50 Influential Leaders in Digital Health and Healthtech

Last updated: June 2026

If you want to understand where healthcare is going, the most direct route is to follow the people who are actually building it. Digital health and healthtech have moved from a niche interest to one of the fastest-growing and most consequential sectors in the world, with US digital health startups alone raising $14.2 billion in 2025, a 35 percent increase on the year before. Behind every one of those funding rounds, platform launches, and clinical breakthroughs is a person with a point of view and the courage to act on it.

As of June 2026, the field is in a genuinely exciting and genuinely uncertain place. Artificial intelligence has gone from a conference talking point to a daily clinical tool for millions of providers. Virtual care has matured from a pandemic workaround into a preferred modality for entire categories of patients. Wearables have crossed from consumer novelty to regulated medical device. And the leaders shaping all of it are posting, writing, speaking, and building in public in ways that give anyone willing to pay attention a front-row seat to the future of medicine.

I put together this list to surface the leaders who are genuinely moving the field right now, from founders who have built companies worth billions to clinician-innovators who are bridging the gap between medicine and technology, to investors and community builders who have created the ecosystem in which everyone else thrives. Rather than recycling the same handful of names that appear on every list, I wanted to put together a directory of the people whose contributions to digital health and healthtech are undeniable, whether they are posting daily on LinkedIn or shaping the field through books, research, and institutions.

Each person on this list was selected on the basis of a documented, fact-checked contribution to digital health and healthtech, drawn from published work, recognised credentials, senior roles, and sustained recognition in the field. You will find clinicians, founders, investors, researchers, advocates, strategists, and community builders from across the globe.

For organisations in the healthcare and health technology sectors looking to strengthen their leadership teams, build stronger cultures, or run executive offsites, book Jonno White at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Digital Health and Healthtech Matter Right Now

The simplest argument for paying attention to digital health and healthtech is this: healthcare is one of the last major industries to be substantially transformed by technology, and the transformation is now happening at speed. Artificial intelligence, connected devices, interoperability platforms, and virtual-first care models are compressing what would previously have been a decade of change into two or three years, and the leaders who understand both the technology and the clinical, cultural, and regulatory context are the ones shaping how it lands.

The funding data reflects the seriousness of the bet. US digital health startups raised $14.2 billion in 2025, the highest total since 2022, driven by AI-native companies capturing enormous rounds and a handful of long-awaited IPOs from companies like Hinge Health and Omada Health that proved digital health can achieve sustainable scale. As of Q1 2026, the sector raised $4 billion across 110 deals, with more than half of that capital going to a small number of breakout players. The story of digital health in 2026 is partly a story of consolidation, but it is more fundamentally a story of proof: proof that virtual care can deliver clinical outcomes, that AI tools can reduce physician burnout, and that technology can make high-quality healthcare more accessible.

The leaders in this directory are the reason those proof points exist. For teams working within healthcare and healthtech organisations, reach out to Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, who works with teams in healthcare and technology sectors globally. Contact jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Each leader on this list was selected for a documented, fact-checked contribution to digital health and healthtech, from published books and recognised credentials to senior roles and sustained recognition in the field. Where a leader is an active LinkedIn voice, that activity was verified. Where a leader's contribution rests on a body of research, a recognised role, or a substantial body of published work, that evidence was sourced independently. Every current role, organisation name, and credential has been verified from primary sources dated within the last 12 months.

Category One: AI and Clinical Decision-Making

AI is the most consequential technology entering healthcare today, and the leaders in this category are the ones determining how it is built, evaluated, deployed, and governed. Their work spans clinical AI tools with FDA clearance, population health platforms, diagnostic algorithms, research programs, and the policy frameworks that will determine who benefits from AI in medicine and who is left behind. These are not technology optimists making abstract claims about the future. They are practitioners, executives, and researchers who are accountable for whether the tools work in real clinical environments.

1. John D. Halamka

John D. Halamka is the President of the Mayo Clinic Platform, where he leads a portfolio of platform businesses focused on transforming healthcare through artificial intelligence, connected devices, and a growing network of partners. Trained in emergency medicine and medical informatics, he has spent more than 25 years developing and implementing health information strategy and policy, including serving as Chief Information Officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and as International Healthcare Innovation Professor at Harvard Medical School.

At Mayo Clinic, Halamka has helped build one of the most ambitious AI programmes in organised medicine, directing work on diagnostic AI, data interoperability, platform partnerships with pharmaceutical and technology companies, and the governance frameworks that allow AI tools to be trusted at scale. His 2026 appearance at the HIMSS26 keynote stage reflects his standing as one of the most operationally credible voices on AI in healthcare, combining decades of health IT leadership with a practical, evidence-oriented perspective on what actually works.

2. Aashima Gupta

Aashima Gupta is the Global Director of Healthcare Strategy and Solutions at Google Cloud, where she has spent more than six years driving AI-powered transformation across health systems, payers, and research organisations. She is a HIMSS Board Adviser and was named one of the Most Influential Women in Healthcare IT by HIMSS, recognition that reflects her role in shaping how the world's largest cloud infrastructure company approaches the healthcare sector.

Her work at Google Cloud has included the development and launch of MedLM, Google's family of healthcare-specific large language models, as well as agentic AI tools designed to reduce administrative burden for clinicians. In 2025, she was appointed to the Board of Directors of Waystar, a healthcare payments company, extending her influence from technology strategy into governance. Her LinkedIn content regularly addresses AI governance, data equity, and the practical realities of deploying AI across complex healthcare organisations.

3. Bertalan Mesko

Bertalan Mesko is the Director of The Medical Futurist Institute and a Private Professor at Semmelweis Medical School in Budapest, where he has spent more than a decade analysing the impact of emerging technologies on global medicine and healthcare. With a PhD in genomics and a reputation as one of the most prolific educators on health technology in the world, he has delivered more than 900 keynotes at institutions including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the WHO, and the world's leading pharmaceutical companies.

His 2026 book Your Map to the Future represents his most comprehensive synthesis of how AI, genomics, wearables, and digital health platforms are reshaping care delivery. Mesko posts actively on LinkedIn, regularly analysing FDA approvals of AI-based medical technologies and offering frameworks for how healthcare leaders should think about adoption, governance, and the balance between technological capability and clinical trust.

