Dr. Adrian Jacques Ambrose, 35, wants to make healthcare, especially mental-health care, more accessible.

Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Ambrose, who goes professionally by Jacques, is driven by how confusing healthcare is. "You're expecting the consumer to diagnose themselves," he said. "It's so convoluted." 

As a senior medical director in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, he oversees over 100 clinicians, including about 50 physicians across four clinical sites. He aims to ensure proper quality of care, proper access, and ways to better integrate a patient's clinical experience. 

One area of focus is mental health and encouraging employers to "begin that conversation, that difficult conversation, in an open and honest way," and that they "consider people as actual human beings who have challenges beyond what we see in the office." 

Ambrose emigrated from Vietnam to Hawaii when he was 9. "If you were to ask me, this refugee child, growing up in Hawaii, to a single mother who never graduated middle school, what was he going to do when he grew up, I would have said, 'Work at McDonald's like my mom.'"

He explained that he grew up in "a very impoverished neighborhood" and many of his friends are "still living in poverty." 

He remembers when he realized healthcare was his calling — during a fellowship at the Satcher Health Leadership Institute, working under David Satcher, the former surgeon general. 

Ambrose said he asked himself: "Where would you reconceptualize healthcare and where would you potentially think about potholes or deficits or gaps currently in the healthcare system for people that don't resemble the healthcare providers, which at the time was predominantly white and predominantly male."

He said his North Star is asking questions. "How do I continue to inculcate this dream of advocating for not only better healthcare, but better healthcare for vulnerable populations and minority populations?" he said.

Ambrose doesn't want patients to be left behind, especially those who may not have financial or social capital — or knowledge of the healthcare system. 

"I don't want to forget my roots, and I don't want to forget there are many, many families and people who still need a lot of help."

—Josée Rose

Dr. Andrew Anzalone, 36, is pioneering a more precise approach to gene editing.

Prime Medicine

By the time he finished his joint medical degree and Ph.D. program, Anzalone knew he wanted to focus on biomedical research.

Instead of continuing his medical training, Anzalone scored a postdoc position in the lab of David Liu at the Broad Institute. The lab has been at the forefront of discovering new ways to modify an individual's genetic information, and Liu has been spinning out those technologies into companies like Beam Therapeutics and Prime Medicine.

In Liu's lab, Anzalone helped develop a more precise way to modify DNA, called prime editing. Prime editing can alter, insert, or delete stretches of genetic material or individual letters.

After finishing his postdoc, Anzalone went to work with Liu as a cofounder at Prime Medicine, aiming to turn this technology into medical treatments. The company raised $315 million from top biotech VCs and went public late last year. It's now valued at $1.5 billion.

Theoretically, prime editing could help treat about 90% of genetic diseases, Prime Medicine said, and the company has named 18 it's going after first. Anzalone and his colleagues said the technique has worked in petri dishes and in animal experiments.

But while gene editing holds the promise of providing cures, or at least highly effective treatments, for many diseases that are now untreatable, there's lots of scientific work still to be done, and it could be years before we find out whether the technology can live up to its promise.

Anzalone and his colleagues want to start testing the technology in people, and Prime Medicine is asking US regulators for permission to do that next year. The company wants to examine whether prime editing can help treat chronic granulomatous disease, a blood-cell disorder that weakens the immune system.

"What fuels the excitement is that we could potentially address many of these things that haven't really had a therapeutic approach," Anzalone said. "And we can get at the root cause."

—Zachary Tracer

Virgílio Bento, 39, offers virtual physical therapy to millions of patients worldwide.

Sword Health

Bento was 8 years old when his brother fell into a coma after a car accident. When his brother woke up a year later, he needed intensive physical therapy, but that care wasn't available where the family lived in Portugal — forcing Bento's brother to seek care at a high-intensity rehabilitation center in Cuba for three months.

The experience stuck with Bento, he told Insider, as a prime example of the inaccessibility of traditional physical therapy.

In 2009, Virgilio Bento began his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Aveiro in Portugal. He dedicated his thesis to building the technology behind Sword Health. He wanted to create an affordable virtual-physical-therapy platform to help people suffering from pain associated with musculoskeletal conditions with personalized treatment plans and remote monitoring devices.

Bento made Sword Health available to US patients in 2020. Since then, the company has seen explosive growth, raising $316 million in venture capital and hitting a $2 billion valuation with its November 2021 Series D round.

Sword now works with more than 2,500 employers around the world, Bento said. The company surpassed $100 million in recurring revenue from annual contracts with employers earlier this year and hopes to end 2023 with $200 million.

Bento said Sword has continued to grow despite the economic downturn because the technology saves money for employers. Musculoskeletal conditions like back pain affect about 1.7 billion people globally, and cost hundreds of billions of dollars every year in healthcare bills and lost wages.

"Instead of having low-back-pain surgery, you can do Sword, which will get you better clinical outcomes and save your company money," Bento said.

The company is expecting to become profitable as soon as 2024, Bento said. And once Sword becomes profitable, he said, an IPO could be just around the corner.

—Rebecca Torrence

Joel Bervell, 28, is teaching doctors, patients, and politicians at the White House to challenge what they know about race in medicine.

Joel Bervell

Bervell said he mapped out his entire career in medicine on a posterboard when he was 12. 

"I was going to go to Yale or Harvard, I was going to go to medical school, and I was going to become a surgeon," he said.

