Yale Career Panels Navigating Careers in Digital Health: Insights from Founder-CEOs (July 7, 2026)
This event is the 73nd in a series of events covering different professions and career issues. There have been 58 Yale Career Panels, 10 Yale Career Fireside Chats, 3 Career Advice and Networking events and 1 Yale Career Conversations event. Organized 15 years ago by a group of Yale alumni volunteers, these panels strive to provide candid, unvarnished views of featured professions and opportunities for career advice and networking.
The healthcare sector represents a massive portion of our GDP, yet it remains one of the most operationally complex and heavily bureaucratically bottlenecked industries in the country. For young professionals, this friction represents a massive opportunity: a new generation of digital health startups is actively looking for talent to build the software, data frameworks, and operations required to transform care. In this highly practical Yale Career Panel webcast, we sit down with three exceptional Yale alumni who are building and scaling pioneering digital health companies from the ground up: Nell Meosky Luo (Folia Health), Nick Bartz (Kairon Health), and Derek Lo (Medallion).
Rather than focusing purely on industry trends, this session will look behind the curtain at what it takes to build a successful career or launch a startup at the intersection of medicine and technology. Our panelists will share the foundational lessons they learned transitioning from campus to the workforce, how the rapid integration of AI is fundamentally shifting the skills required for early-career hires, and the unfiltered highs and lows of the health-tech entrepreneurial path. Whether you are aiming to be an early employee at a fast-growing startup, a product manager, or a future founder, this panel will give you a practical blueprint for driving impact in digital health.
Event Details
Time: Tuesday, July 7, 2026 from 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm EST (Virtual Panel)
Registration: http://yalecareerpanels-7-7-26.eventbrite.com
Discussion Topics
● Making the Leap: How did you translate your specific academic background at Yale into an industry that requires both technical fluency and deep healthcare empathy?
● The AI Skill Shift: How is AI actually shifting the specific day-to-day roles and skillsets you look for in early-career hires today?
● The Best and the Worst: If someone is considering entrepreneurship in this space, what is honestly the best part, and conversely, the absolute worst part, of that path?
● The Lightning Round: Quick-fire questions covering overrated trends, critical resources, and the traits shared by your most successful hires.
Panelists
● Derek Lo: CEO and Founder of Medallion
● Nick Bartz: CEO and Co‑Founder of Kairon Health
● Nell Meosky Luo: Founder & CEO of Folia Health
Moderator and Organizer
● Doug Streat: SVP, Strategic Initiatives & Quality at Aledade
Biographies
Derek Lo | CEO and Founder of Medallion
Derek Lo is the CEO and Founder of Medallion, the AI operations partner powering healthcare credentialing—helping organizations credential, enroll, and manage provider networks so providers can focus on caring for patients. Since 2020, he has built the company to 250+ customers, 300+ employees, and raised $85M from Sequoia, Spark Capital, Optum Ventures, and others. A second‑time founder, Derek’s first company, Py, was acquired by Hired.com in 2019. He holds a BS in Computer Science and Statistics from Yale, has been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 twice, and led Medallion to Forbes’ “Next Billion Dollar Startup” list in 2023.
Nick Bartz | CEO and Co‑Founder of Kairon Health
Nick Bartz is the CEO and Co‑Founder of Kairon Health, where he is building the execution layer healthcare has never had—unifying intelligence, action, and outcomes in one system. A value‑based care (VBC) and healthcare data expert, he previously led ACOs to shared savings at Aledade as both an operator and strategic analytic partner. Earlier, as a consultant at the Advisory Board Company, he advised hospitals and health systems on strategic acquisitions, partnerships, and network optimization to succeed under value‑based arrangements. He holds a bachelor's degree from Yale.
Nell Meosky Luo | Founder & CEO of Folia Health
Nell Meosky Luo is the Founder & CEO of Folia Health, a patient‑driven health company where she has led a team to develop a novel method for enabling the collection and use of home‑reported outcomes for precision care and research. She received the Massachusetts Women in Digital Health award in 2018 and was named to the Massachusetts Governor’s Digital Health Council Working Group and Independent Steering Committee in 2019. Nell also served on the Mass General Brigham COVID‑19 Task Force. Prior to Folia, she was a management consultant at Oliver Wyman, focusing on strategic transformation across healthcare, consumer goods, and intellectual property sectors. Ms. Meosky Luo earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale in History of Science & Medicine and Public Health, graduating cum laude and with Distinction in the major.
Doug Streat | SVP, Strategic Initiatives & Quality at Aledade
In Doug’s current role as SVP of Quality and Strategic Initiatives at Aledade, he is responsible for a broad portfolio of Aledade’s quality measure performance as well as key additional strategic initiatives across the organization. He leads a team of experts across the business to drive strategy and investments in technology and services that further those goals. In prior roles at Aledade, Doug served as Chief Operating Officer for Aledade Care Solutions (Aledade’s patient-facing service line), Chief of Staff to the CEO, as well as roles in product and technology. Before Aledade, Doug worked in clinical trial operations, as both an administrator and trial research coordinator. Doug earned a BS in psychology from Yale College and an MPH concentrated in healthcare management from the Yale School of Public Health.
Previous Yale Career Fireside Chats and Yale Career Panels
The 57 previous Yale Career Panels have covered architecture, artificial intelligence (two times), biomedical, biotech, boutique consulting, consulting (five times), education, entrepreneurism (two times), film and drama, finance and investing, fintech, global health, healthcare and data services, internet and data services, investment banking (four times), investing (twice), K-12 education, government service, journalism and publishing, legal (six times), medical (five times), medical devices, music, non-profit organizations (twice), politics - the election process, post-Ph.D. non-academic careers, product management, R&D, real estate, sales, social media and influencers, start-ups, a comparison of venture capital and private equity and a comparison of investing/investment banking/consulting.
In 2016, we started a series called, “Yale Career Fireside Chats.” This series spotlights issues and opportunities which may be encountered during your professional career. So far, our 11 fireside chats have covered “The Impact of AI on Jobs and Careers”, “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” “Managing Major Career Changes,” “Serving on Boards,” “The Art of Networking,” “Cybersecurity”, “ Managing Your Career in a Covid-19 Downturn,” Lessons from Kevin Ryan, a Veteran Entrepreneur,” “How has the Pandemic Impacted our Careers and Work-Life?,” and “How to Ace Your Interviews”, and “The Art of Effective Self- Assessment”.
In 2022, we started a series called, “Yale Career Conversations” that gathered attendees around virtual tables with a person at each table who is in the profession. The first one was on Investment Banking and Investing.
In 2024, we started a special event, “Advisors and Networking” where we brought Yale alumni in different professions together with Yale students and alumni in a virtual ballroom where they could meet with each other, share advice, and find mentors.
The recorded Yale Career Panels and Fireside Chats can be viewed at www.yalecareerpanels.com. The Yale Career Conversations and Advisors and Networking sessions, due to their structures, are not recorded.
The Series Sponsors
This series is jointly supported by various organizations at Yale University and Yale Alumni organizations, including the Yale Office of Career Strategy, the Yale Alumni Association (YAA), the Yale School of Management, Students and Alumni of Yale (STAY), the Junior Class Council (JCC), the Yale.nyc (the Yale alumni association in New York City), and the Association of Asian American Yale Alumni (AAAYA).