4. Kimberly Powell

Kimberly Powell is the Vice President of Healthcare at NVIDIA, where she leads the company's strategy for applying AI computing infrastructure to healthcare and life sciences. Her work encompasses the development of the NVIDIA Clara platform, which provides healthcare organisations with the computational architecture needed to build and deploy AI models across radiology, genomics, drug discovery, and clinical operations at scale.

Powell is a recognised voice on the intersection of high-performance computing and clinical AI, and her perspective carries particular weight because NVIDIA's infrastructure underlies a large proportion of the most significant healthcare AI programmes in the world. She has spoken at major healthcare technology conferences including HIMSS and is regularly cited in industry publications on the future of AI in medicine.

5. Nate Gross

Nate Gross is the Vice President of Health at OpenAI, a role he took after co-founding Doximity with Jeff Tangney and serving as a healthcare entrepreneur for more than a decade. His move to OpenAI in 2025 brought him to the forefront of one of the most consequential questions in digital health: how should the world's most advanced general AI systems be deployed in clinical and health system contexts, and what governance, safety, and workflow considerations must shape that deployment.

He discussed his work in depth on the Heart of Healthcare podcast in early 2026, outlining how OpenAI is approaching healthcare applications with a combination of technical ambition and clinical caution. His background as a physician, technologist, and co-founder of one of the most widely used platforms in US medicine gives him a perspective that is rare at the frontier of AI development.

6. Anthony Chang

Anthony Chang is the Founder of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIMed), a platform and community he created to bring together researchers, clinicians, and industry leaders to advance the responsible application of AI in healthcare. A paediatric cardiologist by training, Chang has spent more than a decade making the case that AI offers medicine its most significant opportunity in a generation, and that the application of machine learning to clinical decision support, diagnostic imaging, and personalised medicine will fundamentally change what is possible in patient care.

He is the author of Intelligence-Based Medicine, a foundational text in the field of clinical AI, and serves as the Global Convener for Transformation at AIMed. His work consistently prioritises the clinical validity and ethical dimensions of AI deployment, making him a voice of both advocacy and accountability in a field that can easily tip toward uncritical enthusiasm.

7. Chris Mansi

Chris Mansi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Viz.ai, a clinical AI company he founded in 2016 after training as a neurosurgeon and earning an MBA at Stanford. In 2018, he guided Viz.ai to become the first company to receive FDA clearance for an AI triage algorithm in stroke care, a landmark regulatory milestone that demonstrated AI could earn the trust of regulators in high-stakes clinical settings.

By 2025, Viz.ai's platform supported more than 1,700 hospitals and 60,000 providers across the US and Europe, spanning neurological and cardiovascular care, and the company had established partnerships with leading pharmaceutical companies to extend its reach further. Mansi's combination of clinical credibility, regulatory experience, and operational scale makes him one of the most consequential figures in the applied clinical AI space.

8. Arif Nathoo

Arif Nathoo is the Co-Founder and CEO of Komodo Health, a healthcare intelligence company he co-founded in 2014 whose Healthcare Map captures the de-identified health journeys of more than 330 million patients. In August 2025, under Nathoo's leadership, the company introduced Marmot, a healthcare-native AI engine designed to accelerate drug development and care delivery by transforming complex analytics into evidence-based insights in minutes.

His background includes over 15 years in healthcare and life sciences leadership, including work in McKinsey's healthcare practice, and he holds a Harvard MD and MPA in health policy. Nathoo's work at Komodo Health sits at the intersection of population-scale data and clinical decision-making, and the intelligence platform he has built is used by pharma, biotech, and health system leaders to understand disease trajectories, treatment patterns, and care gaps at a scale that was previously impossible.

9. Raina Merchant

Raina Merchant is a Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of the Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health, where she leads one of the most rigorous research programmes on AI in digital health and social media in medicine. Her research has shaped how the field thinks about using data from digital platforms, social media, and connected devices to understand population health, mental health signals, and clinical outcomes.

Her work consistently centres questions of equity and safety in digital health deployment, and she has been recognised as a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader. Merchant's contribution to the field is distinctive because she brings the rigour of academic medicine and emergency clinical practice to a space that often moves faster than the evidence base, providing a critical counterweight to uncritical adoption of AI tools that have not been adequately validated.

Category Two: Founders Shaping the Future of Care

This category brings together the founders and chief executives who have built the digital health companies defining what care delivery looks like in the 2020s. These are not early-stage entrepreneurs with untested ideas. They are leaders who have taken products from zero to clinical scale, built evidence bases that sceptical health systems and payers required, and navigated the regulatory, reimbursement, and cultural barriers that make healthcare one of the hardest industries in the world to disrupt well.

10. Daniel Perez

Daniel Perez is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hinge Health, a digital musculoskeletal clinic he launched in 2014 after experiencing the shortcomings of traditional rehabilitation firsthand. Hinge Health combines wearable sensors, motion-tracking AI, and behavioural support to deliver virtual physical therapy, and today works with thousands of employers and every major national health plan in the United States.

In May 2025, Perez guided Hinge Health through its initial public offering, which valued the company at $2.6 billion following years of rapid expansion and a 77 percent gross margin in 2024. The IPO was one of the most significant exits in digital health in years, proving that virtual-first, employer-sponsored care can achieve sustainable unit economics at scale. Perez's leadership has been defined by a willingness to invest in clinical evidence at a time when many digital health companies prioritised growth metrics over outcome data.

11. April Koh

April Koh is the Co-Founder and CEO of Spring Health, a behavioural health company that offers employers and health plans a precision mental health platform using machine learning to match people to the right type and level of care. In 2025, Spring Health published a peer-reviewed study in JAMA demonstrating a 1.9 times return on employer investment in behavioural health, one of the first rigorous, third-party validations of financial value in mental healthcare at scale.

Koh has built Spring Health into one of the most evidence-credible companies in digital mental health, a field that has struggled with the gap between clinical promise and measurable outcomes. Her leadership is distinctive because she has consistently prioritised independent clinical validation over self-reported success metrics, building a proof base that health systems and payers can trust.