So far, so good. A Yale graduate, Bervell is a fourth-year medical student at Washington State University. He's planning to go into orthopedics — the "whitest" medical specialty, with nearly 84% of surgeons identifying as white, 2022 data from the Association of American Medical Colleges found.

But Bervell never predicted that along the way, he'd become a leading medical voice on social media. It all started during the COVID-19 pandemic when Bervell began questioning some things he was being taught on Zoom. 

"Things like, 'Black patients are more likely to have asthma,' yet we don't talk about redlining," he said. "'Black patients are more likely to die of COVID,' but yet we didn't dive into the social determinants of health."

He started noticing all the subtle — and not-so-subtle — ways racial bias affects care, starting when doctors are trained. 

Bervell began using TikTok and Instagram to tell stories about disparities, such as showing how pulse oximeters perform worse on darker skin, revealing how conditions like eczema and psoriasis actually look on different skin tones, and exploring why an outdated, racist measure of kidney function disqualified more African American patients from transplants. 

The Ghanaian American "Z-illennial" bridges different cultures and generations with savvy storytelling and science communication. He's been tapped by the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, the US Surgeon General, and the White House for his social-media skills. 

Back home in Portland, Oregon, he also gets recognized: "Hey, I follow you on Instagram!" someone shouted out their car window recently. Another follower said she had a precancerous mole removed after she watched his video on acral lentiginous melanoma.

"Things like that really inspire me," he said.

—Hilary Brueck

Kyunghyun Cho, 38, is pushing the boundaries of drug discovery at a major biotech firm.

Kyunghyun Cho

As a machine-learning pioneer, Cho's research was a precursor to today's most advanced artificial-intelligence systems, like that underpinning the breakthrough app ChatGPT.

It propelled him into academia, and eventually, medicine. 

At New York University, where Cho, age 38, is a prolific associate professor, he helped build a data-science hub for healthcare and studied how algorithms can make a difference for patients. One of his ongoing efforts is using them to Strengthen screening for breast cancer.

Eventually, Cho landed on an idea that needed more resources. 

Together with Richard Bonneau and Vladimir Gligorijevic, standouts in molecular design and bioinformatics, Cho cofounded a startup called Prescient Design with the goal of using advances in machine learning to discover medicines more efficiently. 

Other companies have pursued that, but Prescient envisioned a unique approach of using algorithms to design proteins, the basis of many medicines, with more input from lab workers, allowing science and math teams to work together more easily.

Since getting acquired by the biotech company Genentech in 2021, the Prescient program has grown more adept at designing proteins, Cho said, but it also works across the different "modalities" or classes of medicine, giving researchers an incredibly powerful tool kit.

While the Prescient team hasn't yet discovered a breakthrough treatment per se, their technology has been deployed across Genentech to aid a number of active projects, Cho said.

Similar to his work at NYU, Cho tries to foster a collaborative environment at Genentech, hiring computer scientists and biologists in equal numbers.

— Blake Dodge

Kavelle Christie, 39, is fighting for Black maternal health and to safeguard reproductive rights.

Community Catalyst

When Christie was pushing for legislation in 2018 to cement abortion rights under Rhode Island state law, she heard repeatedly that the bill wasn't urgent. With Roe v. Wade in effect, abortions were legal across the US.

But Christie, who was working at Planned Parenthood of Southern New England at the time, saw reproductive rights were in danger. 

The Rhode Island law passed in 2019, three years before Roe v. Wade was overturned. In 2020, Christie joined the healthcare advocacy organization Community Catalyst as its director of gender equity and health justice to fight for reproductive rights and health equity on a national level.

At Community Catalyst, Christie helps create policies such as the Black Maternal Health Act of 2021 and an upcoming bill focused on the impact of long COVID on maternal health.

Christie also advises state and private organizations on increasing access to midwifery services and helped push for a Rhode Island bill, passed in 2021, that made doula services eligible for reimbursement by private insurance and Medicaid.

She's spent years on voter-organization efforts, too, including managing a voter-engagement campaign in 2020 focused on Latino voters in Colorado, which helped protect access to abortion in the state.

Those rights, and reproductive privacy as a whole, remain under fire across the US. Christie pointed to "personhood" laws proposed in various states that would categorize a fetus as a person and grant them a constitutional right to life.

Christie said she worries that the personhood laws could impact fertility care for some, such as barring the creation of frozen embryos in assisted reproduction, and hopes to do more work in the future to protect access to those services.

—Rebecca Torrence

Rivka Friedman, 40, is using the vast resources of JPMorgan to make healthcare better and cheaper.

Morgan Health

After helping hospitals respond to the Affordable Care Act, Friedman, a consultant at the time, wanted to be in the room where policy was made.

In 2016, she joined a venture with the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to find ways to improve patient care while lowering the government's costs.

Like a startup, the CMS innovation center saw industry-shaping wins sprinkled with many failures, Friedman said.

An effort led in part by Friedman showed that you could lower individuals' healthcare costs by supporting their social needs, which helped spawn several digital-health startups.

Another program attempted to address maternal-health-provider shortages by giving Medicaid beneficiaries access to midwives, but the savings were too small, she said.

In 2021, when JPMorgan launched a venture meant to shake up the healthcare industry, Friedman saw an opportunity to apply what she'd learned to employer-sponsored insurance, which is how the majority of Americans pay for care.

She's now in charge of innovation at the bank's Morgan Health unit, which is tasked with lowering costs and improving care quality for the bank's 385,000 employees and dependents and for commercial healthcare more broadly.

