develop strategy, drive growth, and build new technologies. He has worked with both health plans and healthcare providers for over 15 years to build AI and machine learning predictive models, construct data pipelines, and develop analytics infrastructure. Dean’s career has provided him with a unique perspective into the data streams and business models within the US healthcare systems through his work with numerous regional and blues plans and many of the 10 largest national plans. Through his work at Prealize Health, Dean has brought to market a unique AI model capable not only of identifying who is rising in risk, but also when that risk will occur, and which conditions are driving it. Prior to joining Prealize, he built predictive models that uncovered over $40M in annual medical waste, automated in-home care authorization, triaged high risk wound care cases, and enabled proactive palliative care. Prior to working in healthcare, Dean worked on the science of aging, life expectancy predictions and their impact on annuity risk, systems biology, and synthetic biology.Dean received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Georgia and his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from UC Davis.
Matt Whitnack
Senior Vice President, Sales
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.Senior VP, Sales Michele ForlenzaVice President of Customer SuccessMichele Forlenza brings over 25 years of extensive experience in the healthcare industry to her role as Vice President of Customer Success at Prealize Health. With a dedicated focus the last 18 years in client success and relationship management, Michele consistently demonstrates a commitment to driving customer satisfaction, fostering long-term partnerships, and delivering tangible results. Throughout her career, Michele has cultivated a deep understanding of the unique challenges within the healthcare landscape. Leveraging her extensive background, she has successfully collaborated with diverse stakeholders, including healthcare providers and payers, to navigate complex environments and achieve shared objectives. Michele has a passion for driving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Michele’s approach to customer success is both proactive and strategic, constantly looking for ways to elevate the overall customer experience. She is committed to ensuring that our clients achieve maximum value from Prealize products and services. Michele oversees the Client Success and Implementation teams for Prealize and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Health Policy and Administration from the Pennsylvania State University.
Michele Forlenza
Vice President of Customer Success
Michele Forlenza brings over 25 years of extensive experience in the healthcare industry to her role as Vice President of Customer Success at Prealize Health. With a dedicated focus the last 18 years in client success and relationship management, Michele consistently demonstrates a commitment to driving customer satisfaction, fostering long-term partnerships, and delivering tangible results. Throughout her career, Michele has cultivated a deep understanding of the unique challenges within the healthcare landscape. Leveraging her extensive background, she has successfully collaborated with diverse stakeholders, including healthcare providers and payers, to navigate complex environments and achieve shared objectives. Michele has a passion for driving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Michele’s approach to customer success is both proactive and strategic, constantly looking for ways to elevate the overall customer experience. She is committed to ensuring that our clients achieve maximum value from Prealize products and services. Michele oversees the Client Success and Implementation teams for Prealize and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Health Policy and Administration from the Pennsylvania State 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
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.
Professor of Medicine, Stanford
Director Clinical Excellence Research Center, Stanford University
Member, National Academy of Medicine
Thomas McKinley, MS, MBA
Partner, Cardinal Partners
Kent Marquardt
CEO, Maverick Advisors
Mark D. Smith, MD, MBA
Professor, Clinical Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
John Doerr
Chairman, Kleiner Perkins
Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD
Co-Founder, Prealize Health
Kyle Raffaniello
CEO, Prealize Health
Thomas McKinley, MS, MBA
Partner, Cardinal Partners
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.
Kent Marquardt
CEO, Maverick Advisors
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.
Mark D. Smith, MD, MBA
Professor, Clinical Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
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.
John Doerr
Chairman, Kleiner Perkins
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.
Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD
Co-Founder, Prealize Health
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
Kyle Raffaniello
CEO, Prealize Health
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.
Careers
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