12. Maayan Cohen

Maayan Cohen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hello Heart, a digital platform dedicated to preventive heart health that she co-founded in Israel in 2013. Hello Heart pairs an app with a connected blood pressure monitor and has published peer-reviewed evidence showing meaningful improvements in blood pressure, cholesterol, and weight among high-risk users enrolled through employer and health plan partnerships.

By 2025, Hello Heart was trusted by more than 130 Fortune 500 and government employers, national health plans, and labour organisations, and Cohen oversaw the launch of the Hello Heart Smart Pill Box, designed to improve medication adherence through app integration and personalised reminders. Her work is a model for how digital health companies can build rigorous clinical evidence while achieving the scale required to impact population health.

13. Zachariah Reitano

Zachariah Reitano is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ro, a digital health company he launched in 2017 after personal health challenges and conversations with his physician father revealed how many people avoid care because of stigma, cost, or inconvenience. Originally focused on men's health under the name Roman, Ro has since expanded into telehealth, diagnostics, pharmacy, and at-home care across multiple therapeutic areas.

Under Reitano's leadership, Ro has raised more than $1 billion across seven funding rounds, acquired Modern Fertility and Kit to broaden into women's health and diagnostics, and became one of the first digital health providers to integrate GLP-1 obesity medications through a direct partnership with Eli Lilly. Today Ro operates as one of the largest vertically integrated digital health platforms, serving millions of patients in the United States.

14. Jeff Tangney

Jeff Tangney is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Doximity, the leading digital platform for US medical professionals, offering tools for physician networking, clinical workflow, and telehealth. He co-founded Epocrates earlier in his career, grew it into a widely used mobile clinical reference, and went on to co-found Doximity in 2010, which went public in 2021 at a $9.4 billion valuation.

Doximity reported revenue of $570 million in fiscal year 2025, a 20 percent year-over-year increase, and in 2025 Tangney led the acquisition of Pathway Medical for clinical decision support and the launch of Doximity Scribe, an AI assistant for physician documentation. His company has become one of the most widely used technology platforms in US medicine, reaching the vast majority of licensed physicians in the country.

15. Farzad Mostashari

Farzad Mostashari is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aledade, the largest network of independent primary care practices in the United States, which he built on the premise that fixing the incentive structure in primary care would produce better health outcomes at lower cost. In 2024, Aledade's accountable care organisations generated more than $1 billion in Medicare savings, prevented 263,000 unnecessary hospitalisations and emergency department visits, and conducted more than 800,000 annual wellness visits.

Mostashari served as the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology before co-founding Aledade, bringing a deep policy background to a technology-enabled care transformation at practice scale. In June 2026, Modern Healthcare named him among its 50 Most Influential Clinical Executives, citing his leadership in expanding value-based care and strengthening primary care organisations across 46 states.

16. Andrew Adams

Andrew Adams is the Founder and CEO of Headway, a mental health platform he launched in 2019 to solve the problem that had affected him personally: the near-impossibility of finding affordable, in-network therapy. Headway connects patients to clinicians through a network of more than 34,000 providers and more than 40 payer partners, facilitating more than 600,000 therapy sessions per month.

The platform surpassed 1 million patients in 2025 and achieved a $2.3 billion valuation following a $100 million Series D in July 2024. Adams expanded Headway's coverage in 2024 to serve people with Medicare Advantage and Medicaid insurance, extending its reach to populations that have historically faced the steepest access barriers in mental health care.

17. Sebastian Seiguer

Sebastian Seiguer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Scene Health, a company that uses video technology and behavioural coaching to improve medication adherence. Launched from Johns Hopkins in 2014, Scene Health's platform uses directly observed therapy in a digital format, making adherence support scalable for health systems and payers in ways that in-person supervision could never achieve.

In 2025, Seiguer oversaw the expansion of Panorama, Scene Health's core care model, and the company's real-world data demonstrated that people with type 2 diabetes enrolled in the programme had 26 percent fewer emergency department visits. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognised Scene Health's video-based monitoring in 2023 as equivalent to in-person observation, a milestone that validated the company's core clinical claim.

18. Jennifer Schulz

Jennifer Schulz is the CEO of Lyra Health, one of the largest providers of mental health services in the United States, a role she took in January 2025. Lyra offers coaching, therapy, and medication management to more than 20 million members through a customer base of 300-plus employers that includes Starbucks and Meta.

Under her leadership, Lyra launched Lyra Empower in April 2025, an AI-powered platform delivering insights and matching tools for HR leaders, and in July 2025 acquired Bend Health to expand into paediatric and neurodiverse mental health care. Her background includes more than a decade at Experian, where she led the company's $4.5 billion North American business and helped expand Experian Health to cover 60 percent of US hospitals.

19. Robin Glass

Robin Glass is the President of Included Health, where she leads the company's growth and business excellence organisation spanning general management, business operations, communications, marketing, sales, client success, and analytics. With more than 20 years of experience building and scaling growth organisations for innovative healthcare companies, she joined Included Health from Evolent Health, where she served as Chief Customer Officer.

Included Health is a navigation and care platform that helps members find and access the right care, and Glass's leadership of its commercial organisation is central to the company's mission of making high-quality care genuinely accessible, not just technically available. Her perspective on what it takes to build and scale a healthcare company that serves diverse populations is distinctive and consistently influential in digital health conversations.

20. Kerem Ozkay

Kerem Ozkay is the CEO of Carbon Health, a health technology company that combines urgent, primary, and virtual care into a single patient experience. Appointed CEO in August 2024 after serving as chief operating officer, he restructured Carbon's operations and drove margin improvements to support the company's next phase of growth.

In 2025, Ozkay directed Carbon's expansion of PrEP and PEP services across all clinics, the launch of a redesigned mobile app to improve patient navigation, and a workplace health partnership with the City of Corona in California. His leadership has focused on operational discipline in a sector where many companies have prioritised growth over sustainability.