One element of Morgan Health's strategy is working closely with startups to run pilots for JPMorgan's workers and their families to find ideas worth building on.

Thus far, a Columbus-based pilot in primary care is going well. Friedman's team has many more experiments planned, she said.

One will have the former CMS leader once again tackling maternal health, where people of color see worse outcomes regardless of income, she said.

Though it's still early, Friedman's team aims to support pregnant people more holistically, outside of their "capital-M medical needs," she said.

Friedman said she hopes to publish details about Morgan Health's work with providers, so other employers can replicate them. She said the right interventions exist — they're just not being implemented enough.

"If we can change that even modestly, I will feel really proud," she said.

— Blake Dodge

After losing a loved one to an overdose, Zack Gray, 34, is expanding access to addiction treatment for others.

Ophelia Health

In 2019, as Gray was Getting ready to graduate from Wharton Business School, a woman he loved died.

Unable to get a prescription for Suboxone, a medication that eases opioid cravings, she bought some illegally before dying from what Gray suspects was an overdose.

After reading books about addiction and talking to doctors, Gray was bewildered to learn how common her experience was.

"The fact that I didn't have a healthcare background wasn't all that relevant," he said. "It was about redesigning the evidence-based treatment to be more accessible to people who wanted it."

Later in 2019, Gray founded Ophelia Health, which helps treat opioid-use disorders by making Suboxone available online. Since the market downturn, the Wharton grad has been focused on building Ophelia into a sustainable business, which is no easy feat in addiction care. 

Many of Ophelia's contracts with health plans are "fee-for-service" arrangements, which means the company is paid per visit. That leaves out a lot of other services Ophelia provides for patients, such as helping them find pharmacies and get their care covered by insurance.

About 75% of Ophelia's patients have insurance via the state-federal health plan Medicaid, and Medicaid's reimbursement rates are low.

To boost revenue over the past quarter, Gray has doubled the percentage of patients covered by more lucrative contracts with insurers, in which they pay Ophelia flat monthly fees.

Among Ophelia's insured patients, 70% are still in care a year after starting treatment, Gray said. So for insurers, the upfront investment in Ophelia is worth it. 

But Gray is proudest that Ophelia provides care to people with no other options, and the startup will continue taking patients regardless of how they or their health plans pay for it.

Internal surveys at the company found many patients don't have primary-care doctors or any other touchpoint to the rest of the healthcare system.

— Blake Dodge

Hakan Kardes, 36, is using data and AI to help clinicians provide proactive care to seniors.

Alignment Health

A common gripe about the US healthcare system is that a patient's data is often scattered in different places that don't communicate with each other.

That can make it tough for a single healthcare provider to get a complete picture of a patient's health, leading to redundant tests and a frustrating experience.

"There are so many different silos of data. All these different entities are disconnected, and it puts seniors in a very tough situation to navigate all this," said Kardes, the chief technology and experience officer at Alignment Health, an insurer that serves seniors enrolled in the privatized version of Medicare.

Kardes is the lead architect behind AVA, the proprietary technology that powers the insurance company. His goal in building it was to break down those data silos, allowing Alignment to take better care of its members.

AVA — short for Alignment's Virtual Application — gathers data from hundreds of different sources, such as hospital visits, medical claims, and lab results, to provide an accurate account of a patient. 

It then applies more than 200 different AI models to make predictions. It can tell Alignment which members are likely to become hospitalized or develop a chronic disease, for example, and helps clinicians respond. 

The company's in-house team of healthcare providers use information from AVA to focus on those high-risk, costly patients and try to keep them healthier and out of the hospital.

Next up, Kardes is exploring ways that new generative-AI technology could save healthcare providers time. A doctor could ask a generative-AI tool for a member's most exact A1C test results and get the answer instantly, rather than having to comb through lab reports, he said.

— Shelby Livingston

Sasha Kelemen, 35, is securing the financial future of women's health.

Sasha Kelemen

While at Goldman Sachs, Kelemen held her own at tables full of primarily white men and got promoted to vice president.

She planned to stay, but things changed after the investment banker had her first daughter. 

While on maternity leave in November 2020, she read everything possible about women's health and felt there was untapped potential. 

"There's something here," Kelemen said of her thinking at the time. "Why is nobody on Wall Street paying attention?"

In summer 2021, the bank SVB Leerink recruited Kelemen. In a 90-minute meeting, she pitched Barry Blake, a top banker there, on creating a team to land deals in women's health.

But as a working mom at Goldman — short on time while weaning the baby off breast milk and caring for her when she got sick — she also told Blake about her family and intentions to grow it.

Blake endorsed both of Kelemen's plans.

Now, at Leerink Partners, Kelemen runs the only women- and family-focused healthcare investment banking practice, staffed by a small team of female bankers, on Wall Street. And every day, her calendar is blocked from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. so she can spend time with her kids.

Part of Kelemen's challenge is convincing largely male investors of the value of companies that treat menopause, pelvic-floor dysfunction, pain during sex, and other elements of a woman's healthcare journey.

Last year, Kelemen sold a menopause-treatment startup to a national OB-GYN services company. It was the first deal Kelemen put together from start to finish, and the first time her client, the startup's CEO Jill Angelo, wasn't a man. 

Right after the deal was announced, Kelemen hung up the phone and kissed her second daughter, who was then about 5 days old, on the head, thinking she might have better access to care one day. Then she started to tear up.

