Our Story and Our Leadership

Shika Pappoe, MD, MPH, MBA is a 4D thinker. As a physician executive, she is focused on synthesizing long-term vision into short-term strategy. With a demonstrated track record as a systems thinker, she excels at distilling complex large-scale themes to practical, on-the-ground solutions.

She is a visionary physician executive leader, nephrologist, and expert in value-based care, with a deep commitment to transforming healthcare delivery through innovation and patient-centered design. With a unique blend of clinical and digital health expertise, business acumen, and public health perspective, she is passionate about advancing the quintuple aim: improving population health, enhancing the patient experience, reducing healthcare costs, supporting clinician well-being, and promoting health equity.

As the founding Chief Medical Officer of Strive Health. Dr. Pappoe successfully built and scaled a pioneering organization that redefined kidney care delivery. Her ability to blend strategic vision with operational execution has positioned her as a recognized leader in the healthcare industry with additional roles at CareMore, HIll Physicians and Carna Health.

Dr. Pappoe is deeply passionate about improving the patient experience and rebuilding trust in the healthcare system. She believes in the power of meaningful engagement to create care models that resonate with patients and communities, fostering equity and sustainability in care delivery. Her work is guided by the core tenets of social impact, leveraging her expertise to drive initiatives and investments that advance systemic change and improve the health of underserved populations.

Believing in the importance of lifting others to serve as leaders, she also has roles advising graduate students and healthcare startups and serves as an angel investor.

Manisha Sharma, MD, FAAFP is a constellation of identities. She is a board certified family medicine physician, trained in social medicine, who works at the intersection of social justice and equity, patient care, health policy, care delivery system design and clinical innovation.

Dr. Sharma leads and provides strategic advisory support on multiple local, state, and national initiatives geared to end health inequities. She appears often on several major television and radio networks, addressing topics such as health and racial equity, health in all policy, social justice, wellness, health, and medicine.

She has organized and led numerous grassroots physician campaigns through the organization Doctors for America where she served as the National Director of Leadership Cultivation.

She is a graduate of the California Health Care Foundation Leadership and Innovation Fellowship. She is a founding partner of Civic Health Alliance (a non-partisan coalition of health professionals and students, committed to helping peers and patients register to vote and vote safely), and Centivox Group, a social impact firm that transforms public health communications by elevating health care providers, scientists, health and racial equity experts as trusted messengers.

She loves spending time with her son, family, and friends.

Katie Abbott, MHA, FACHE is a third generation heart-centered entrepreneur on a mission to inspire more joy, health and wellbeing in the world. A Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives (FACHE), Katie is a visionary upstreamist thinker dedicated to identifying and healing the root causes of broken processes and systems in healthcare

With expertise in complex matrixed healthcare operations, strategic business planning, and multi-million dollar program development and implementation, Katie creates holistic solutions that drive meaningful and sustainable change. Her career is a testament to her relentless drive to simplify complexity, empower teams, and transform healthcare systems to better serve all people—especially the most vulnerable.

Katie was a key leader in designing and operating Stanford Health Care’s South Bay Cancer Center, which integrated academic medicine with community oncology. As the founding co-chair of the center’s Patient and Family Advisory Council, she helped create a center recognized globally as the “cancer center designed by patients, for patients”. Her career spans the healthcare continuum with progressive leadership roles at Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan and Indiana University Health.

Through her passion and expertise as a certified yoga teacher and Integrative Nutrition Health Coach, Katie teaches women leaders to build an empowered relationship with their stress so they can achieve (and be present for) what matters most - without sacrificing their health, wellbeing and authenticity.

Rooted in her commitment to equity, innovation, and holistic care, Katie continues to lead with a heart-centered approach, always focused on creating systems that work with and for the people they serve. She holds a deep belief that healthcare can one day become a true sanctuary of healing.

Katie serves on the Alumni Board for Indiana University’s Fairbanks School of Public Health, is a past President of Women Health Care Executives (WHCE) and a past board member of the California Association of Healthcare Executives (CAHL).

Katie volunteers with Kara Grief as a group facilitator for children and young adults who have experienced the death of someone special, providing them the opportunity to grieve in a supportive environment.