21. Michael Kopko

Michael Kopko is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pearl Health, a physician enablement and risk management company that partners with primary care providers across 44 states to help them succeed in value-based care arrangements. He co-founded Pearl in 2020 after serving as Vice President at Oscar Health, where he managed a $2.5 billion business unit.

In 2025, Kopko led Pearl through HITRUST r2 Certification of its core application and established a preferred partnership with DeepScribe to bring ambient AI documentation to more than 3,500 clinicians in Pearl's network. His work at Pearl reflects one of the most important trends in digital health: the recognition that independent primary care practices need operational enablement and risk management support alongside the clinical tools.

Category Three: Healthcare AI Investment and the Digital Health Ecosystem

The leaders in this category are not building individual companies. They are building the conditions in which great companies can be built. Investors who understand both medicine and technology are rare, and when they surface, they shape the entire trajectory of the sector. Community builders, media entrepreneurs, and strategists who translate what is happening at the frontier for the thousands of practitioners and executives who need to make decisions based on it are equally essential.

22. Halle Tecco

Halle Tecco is the founder of Rock Health, the first venture fund dedicated to digital health, and the author of Massively Better Healthcare: The Innovator's Guide to Tackling Healthcare's Biggest Challenges, published by Columbia University Press in 2026. She teaches at Harvard Medical School and Columbia Business School, where she created the first MBA course on digital health investing.

Her podcast, The Heart of Healthcare, co-hosted with Michael Esquivel and Steve Kraus, won the 2026 Webby Award and publishes weekly conversations with the biggest names in healthcare innovation. Tecco's position is unique in digital health: she has been both an operator, as the builder of Rock Health into the defining accelerator of the sector, and a scholar and communicator who has consistently tried to make digital health investing and innovation legible to a broader audience.

23. Nikhil Krishnan

Nikhil Krishnan is the founder of Out-Of-Pocket, a tech-forward media and education company that has built one of the most engaged communities in US healthcare through a combination of long-form analysis, community courses, and the use of humour to make genuinely complex healthcare system dynamics accessible to operators, investors, and curious outsiders.

His work bridges the gap between policy wonks, technology founders, and clinicians in ways that few platforms manage, and he has built a reputation for the kind of deeply reported, independently minded analysis that healthcare journalists rarely provide. Out-Of-Pocket's growing role as a source of operator intelligence for digital health founders reflects the gap Krishnan identified between the information healthcare executives need and what the trade press typically provides.

24. Gil Bashe

Gil Bashe is the Managing Partner and Chair of Global Health at FINN Partners, one of the world's largest independent communications firms, and the Editor-in-Chief of Medika Life, a health and medical communications platform. He hosts the Health UnaBASHED radio programme, which has become a destination for conversations about the intersection of global health, technology, and communications strategy, and has been recognised as a Top 50 Health Influencer and a Top 10 Innovation Catalyst.

His perspective on how digital health organisations communicate, build trust, and navigate the public conversation distinguishes him from most people on this list, who come from clinical or technology backgrounds. Bashe has spent decades at the intersection of health innovation and public communications, and his view of how technology and healthcare institutions earn and maintain credibility is a crucial complement to the clinical and engineering perspectives that dominate the field.

25. Annie Lamont

Annie Lamont is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Oak HC/FT, one of the most respected growth-equity funds in healthcare technology and fintech. She has been investing in healthcare technology for more than three decades, building Oak HC/FT into a firm whose portfolio spans companies at the frontier of digital health, healthcare IT, and value-based care.

Her annual predictions episode on the Heart of Healthcare podcast has become a reliable barometer of where sophisticated investors see digital health heading, and her perspective on the conditions that separate durable healthcare technology businesses from well-funded experiments is consistently grounded in the operational realities of scaling in a complex, regulated sector. Her long track record and continued active engagement in the sector make her one of the most experienced and credible investor voices in digital health.

26. Thomas Hagemeijer

Thomas Hagemeijer is a healthcare strategy advisor and HLTH Europe Ambassador who has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of digital health, business strategy, and commercial development across European and global markets. He collaborates with pharmaceutical companies, MedTech innovators, investors, startups, hospitals, and policymakers, advising on business models, go-to-market strategies, and the commercial translation of digital health innovations.

His LinkedIn content on healthtech and AI reaches more than 2 million people annually, and he is a sought-after speaker and moderator at major European healthcare technology conferences, including HLTH Europe. Hagemeijer's value is his European perspective, which frequently challenges the US-centric assumptions that dominate the digital health conversation.

Category Four: Clinician-Innovators and Health Technology Educators

The most credible voices in digital health are often those who have worked as clinicians and then moved into technology, building, or education. They understand the clinical reality that most technology executives are missing, and they understand the technological possibility that most clinicians have not yet imagined. These leaders sit at that intersection, and their work is defined by their refusal to accept that good medicine and good technology have to be separate projects.

27. Daniel Kraft

Daniel Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard-trained physician-scientist and the Founder and Chair of NextMed Health, a platform and community he established in 2011 to explore the convergence of accelerating technologies and their potential to reshape healthcare. He is also the Founder of Digital.Health and a partner at Continuum Health Ventures, and in 2025 he was appointed as an Adjunct Professor in the Stanford Department of Medicine.

NextMed Health, which held its 2025 conference in San Diego, brings together more than 600 innovators from across the technology and healthcare ecosystem to explore the frontier of digital medicine. Kraft has delivered six TED and TEDMED talks on the future of health and medicine, and his Now, Near, Next framework for mapping where healthcare technology is heading has become a widely used conceptual tool for healthcare leaders navigating the pace of change.

28. Brennan Spiegel

Brennan Spiegel is the Director of Health Services Research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the author of VRx, a book that documents the clinical evidence for using virtual reality to treat pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, dementia, and other conditions. His work has helped establish therapeutic virtual reality as a credible clinical modality, supported by randomised controlled trials rather than anecdote.

Spiegel's research at Cedars-Sinai has produced some of the most rigorous clinical evidence in digital therapeutics, and his ability to translate complex research findings into compelling narratives for clinical and executive audiences has made him one of the most effective communicators on what evidence-based digital health actually looks like in practice.