Kelemen added that other than that, she didn't work during her maternity leave.

— Blake Dodge

Robert Krayn, 35, is building a better workplace for mental-health professionals.

Talkiatry

Living in New York, Krayn didn't think he'd have difficulty finding a mental-health professional after experiencing a traumatic event.

He couldn't have been more wrong.

"I had great health insurance and was living in a populated city in terms of finding available psychiatrists," Krayn told Insider in an interview. "But it took several years of trying to understand why I was having a problem with access and not finding the solution I was looking for."

A finance professional and alum of Rutgers University, Krayn became obsessed with the pain points in the mental-health care system. He came to realize that many clinics and startups were not meeting the needs of providers and insurers, which in turn meant that patients were also suffering.

"There's a shortage for mental-health care, but lots of people aren't solving the problem in the right way and aren't meeting the needs of all stakeholders," he said. 

In 2019, this realization led Krayn to leave finance to launch Talkiatry, a national mental-health-care practice that provides in-network psychiatry and therapy. The startup has raised $115 million in VC funding.

Unlike some other mental-health startups, Talkiatry employs psychiatrists as full-time, salaried workers. Krayn said that while this approach is more expensive, it sets Talkiatry apart as a better place for mental-health professionals to work, which in turn translates to more and better care for patients.

"Talkiatry believes you can't just increase access, but you have to increase access to quality care," he said. "We hire the best-quality providers and have a clinical-leadership structure where we can manage a large patient population and produce better outcomes."

—Samantha Stokes

Noah Lang, 39, wants to make it easier for gig workers to get health insurance.

Stride Health

Americans are changing their relationship with work. Many are less loyal to their jobs, and a growing number of people are ditching a traditional nine-to-five entirely in favor of freelance work.

But with health insurance in this country largely tied to employment, it can be difficult for people to access quality healthcare while pursuing their career goals.

That's where Noah Lang comes in. A longtime leader in the tech and healthcare space, he's passionate about overhauling the relationship between jobs and health insurance. 

"The average American works more than 12 jobs in their lifetime," he told Insider. "We need a benefits system built around people, not around one company."

In 2013, Lang launched Stride Health, which helps independent workers find affordable health insurance. The startup has raised $96 million in funding and counts Venrock, F-Prime Capital, and Kleiner Perkins as investors. 

Stride was founded soon after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which allowed people to get access to health coverage regardless of gender or health condition or where they lived, even if they didn't get insurance through work.

"The whole sector was being disrupted," he said.

Ten years into Stride Health's existence, Lang said the company has worked with three presidential administrations to increase access to different forms of healthcare, and it continues to reimagine what the industry should look like. About 3.5 million people get health insurance or other benefits via Stride, the company said.

"The thing that motivates me is building a new benefits system," he said. "We worked with the Obama administration and convinced them to build a private-sector integration with healthcare.gov, and that work was finished with the Trump administration. Now we're scaling with the Biden administration."

—Samantha Stokes

Julia Leach, 36, is designing glasses and headphones that could help protect Alzheimer's patients' brains

Julia Leach

Leach spends a lot of time trying to look at the world through the eyes of an Alzheimer's patient. Sometimes, quite literally — as she dons big, dark glasses and headphones she's designing for people with mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's.

The headsets she designs as the head of translational research at Cognito Therapeutics emit bright flashing lights and sounds tuned to particular frequencies. This combination is meant to serve as a kind of disruptive exercise session for the brain, slowing cognitive decline and brain decay.

Early evidence suggests the therapy may work, at least among patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. Some patients also report better sleep, a nice bonus.

"What I personally hope to provide back to these individuals is that feeling of themselves — whether that's a memory, whether that's a smell that links to a memory, whether that's just being able to get up and go for a walk outside," Leach said.

Leach lost her grandmother to Alzheimer's 5½ years ago, so the work is deeply personal.

"She was the one who sparked my love for science," Leach said. "She always encouraged me to push and to grow and to learn."

Imagining her declining grandmother using Cognito's device grounds and motivates Leach's research, as she considers how to Strengthen device comfort and usability.

Cognito's therapy is now being tested in a large, yearlong trial of more than 400 Alzheimer's patients across the US to determine how well it works. If successful, it could be on the market as early as 2026.

— Hilary Brueck

Christopher McGhee, 33, is working with hospitals to bring care into the home.

Current Health

As a medical-school student in Scotland, McGhee cofounded Current Health in 2015 to help expand access to acute at-home care. But it wasn't until the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020 that business exploded.

McGhee built Current Health's remote-monitoring platform, with tools like video visits and wearables, to provide home care to patients who would otherwise be in the hospital for conditions ranging from cancer to broken bones. During the pandemic, patients were desperate to get care virtually or in their homes, rather than going to the hospital and risking infection.

Revenue surged "basically overnight," said McGhee, and the UK-based company landed multiple partnerships with health systems in the US.

On the back of that growth, Best Buy bought Current Health in October 2021 for $400 million. The electronics-retail giant helps customers set up the remote-monitoring technology at home.

Following the acquisition, Current Health had its best year so far in 2022, which McGhee attributed to growing consumer preference for care at home and to increasing financial incentives for at-home care, including in Medicare and Medicaid coverage. The company has notched partnerships with more than 50 healthcare organizations globally, including five of the US's 20 biggest health systems, per Best Buy.

