30 Leaders Under 40 Changing Healthcare in 2023

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

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