29. Hillary Lin

Hillary Lin is a Stanford-trained physician entrepreneur and the CEO of Elevate X Health, where she is building a longevity medicine platform that integrates AI-powered precision care with concierge clinical practice. She is an Aspen Health Fellow and has been recognised as a healthtech leader by Digital Health Insider and other sector publications.

Her work sits at the intersection of longevity medicine, technology, and clinical practice, and her LinkedIn content regularly explores how AI, wearables, and precision diagnostics are changing what preventive healthcare looks like for individuals who want to optimise their healthspan rather than simply extend their lifespan. She is one of the clearest communicators in a space that can easily tip into hype, bringing clinical seriousness to conversations about longevity technology.

30. Jennie Byrne

Jennie Byrne is a physician-scientist, psychiatrist, and co-founder of Belong Health, a company building technology-enabled mental health solutions for complex populations. With a dual MD and PhD, she brings a rare combination of clinical expertise, research depth, and entrepreneurial experience to the intersection of psychiatry and health technology.

She also advises Wovenly, PsychNow, and Overstory Health, and is a recognised voice on clinician wellbeing, brain science, and the future of care delivery. Byrne is one of the most credible clinical voices in the mental health technology space, and her work consistently centres the clinical validity of technology-assisted mental health care at a time when the sector is under scrutiny for overpromising and underdelivering on outcomes.

31. Robert Pearl

Robert Pearl is a Clinical Professor at Stanford University's School of Medicine and Graduate School of Business, and the former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, the physician arm of Kaiser Permanente, which he led for 18 years. His 2024 book ChatGPT, MD, co-authored with ChatGPT, explores how generative AI is poised to transform the patient-provider relationship, written from the perspective of a physician who has spent decades inside one of the most technologically advanced integrated health systems in the world.

Pearl's perspective on AI in healthcare is shaped by his experience at Kaiser, where he oversaw one of the largest integrated health system technology programmes in the United States, and by his willingness to challenge the medical establishment's resistance to technology that could fundamentally change how care is delivered. He is a regular contributor to Forbes and other publications on the future of physician practice in the age of AI.

32. Nasim Afsar

Nasim Afsar is a physician and health system executive whose 2026 book Intelligent Health provides a system-level blueprint for unifying data and applying AI across complex health organisations. Her work reflects years of experience in health system leadership, where the challenge is not understanding the potential of AI in theory but implementing it at scale in organisations with legacy infrastructure, regulatory constraints, and workforce cultures that resist change.

Her perspective on AI adoption is distinctively operational, drawing on the kinds of decisions that health system Chief Information Officers and Chief Digital Officers face in practice, and her book has been recommended as one of the essential texts for health system leaders navigating AI in 2026.

33. Karen DeSalvo

Karen DeSalvo is the Chief Health Officer at Google, a role she took after serving as the US Assistant Secretary for Health and as New Orleans Health Commissioner in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Her career has moved between public health leadership, government, and technology, and she brings an unusually complete view of how technology intersects with public health systems, community health, and the regulatory frameworks that govern both.

At Google, DeSalvo's work includes shaping how the company approaches its responsibilities in health information, AI ethics, and the public health implications of Google's products and platforms. Her voice on the Fixing Healthcare podcast and in major sector publications reflects a perspective that is rare at the frontier of health technology: grounded in community and public health, not just clinical or commercial outcomes.

34. Geeta Nayyar

Geeta Nayyar is a rheumatologist, physician-technologist, and author whose career has included serving as Chief Medical Officer for both Salesforce and AT&T, two of the most prominent technology companies to build significant healthcare divisions. She now operates as an independent physician-technologist, investor, and speaker, serving on the board of the American Telemedicine Association and as an advisor to health technology organisations.

Her book Dead Wrong: Diagnosing and Treating Healthcare's Misinformation Illness was recognised as a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller, and has made her one of the most prominent voices on the intersection of health technology, misinformation, and the role of trust in clinical AI adoption. She has appeared on CNBC, CNN, and CBS, extending her reach far beyond the specialist digital health audience.

35. Benjamin Schwartz

Benjamin Schwartz is a board-certified orthopedic surgeon, digital health advisor, and the Editor-in-Chief of The Surgeon's Record, a weekly newsletter that has built a dedicated following among surgeons, healthcare technology investors, and health system leaders interested in value-based specialty care. A LinkedIn Top Voice in digital health, he is also an advisor and investor to early-stage digital health companies.

His content is distinctive because it combines the perspective of a practising clinician with genuine technology fluency, and he has built one of the most engaged audiences in digital health among surgical and specialty care audiences who are not typically well represented in broader digital health conversations. His work as a mentor and community builder in digital health reflects the broader category of clinician-innovators who are shaping the field from inside the operating room.

Category Five: Patient Empowerment and Health Equity in Digital Health

The most important test of any digital health innovation is whether it improves outcomes for the people who need it most, not just the people who can most easily access and afford it. The leaders in this category have built their careers around that test. They include a patient advocate who became one of the most influential voices in the history of the patient empowerment movement, an entrepreneur building healthcare infrastructure in markets that most global platforms ignore, and leaders whose work centres equity, access, and the human dimensions of digital health.

36. Dave deBronkart

Dave deBronkart, widely known as e-Patient Dave, is a cancer survivor who became one of the most influential advocates in the history of participatory medicine after beating stage IV kidney cancer in 2007 and discovering that the healthcare system made it nearly impossible for patients to access their own medical records. His TEDx Talk Let Patients Help became one of the most-watched TED talks on health, and he has since attended more than 650 conferences and policy meetings in 26 countries advocating for patient data rights, shared decision-making, and patient-centred technology.

He is a co-founder and Chair Emeritus of the Society for Participatory Medicine and was the Mayo Clinic's Visiting Professor in Internal Medicine in 2015. In 2025 and 2026, he has been actively exploring how empowered patients are using AI in the work of navigating their own healthcare, a natural extension of the patient empowerment work he has championed for nearly two decades.

37. Aigerim Shorman

Aigerim Shorman is the CEO of AlemHealth, a healthcare technology company expanding access to specialist care across underserved markets in Africa and Central Asia. AlemHealth builds the digital infrastructure that allows radiologists, pathologists, and other specialists in high-resource settings to deliver expert reads and consultations to patients in markets where specialist care is either unavailable or unaffordable.