McGhee, who still serves as Current Health's CEO, also advises Best Buy Health on its virtual-care strategy. Best Buy's sales have been slipping for over a year, but the retailer has continued to invest in its healthcare business.

McGhee said Current Health plans to announce more health-system partnerships in the coming months and wants to add more automation into its platform to ease the burden of certain administrative tasks for clinicians.

— Rebecca Torrence

Dan Miller, 38, is tackling health disparities by providing better care to people of color.

Spora Health

Miller was at a Black Buddhist retreat in the San Francisco Bay Area when he came up with the idea for Spora Health, a startup that provides virtual healthcare for people of color.

The retreat was the first time he'd experienced mindfulness and meditation in a space designed for a specific culture. Folks were elated to "learn from one another, have conversations with one another" and talk about their experiences as Black Americans, Miller said.

He knew immediately that the same sort of space should exist in medical care, where people of color experience discrimination and worse outcomes than white people. He founded Spora in 2019 to address these problems by providing care informed by the culture of the populations it serves.

"This culture-centered approach was a hypothesis that if we do this well, at a minimum we can create more access to care," Miller said. "At most, we will save lives," he continued. "And, thankfully, I can say that we've done both."

The San Francisco-based company, which has raised $4.1 million, cares for thousands of patients in more than 22 states and will expand to the rest of the US later this year, Miller said. About three-quarters of Spora's providers are people of color, and the startup also trains clinicians to provide culturally competent care.

Miller's proudest accomplishment is building Spora Mommas, a program that aims to Strengthen maternal health outcomes for Black mothers, who are more likely to die during pregnancy than white women. Spora has helped facilitate more than 100 births in the year since it launched, Miller said.

"We're getting baby photos in, and our babies are like eight months after being born. They're still healthy and our mommas are doing well. That's the thing that I'm most proud about. It's incredible." 

— Shelby Livingston

Manav Sevak, 26, and Kunaal Naik, 27, are creating a more robust system for managing care plans.

Memora Health

While in college at Georgia Tech, Sevak and Naik had a friend who was diagnosed with a chronic condition. Although this person was young, tech-savvy, health literate, and had great access to healthcare, they still struggled to communicate with their care team and follow a care plan.

Sevak and Naik realized that their friend's experience was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to care-management problems. 

"We came to the ultimate realization of just how broken the healthcare experience looks and feels for lots of different people, which inspired us to dig a little deeper into the problem space," said Sevak.

The pair were initially on different paths in college — Sevak wanted to become a doctor, while Naik was studying computer science — but their quest for a solution led them to found Memora Health, a company that digitizes and automates care plans with the help of AI. Since launching in 2017, the startup has raised $80.5 million from VCs including General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and AlleyCorp.

Memora started as a medication-management platform that would send automated reminders to patients when it was time for their next dose. The startup has expanded to become a holistic program managing patients' entire care regimens, from doctor visits to medical history to insurance reimbursements.

Naik, the startup's chief technology officer, said that AI has been integral in growing Memora Health into a care-management program, and that machine learning is being used to figure out the best time of day to message patients and anticipate when they may have questions.

"This is a conversational way to ultimately interact with clinicians," he told Insider in an interview. "The AI can answer routine questions about medications, surgeries, and appointment visits, but if AI can't confidently answer the question, it will redirect to a care team member."

—Samantha Stokes

Colleen Nicewicz, 38, is expanding much-needed addiction care at a measured pace.

Groups Recover Together

After helping lead Athenahealth, the medical software giant, through a major crisis, Nicewicz wanted to use her business chops to help patients more directly.

In 2019, having seen the toll of addiction in her own family, she took a role as COO at Groups Recover Together, a startup that treats opioid-use disorder, before becoming its CEO in 2020.

Groups had a unique approach to addiction medicine. Besides prescribing medication like Suboxone, which reduces cravings for drugs, Groups also required group therapy, allowing patients to form lasting connections, and outfitted clinics with bright colors and snacks.

Clinically, it was working. But financially, Groups needed to grow the business and get paid more. For the past four years, that's been Nicewicz's focus.

When she joined, most of Groups' revenue came from patients paying with cash and health plans reimbursing it for service. In addiction care, that often isn't enough to sustain a business.

Groups was eventually able to show insurers that it saved them money, Nicewicz said. As patients stopped using drugs, they needed less medical care, Groups data showed.

Now, health plans pay Groups a premium. The vast majority of its revenue comes from insurers paying set monthly fees for patients. Those fees are typically more than threefold what Groups would otherwise be able to charge for their care, Nicewicz said.

The model has allowed Groups to expand to more than 15 states while focusing on patients that need it most. Seventy percent of the 16,000 patients it sees each week have Medicaid, the government-sponsored insurance program for people with lower incomes, she said.

While Nicewicz has ideas to expand to provide mental-health services, the CEO is in no rush. 

Remembering lessons from Athena, where Nicewicz ran cost-saving programs and eventually the company's sale, she shies away from the "growth at all costs" mindset, she said.

— Blake Dodge

Alfredo Quijano Rubio, 30, is developing a better way to make medical diagnostics.

Monod Bio

Quijano Rubio has long had a passion for pushing the boundaries of science then turning his discoveries into business ideas.

"My passion was entrepreneurship," he said. "I've always been the kind of person that is, 'Oh, you're working on that project, why? Why is that useful?'"

Quijano Rubio grew up in Valencia, Spain, and studied biotechnology at the Universitat Politècnica de València. He won a prestigious scholarship to continue his education and earned his Ph.D. under David Baker at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. 

He's already cofounded two companies based on his work on custom-designing proteins. The first, Neoleukin, focused on creating better cancer treatments. The second company is Monod Bio, a spinout from Baker's lab that's aiming to create better medical-diagnostic tools. Monod started in late 2021 and raised a $25 million seed round in 2022. 

Monod relies on proteins that are designed to bind to a particular substance and emit light based on the amount of that substance that's present. Quijano Rubio has published research showing this method can detect things like the novel coronavirus and troponin, a protein that can signal a heart attack. 

The company envisions creating a device that can be used in a hospital or clinic in place of some lab draws. In theory, this could make some labs faster, easier, and less expensive, Quijano Rubio says. 

Quijano Rubio said the company is working to develop tests in areas such as cardiovascular disease and hormonal diseases, but declined to name particular ones. The company isn't pursuing tests for infectious diseases like COVID-19 right now.

—Zachary Tracer

Kuldeep Singh Rajput, 31, is combining wearable technology and AI to track patients at home and Strengthen their health.

Biofourmis

Rajput dropped out of a Ph.D. program in neuroscience in 2015 and started Biofourmis, a company that uses wearable sensors, artificial intelligence, and data analytics to help hospitals track and care for patients in their homes.

This was the year the Apple Watch became available, and fitness trackers were catching on. At the same time, the US Food and Drug Administration was starting to clear wearable medical devices for certain uses, Rajput said. 

But he was more interested in what could be done with all the data this new technology produced.

The idea behind Biofourmis was, "can we leverage all these passively captured data from patients to really be able to predict complications and deterioration?" he said. 

Biofourmis, which has raised $465 million in venture funding, works with hospitals to monitor and manage patients at home. It also works with pharmaceutical companies to manage clinical trials. It aims to detect problems and predict when patients' conditions might worsen, so doctors can step in early. Its software also provides recommendations on next steps, such as adjusting medication, Rajput said.

"Where typical remote monitoring has failed is: How do you act on that data to drive outcomes?" he said. "We wanted to focus on how do we use that data to influence outcomes, drive better patient outcomes, and save costs for our partners?"

The company initially worked with hospitals to take better care of their patients. About a year and a half ago, it branched out into providing care itself, which helps hospitals dealing with staffing shortages and frees up their beds for more patients, Rajput said.

While the company is growing rapidly — it managed more than 100,000 patients in 2022 and hopes to double that figure this year, Rajput said — its mission has always been to tailor care to the individual, he said.

"There's been a lot of talk about personalized medicine, precision medicine," Rajput said. "We have been actually doing it for many years now."

— Shelby Livingston

Holly Rees, 30, is innovating at the cutting edge of gene editing.

Holly Rees

Rees is at the forefront of perfecting a type of gene-editing technology called base editing. Base editing lets scientists change the individual letters that make up an individual's genetic code, or DNA. The hope is that these tiny edits can help treat or even cure diseases.

Rees is the associate director and head of lead discovery at the biotech company Beam Therapeutics. Her work is focused on finding new base-editing tools to target different diseases and making these tools more effective and less prone to errors.

Beam's most advanced projects focus on the blood disorders sickle-cell disease and beta thalassemia, and on treating certain kinds of severe cancer. Meanwhile, Rees is focused on the other end of the spectrum — scientific advances that are still in their infancy but that could one day help treat diseases in people.

Rees told Insider that she can't publicly discuss most of the diseases she's working on, though she's involved in the company's efforts to treat hepatitis B. It's difficult to say when her work will make its way to treatments used in people.

"My hope is that a lot more patients who are currently suffering from rare or common serious diseases will have options provided to them for curing those diseases in a onetime therapy or single-administration therapy that has been enabled by base editing," Rees said. 

Rees earned her undergraduate degree in natural sciences at the University of Cambridge in the UK, before pursuing a Ph.D. at Harvard in the lab of David Liu. Liu is a cofounder of Beam, and two of his students — Nicole Gaudelli and Alexis Komor — helped invent key parts of base editing. Rees worked closely with them to build on their discoveries, an effort that continues at Beam. 

—Zachary Tracer

Jayodita Sanghvi, 38, is designing tech to help people get better healthcare faster.

Included Health

Grand Rounds, now called Included Health, was started in 2011 to help people with complex medical conditions connect with experts to get second opinions.

Sanghvi joined the company three years later, after getting her Ph.D. in bioengineering from Stanford University. She wanted to use her skills in computational biology and statistics to make a difference in patient care.

So she helped build Grand Rounds' provider-matching service, which uses machine learning to determine which provider is most likely to provide the best outcomes for a given patient. The service separates out decisions as granular as which provider is the best at getting patients to stay on medication, or which has received Good Score in communicating with patients.

The tech brings big savings for the more than 300 employers and health plans that Included Health works with, too — last year, Provider Match helped drive a few hundred million in cost savings for those companies, thanks to decreased medical events like hospitalizations and better outcomes for patients, according to Included Health.

Grand Rounds merged with Doctor on Demand to become Included Health in 2021. Sanghvi now leads Included Health's data-science team as its senior director.

Sanghvi and her team also built automation tech that predicts which patients are likely to have a "care episode," such as a cardiovascular event, so they can get to the care they need faster.

Sanghvi said she wants to build patient trust in healthcare by using technology. At the moment, that trust is sorely lacking, she said. 