Her LinkedIn content is among the most genuinely distinctive in digital health, covering the operational realities of building healthcare technology in markets where basic infrastructure cannot be assumed, and challenging the global health technology conversation to look beyond US and European contexts when defining what innovation means. She brings an operational and geographic perspective that is almost entirely absent from other digital health leadership directories.

38. Alessandra Henderson

Alessandra Henderson is a healthcare entrepreneur, investor, and digital health strategist who co-founded and led Elektra Health, building one of the first virtual care platforms focused on menopause and women's midlife health. Under her leadership, Elektra secured more than $7 million in funding and launched the first US payer partnership for menopause care, demonstrating that a historically underserved clinical category could be built into a viable, evidence-based digital health business.

Today she advises digital health companies on strategy, commercialisation, and the particular challenges of building in women's health. Her perspective on what it takes to build in femtech with clinical rigour is increasingly influential as the women's health technology market matures.

39. Anca del Rio

Anca del Rio is a digital public health strategist with expertise in healthcare governance, health systems innovation, and the implementation of digital health programmes at national and international scale. Her work spans health policy for equity, diversity, and inclusion, and she has built a reputation for translating complex digital health strategy into actionable frameworks for government and health system leaders.

Her multilingual background and experience across European, North American, and international health systems gives her a genuinely global perspective on how digital health governance works differently across regulatory and cultural contexts. Her content and advisory work consistently addresses the structural barriers that prevent digital health innovations from reaching the populations that stand to benefit most from them.

40. Vivienne Ming

Vivienne Ming is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Socos Labs, a human potential company that uses AI and cognitive science to address what she calls the tax on being human: the systematic ways in which people's characteristics, identities, and circumstances reduce their ability to realise their potential. Her work in digital health centres on AI ethics, cognitive augmentation, and the design of technology systems that expand human capability rather than replacing human judgment.

Her perspective on AI in healthcare is one of the most rigorous and philosophically sophisticated available, drawing on neuroscience, economics, and AI research to examine what it actually means for technology to serve human wellbeing. She is a regular speaker at major technology and healthcare conferences and a distinctive voice in conversations about the ethics and human implications of AI at scale.

Category Six: Health Technology Communication, Community, and Global Voices

The global reach of digital health is one of the most exciting things about the field, and some of the most valuable leaders in it are the ones who have made the conversation accessible, international, and inclusive. This category includes the founder who has built the most influential wearable technology community in the world, the health IT strategist who centres equity in every conversation about technology adoption, and strategists who are connecting innovation ecosystems across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond.

41. Joao Bocas

Joao Bocas is the Founder and CEO of Digital Salutem, a UK-based digital health platform, and is recognised as one of the world's leading voices on wearable technology and its application in healthcare. Over more than 25 years in the healthcare and technology sectors, he has built a global network of healthcare executives, entrepreneurs, and investors, and his content reaches audiences across the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

He is the creator of the Digital Health and Wearables video series, a long-running programme that features conversations with some of the most significant figures in digital health, and he posts actively on LinkedIn on the intersection of wearables, healthcare innovation, and digital transformation. His consistent focus on wearable technology as a clinical tool, rather than simply a consumer product, has helped drive the conversation in that sub-field toward the kind of regulatory and clinical rigour that makes adoption at scale possible.

42. Daisy Robinton

Daisy Robinton is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ovos Health, a company focused on women's health and longevity. With a PhD in molecular biology from Harvard, she has built a reputation as a scientist who can translate complex biology into accessible insights, and her work at Ovos Health addresses the intersection of longevity science, women's biology, and digital health in ways that the field has historically neglected.

She has been a participant in NextMed Health and other major digital health innovation gatherings, and her growing public presence in the longevity and women's health technology space reflects both the commercial and scientific opportunity in building evidence-based digital health programmes specifically designed around female physiology.

43. Brian Ahier

Brian Ahier is the Lead Health IT Engineer at the MITRE Corporation, a federally funded research and development organisation, where he focuses on health data exchange, interoperability standards, and the technical infrastructure that makes population health management possible. He has served on the boards of DirectTrust and the Sequoia Project, two of the most important standards and trust organisations in US health information exchange.

His work is foundational in the most technical sense: the interoperability standards he has helped develop determine whether the AI tools, analytics platforms, and virtual care programmes built by others can actually communicate with one another and with existing health system infrastructure. He is an active voice on LinkedIn on digital health from a health IT engineering perspective that is often missing from more executive-focused digital health conversations.

44. Christopher Kunney

Christopher Kunney is a health IT strategist and the host of the Straight Outta Health IT podcast, where he brings together healthcare leaders to discuss technology trends, implementation challenges, and the particular ways in which digital transformation plays out differently across different healthcare contexts. He is an adviser for Chilmark Research and ScaleHealth, focusing on digital transformation and health equity, and serves as Advocacy Chair for HIMSS Georgia, promoting diversity and inclusion in healthcare careers.

His perspective is distinguished by its consistent focus on health equity in technology adoption, asking not just whether digital health tools work but whether they work for everyone and whether the people who most need improved access to care are actually being reached. His podcast and advisory work have built a following among health IT professionals who want to think more seriously about the human dimensions of technology deployment.

45. Aline Noizet

Aline Noizet is a digital health connector and advocate who runs an independent consulting practice advising startups and global corporations on digital health strategy, innovation scouting, and business development across European and US markets. She has been involved in digital health acceleration for more than eight years, including roles as Programme Manager for the Bayer G4A Accelerator programmes and Business Development Director Europe for Health 2.0.

Her perspective on digital health is shaped by her work at the intersection of innovation ecosystems in Europe and the United States, and she brings a distinctively European lens to questions about how digital health innovation travels across regulatory environments, reimbursement systems, and healthcare cultures that differ significantly from the US context that dominates most English-language coverage of the field.