"We're not there in health, but we're there in so many other industries," she said. "There's a huge opportunity to bring that to healthcare, instead of patients trying to avoid it or hating it every time they need care."

—Rebecca Torrence

Neil Sanghavi, 34, is helping doctors provide better care by equipping them with on-demand evidence from millions of patient records.

Neil Sanghavi

New ideas and pilot programs at hospital systems often peter out before they get the chance to reach the masses. Atropos Health, a clinical-consultation startup born from a pilot at Stanford Healthcare, is a rare success story.

It's on the way to being one, at least. It's Sanghavi's job to make that happen.

Sanghavi is the president of Atropos, where he's helping to develop its product and bring it to health systems around the country. He joined the company as part of the founding team in 2021. He previously held strategy and leadership roles at Haven, Centivo, and the Cleveland Clinic.

At its core, Atropos aims to help doctors provide better care based on evidence from past patients' cases. "What we're talking about is changing the way that every physician and physician-patient combination make decisions about the care that's being delivered," Sanghavi said.

Spun out of a Stanford research project begun in 2011, the company answers doctors' questions by aggregating and analyzing data from millions of anonymous patient records. Atropos physicians review the analyses and write short summaries doctors can use to help them make treatment decisions.

And Atropos can do this in two business days, whereas a similar-caliber study could take 10 months in a research setting, Sanghavi said.

A big part of Sanghavi's job is getting health systems to adopt Atropos' service. That means making sure clinicians trust its analyses. While it's early, the company's already being used by thousands of doctors at a handful of institutions, he said.

In late 2022, Atropos clinched a partnership with Mayo Clinic — a deal orchestrated by Sanghavi over 18 months. "That was kind of our first big stamp of approval after Stanford," Sanghavi said.

— Shelby Livingston

Robin Shah, 36, is guiding patients with cancer through treatment and improving their health outcomes.

Thyme Care

Robin Shah has been around cancer care for just about his entire life.

The son of an oncologist, Shah got a crash course in operating a cancer center when he began working at his father's practice while in college. Next up was Flatiron Health, where he built tools to help doctors shift their cancer practices to new ways of getting paid that reward better care. In 2018, he helped launch OneOncology, a network of independent cancer practices.

Between these day jobs, Shah helped friends who needed assistance navigating a cancer diagnosis, he said.

In one case in 2019, the mother of Shah's high-school friend was told by her primary-care doctor she may have cancer but would have to wait at least a month to see an oncologist. Shah connected her with his father, who ordered tests within a day to confirm her diagnosis of stage 4 pancreatic cancer and started her treatment 36 hours later.

"Who knows what a four- to five-week wait just to get a consult, to get the test ordered, to then come back to get a treatment plan would've done?" he said.

The experience prompted him to build Thyme Care to help guide people through cancer treatment. The company, which has raised $22 million, helps patients understand their diagnosis, manage symptoms, and schedule appointments. It also connects patients to resources such as meals and transportation, Shah said.

Thyme Care is working with about 1,600 patients and expects to double that number by the end of the year, Shah said. Beyond improving care for these patients, Shah said he's excited about the talented workers that companies like Flatiron, OneOncology, and Thyme have recruited to help Strengthen cancer care.

"We've attracted amazing talent and I think it has permeated to additional companies being built in the healthcare space," Shah said. "I am so excited about the impact, not just me, but everybody that's working in this space is going to have on healthcare for the next 20 years."

— Shelby Livingston

Stephen Smith, 29, is building an app to provide patients access to better care for OCD.

NOCD

When he was 20 years old, Smith left college and became housebound because of his obsessive-compulsive disorder. After experiencing misdiagnoses and ineffective treatment, he ended up waiting seven months to see a clinician trained in specialized OCD care. The cost was $400 a session.

The treatment he received, called exposure and response prevention therapy, helped Smith recover so he could return to college. 

But the lack of specialists trained to provide ERP therapy means that of the 2.5 million US adults with OCD, few can access the care that worked for Smith.

Smith started NOCD in 2014 to bridge that gap. The Chicago-based startup connects patients with licensed therapists who provide virtual ERP therapy for OCD. Patients can also access peer communities and self-help tools through NOCD's app.

"Our goal is to ensure that everyone in the US, no matter where you live or how much money you make, can access this treatment," Smith said.

NOCD provides its clinicians with ERP therapy training, and the company built its own electronic-medical-records system to better monitor its patients' progress.

Today, NOCD is available in all 50 US states and internationally, and tens of thousands of people get therapy through NOCD, Smith said. About 130 million people in the US can use insurance to pay for NOCD's services, he added. Without insurance, NOCD's sessions cost between $90 and $210, depending on the length of the visit.

The startup has raised about $85 million and says it expects to bring in more than $50 million in revenue this year.

NOCD has begun providing care for other mental-health conditions that can present alongside OCD, like tic disorders and hoarding disorders. Smith said NOCD plans to launch care for body-dysmorphic disorder in the next 12 months.

— Rebecca Torrence

Kathleen Sullivan, 37, is infusing healthcare research with the power of Microsoft's technology.

Microsoft

After leading strategy for a health plan and a pioneering digital-health startup, Sullivan wanted an even bigger arena. 

Sullivan joined Microsoft in 2017 to help the company's global research organization find its footing in healthcare.

As the senior director of strategy and operations within the health and life sciences division of Microsoft Research, Sullivan helps Microsoft decide where to place its bets in artificial intelligence, guided, for one, by the goal of directly helping patients.