46. Parisa Vatanka

Parisa Vatanka is the Co-Founder of Digital.Health, the platform she co-founded with Daniel Kraft that curates digital health solutions, resources, and community programmes for clinicians, health system leaders, and innovators navigating the intersection of technology and medicine. She also serves as a pharmacist and digital health educator, bringing a clinical pharmacy perspective to conversations about how digital health tools are integrated into care delivery.

Her work at Digital.Health, which includes a curated podcast directory, a books library, and community programmes focused on evidence-based digital health, reflects a commitment to making the most credible digital health resources accessible to practitioners who are trying to navigate a rapidly changing landscape.

Category Seven: Health Technology Law, Governance, and Emerging Technology Leadership

As digital health matures, the questions that determine whether it delivers on its promise are increasingly legal, regulatory, and governance questions. Who owns patient data? How should AI liability be allocated? What does it mean to govern AI in a clinical setting responsibly? The leaders in this category are the ones shaping the answers, from health AI governance to the leaders building tomorrow's healthcare technology platforms and investing in the companies that will define the next decade of digital health.

47. Amy Leopard

Amy Leopard is a Partner at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings and one of the most authoritative voices on health AI governance and digital health law in the United States. She is a HIMSS Fellow, certified in AI Governance and Privacy by the IAPP, and has spent years advising healthcare organisations and technology companies on AI governance frameworks, data strategy, regulatory compliance, and the legal and contractual dimensions of health AI deployment.

Her appearance at HIMSS25 as a featured speaker reflected her standing as a go-to resource for health system leaders who need to understand both the regulatory and the practical dimensions of responsible AI deployment. At a moment when the policy environment around healthcare AI is evolving rapidly, her ability to translate complex regulatory and governance concepts into practical guidance for healthcare executives makes her an essential voice in the field.

48. Rasu Shrestha

Rasu Shrestha is the Enterprise Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Commercialisation Officer at Advocate Health, one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the United States. With nearly 30 years of experience as a physician leader, he has spent his career at the intersection of clinical practice, health information technology, and enterprise strategy, including a decade at UPMC where he built what was then the largest health system innovation and commercialisation engine in the industry.

At Advocate Health, Shrestha has been responsible for enterprise strategy, innovation, corporate communications, and data and analytics, driving the organisation's multi-year transformation programme. He served on the Board of Directors of HIMSS and on the AcademyHealth Board, extending his influence beyond his own organisation into the governance of the field's most important professional and research communities.

49. Shiv Gaglani

Shiv Gaglani is the Co-Founder and CEO of Osmosis from Elsevier, one of the world's leading health education platforms, serving more than 3 million medical and health professions students with video-based learning, clinical decision support, and AI-powered education tools. He co-founded Osmosis as a medical student at Johns Hopkins and built it into a platform that is now used by the majority of US medical and health professions schools, before it was acquired by Elsevier in 2021.

His work sits at the intersection of health education and digital health, shaping how the next generation of clinicians learns about and engages with health technology before they enter clinical practice. Remarkably, he continues to complete his own medical training concurrently at Johns Hopkins, a distinctive commitment that underscores his conviction that clinical credibility and technological innovation are not competing priorities.

50. Sally Frank

Sally Frank is the author of The Startup Protocol, published in 2024, a practical stage-by-stage guide for digital health founders navigating the regulatory, commercial, and operational challenges that separate successful health technology ventures from well-funded failures. Her work draws on years of experience in digital health strategy and commercialisation, and the book has been recognised as one of the most practically useful resources for clinicians and entrepreneurs entering the digital health startup space.

Her perspective on what it actually takes to build a viable digital health business, including the regulatory affairs, intellectual property, financing, and cybersecurity considerations that are unique to the sector, fills a gap that most digital health content leaves open. She is an active contributor to conversations about how to improve the conditions for responsible innovation in digital health.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

The digital health field has no shortage of remarkable leaders, and assembling a list of 50 means leaving out people whose contributions are equally significant. A few names that almost made this list deserve recognition here, not as runners-up, but as leaders whose work is equally worth following.

Eric Topol at Scripps Research Translational Institute has spent more than a decade making the most rigorous case for AI in medicine, and his books Deep Medicine and The Creative Destruction of Medicine have shaped how the entire field thinks about technology and the clinician-patient relationship. His 2025 book Super Agers continues that tradition with a focus on longevity and AI-powered preventive medicine.

Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, is building next-generation cancer treatments through AI, biotech, and bold science, and her voice on health innovation, strategy, and policy across sectors is increasingly influential at the intersection of oncology and digital health.

The ViVE conference ecosystem, the patient-powered digital health movement represented by organisations like the Society for Participatory Medicine, and the networks formed through HIMSS and HLTH produce dozens of leaders who are shaping the field through their work, their communities, and their willingness to challenge how the sector thinks about access, equity, and accountability.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging with Digital Health Leaders

The digital health field moves fast, and following the right voices is a significant advantage. But there are common mistakes that reduce the value of that investment.

The first is conflating funding size with clinical validity. Many of the most heavily funded digital health companies have struggled to demonstrate the patient outcomes their fundraising implied, while some of the most clinically rigorous work in the sector has been done by researchers and founders who prioritised evidence over valuation. When you follow a digital health leader, ask what the evidence base is for their claims, not just how much capital they have raised.

The second is assuming that US-centric coverage represents the full picture of digital health innovation. The UK, Israel, Germany, Australia, and a growing number of markets in Africa and Asia are producing genuinely distinctive approaches to digital health, shaped by different healthcare system structures, regulatory environments, and technological infrastructure. The leaders who build in those contexts are developing solutions and frameworks that often have much to teach the US market, and vice versa.

The third is following leaders who primarily talk about what is possible rather than what has been proven. Digital health has a long history of compelling visions that have not translated into clinical or operational reality on the timelines that were promised. The leaders worth following most closely are those who can tell you not just what the technology can do in theory, but what it has actually delivered at scale, and what the limiting factors are.

The fourth is treating digital health leadership as a zero-sum field where every advance in AI-assisted care replaces human clinical judgment. The most thoughtful leaders in this field consistently make the case that the goal of digital health technology is to give clinicians more capacity to do what only humans can do: build trust, exercise nuanced judgment, and provide care that accounts for the full complexity of a patient's life and circumstances.

For leadership teams in the digital health and healthcare technology sectors who want to build stronger cultures, sharper communication, and more aligned executive teams, Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, delivers executive offsites, Working Genius workshops, and leadership keynotes for healthcare and technology organisations globally. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore whether Jonno's work is a fit for your team. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect.

Implementation Guide: How to Learn From Digital Health Leaders

Following digital health leaders is valuable. Converting that exposure into professional capability is the harder and more important step.

The most effective approach is to identify which sub-field of digital health is most relevant to your work, and to build a focused reading and listening practice around the three or four leaders who are most active and most credible in that space. If you work in hospital operations, Halamka, Aashima Gupta, and the HIMSS ecosystem are natural anchors. If you are building a digital health startup, Halle Tecco's work at Rock Health and her book Massively Better Healthcare provide the most comprehensive framework for how to think about digital health innovation. If you care about global health equity in digital health, Aigerim Shorman and Anca del Rio offer perspectives that are largely absent from US-centric coverage.

The second step is to distinguish between leaders who are generating new insight and those who are primarily amplifying existing consensus. The most valuable voices in any field are those who challenge received wisdom, flag uncomfortable trade-offs, and are willing to say what they do not know. Nikhil Krishnan's Out-Of-Pocket community has built its reputation on exactly this kind of honest, independent analysis.

The third step is to engage, not just consume. The leaders in this directory are accessible through LinkedIn, newsletters, podcasts, and live events in ways that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago. The most direct path to understanding their thinking is to engage with their content, ask questions, and participate in the communities they have built. Digital health is a field where meaningful connections between clinicians, technologists, policymakers, and investors regularly produce insights and opportunities that no individual perspective could generate alone.

Finally, bring what you learn into your own organisation. The goal of following digital health leaders is not to be well-informed as an individual. It is to ensure that your organisation's decisions about technology adoption, care delivery models, and strategic positioning are informed by the best available thinking about where the field is going and what separates the innovations that deliver on their promise from those that do not.

For executive teams in digital health and healthcare technology organisations who want to strengthen their leadership culture, improve team alignment, and build the communication and accountability structures that sustain high performance, reach out to Jonno White at jonno@consultclarity.org. Jonno works with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world, delivering Working Genius workshops, executive offsites, and leadership keynotes for organisations ready to invest in their people. Whether virtual or face to face, many organisations find that international travel for facilitation and keynote work is far more affordable than they anticipated.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is digital health and what makes it different from traditional healthcare technology?

Digital health refers to the use of digital technologies to improve and extend care, covering everything from electronic health records and telehealth platforms to AI-powered diagnostics, wearable devices, remote patient monitoring, and digital therapeutics. What distinguishes it from earlier healthcare IT is the shift from administrative and back-office digitisation to technologies that directly change how clinical care is delivered, how patients engage with their own health, and how health systems make decisions about treatment and resource allocation.

How do I know which digital health leaders are worth following on LinkedIn?

The leaders worth following most consistently are those who share specific, evidence-based insights rather than generic optimism, who acknowledge the complexity and trade-offs in digital health deployment, and who have direct operational or clinical experience in the areas they discuss. A good test is whether their content regularly changes how you think about a topic, not just affirms what you already believe. The leaders in this directory have been selected precisely because they meet that test.

What are the most important sub-fields within digital health and healthtech in 2025 and 2026?

The sub-fields generating the most attention and capital in 2025 and 2026 include AI-powered clinical decision support, ambient documentation and clinical workflow AI, virtual-first chronic disease management, digital mental health, remote patient monitoring and connected devices, health data interoperability platforms, and value-based care enablement. Women's health and longevity medicine have also emerged as rapidly growing investment categories, driven by a recognition of historically under-served populations and under-researched clinical questions.

How do digital health leaders in the US compare to those in other countries?

US digital health leadership tends to be shaped by the particular characteristics of the US healthcare market: fee-for-service reimbursement, employer-sponsored insurance, a fragmented provider landscape, and a regulatory environment centred on the FDA and CMS. Leaders from the UK, Australia, and European markets bring different perspectives because they work within single-payer or multi-payer systems that create different incentive structures, different interoperability requirements, and different relationships between government health agencies and technology providers. The most useful digital health thinking integrates both perspectives.

Final Thoughts

Digital health and healthtech are not niche interests for technology enthusiasts. They are the front lines of one of the most significant changes in how human beings receive care, manage their health, and understand their bodies. The leaders in this directory represent a cross-section of the people who are building, funding, researching, and advocating for a future in which technology makes healthcare better for everyone, not just for those with the most resources and the most convenient access to the best systems.

Following them is a start. Engaging with their work seriously, bringing it into your organisation's decision-making, and using it to build the leadership cultures that can navigate rapid change is the harder and more important project. The organisations that will do digital health well in the next decade will not be the ones with the most capital or the most advanced technology. They will be the ones with the most aligned, most capable, and most adaptive leadership teams.

To explore how Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and trusted facilitator for healthcare and technology organisations globally, can support your leadership team through Working Genius workshops, executive offsites, or keynote speaking, email jonno@consultclarity.org. Whether virtual or in person, Jonno works with organisations around the world.

For a broader look at the global healthcare leadership landscape, see thought leaders in healthcare and thought leaders in hospital leadership on consultclarity.org.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected. To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

Digital health funding figures: Rock Health (rockhealth.com), 2025 Year-End Digital Health Funding Overview (February 2026) and Q1 2026 Funding Overview. Clinical outcome data: Aledade press releases (aledade.com, June 2026), Healthcare Technology Report Top 25 Digital Health Executives of 2025 (September 2025), Spring Health JAMA study (2025). Company valuations and IPO data: Healthcare Technology Report (September 2025). Book listings: Digital.Health books directory (May 2026). Keynote data: NextMed Health (danielkraftmd.net). Patient advocacy data: epatientdave.com.

Next Read

The digital health leaders in this list operate inside healthcare organisations that face the full range of leadership challenges. For the leaders of those health systems, see 35 Essential Thought Leaders in Hospital Leadership Globally (2026) on consultclarity.org.