That often looks like securing partnerships between Microsoft and other companies, helping researchers break up their big moonshot ideas into bite-sized milestones, and translating the value of Microsoft's health work to other areas of the company and to the industry at large. 

For example, Sullivan was part of the team that made the case for Microsoft to work with Nuance Technologies, known for making transcription tools for doctors. 

That partnership was a precursor to Microsoft's almost $20 billion acquisition of Nuance in 2021, a watershed moment for its healthcare push.

In 2018, Sullivan landed Microsoft's partnership with Adaptive Biotechnologies to map the human immune system. The deal included a $45 million Microsoft investment in the biotech company and other business terms that Sullivan helped negotiate. 

The companies have already discovered a type of blood test that has opened up new research avenues for vaccines, Sullivan said.

Now, as the healthcare industry races to work with Microsoft's latest AI models, Sullivan is even busier than usual, helping Microsoft decide where to go deep with partners, but also helping other companies understand what they can accomplish on their own with these powerful tools.

"To help evangelize a lot of the really incredible stuff we're doing is something I'm very proud of right now," she said.

— Blake Dodge

James Wong, 37, is helping people build their families.

Carrot Fertility

Wong became homeless at 9 years old in New Zealand and bounced between foster homes in his teens, so he desperately wanted a family of his own. When he came out as gay at age 22, he was panic he could never have one.

Now, Wong and his husband are exploring having a child via a gestational surrogate — a path opened up to him by the growth of and innovations in the fertility industry, he said.

Wong joined the fertility-benefits startup Carrot Fertility at the beginning of 2021 and became the company's chief product officer a year later. He's helped build out Carrot's services beyond fertility care, including support for menopause, low testosterone, pregnancy, and postpartum care.

Trained as an engineer, Wong also oversees Carrot's efforts in data science and information security, as well as its global expansion. 

Central to Carrot's growth, he said, is leveraging clinical evidence to build Carrot's new offerings and collecting its own data to Strengthen the company's services. 

Carrot now works with more than 850 employers and health plans globally. More than 2 million people in over 130 countries can access the company's services with coverage through those employers.

Before coming to Carrot, Wong held product-management roles at companies including the genomics startup Genome Medical, the AI-powered life-sciences company Aktana, and the mental-health startup Lyra Health.

He's particularly excited about the future of precision medicine in fertility and in other areas like genomics and behavioral health and in using AI to connect each patient to the right provider or treatment for better outcomes.

"I think the best of precision care in these spaces has yet to come," he said.

— Rebecca Torrence

Alice Zhang, 34, is using AI and human data to come up with treatments for diseases more quickly.

Verge Genomics

Zhang is at the forefront of the biotech industry as the CEO and a cofounder of Verge Genomics, working on drugs for diseases that don't have good treatments, particularly ALS, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's.

She's worked with machine learning and computational biology since her Ph.D. days and thought even then that "it's kind of crazy that people are still using things like mice to try to predict what will work in humans." 

It's not a crazy concept — using human data instead of animal models to identify effective human drugs. With AI advances across science and engineering, there's "potential to totally revolutionize how we discover drugs," she said. 

One way is through cutting the time it takes to develop certain drugs, which can take 10 years or more. Verge targeted and developed a potential ALS drug and is now testing it in people, all in the span of four years. The company has raised more than $134 million in funding.

"You can have as much data as you want and the fanciest algorithms but you're still not going to be able to predict something that actually works in humans," she said.

That's why Verge works with data derived from brains and spinal cords donated by people after they die. By generating the right clinical data, Zhang said they can feed it back into the company's AI to train and Strengthen it.

Beyond drugs, Zhang focuses on people and wants to show "there's a new way that people can work together that doesn't need to be ego-driven, that doesn't need to be fear-driven." She welcomes emotions in science because "emotions have a huge amount of data," and it's important to bring that to the table. 

—Josée Rose

Dr. Alice Zheng, 37, is backing the next generation of women's-health startups.

RH Capital

Zheng has spent her career focused on women's health — but the RH Capital investor took a roundabout route to the venture-capital world.

Zheng worked in reproductive health in Uganda and China before going to medical school at the University of Michigan. She took two years off from medical school to earn an MBA at Harvard, before returning to graduate. Then she dropped out of residency to join McKinsey, where she was the consulting firm's point person on women's health.

In 2021, Zheng realized she wanted to work with innovative women's-health companies more directly, and joined RH Capital as a principal.

She's since backed five women's-health startups, including the maternal-health startup Cayaba Care, the ovarian cancer diagnostics company AOA Dx, and the fertility startup Vitra Labs.

RH Capital is one of the larger funds focused solely on women's health, Zheng said, with about $40 million in assets under management. That's a relatively small figure in the world of venture capital, which highlights that women's health remains an emerging area of investment, Zheng noted. The sector has been growing steadily over the past few years, with $1.16 billion invested in women's-health startups in 2022, according to PitchBook.

The fund has remained active despite the economic downturn, Zheng said. She's interested in investing more in contraceptive innovations, life sciences companies working on maternal-health diagnostics, endometriosis treatments, and menopause care.

In addition to her work at RH Capital, Zheng mentors companies in the startup accelerator programs FemTechLab and Tech4Eva, and she regularly speaks at conferences and publishes articles about women's health.

"It's been amazing to see the conversation move from more targeted circles onto the main stage," she said.

—Rebecca Torrence