Tag Archives: KP Yelpaala

Prioritizing Health Equity Through Sustained Action and Equitable Innovation



Last year StartUp Health launched a Health Equity Moonshot with the goal of creating a guiding equity framework for how we support health startups. That work has been led by our Chief Impact Officer Kaakpema “KP” Yelpaala. One of the first things KP did was to build a cross-disciplinary impact board who could help us guide our policies, and one of the first people he turned to for that task was today’s guest, Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH.

Dr. Maybank is the Chief Health Equity Officer & Senior VP at the American Medical Association. In the world of health equity, that’s a big deal because she guides critical policy decisions for an organization that numbers more than a quarter of a million healthcare professionals.

We wanted to have Dr. Maybank in for a Fireside Chat to get a candid look at the work she’s been doing at the AMA and hear her vision for the future. In the conversation, which was hosted by KP Yelpaala and held in front of a virtual audience of Health Transformers from our portfolio, Dr. Maybank draws a line between intention and outcomes and explains why more institutions need to do the hard internal work of examining inequitable structures.


Looking to break down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.

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Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.

KP Yelpaala Shares the Mission & Vision Behind StartUp Health’s Health Equity Moonshot



As our listeners will know, StartUp Health invests in what we call health moonshots. These are big, audacious health goals that guide us as we push innovative health entrepreneurs — our global army of Health Transformers — to collaborate and focus on long-term impact. We have health moonshots around curing cancer, improving women’s health, ending the opioid crisis, and we’ve recently added another focused on Type 1 diabetes.

This week, we launched a Health Equity Moonshot at the Clinton Global Initiative in order to build a framework that re-orients these inspiring problem solvers to tackle the challenge beneath the challenge, the social and systemic factors that drive health inequities. This transformative initiative will be integrated into all of StartUp Health’s other health moonshots, breaking down silos and encouraging local and global collaboration.

Leading StartUp Health’s Health Equity Moonshot is Kaakpema “KP” Yelpaala, a global health entrepreneur and long-time Health Transformer (he is the CEO & Co-founder of StartUp Health portfolio company InOn Health) who has dedicated his life to reducing health disparities. Yelpaala is an American of Ghanaian heritage and sits at the intersection of the immigrant and Black experiences in the United States.

In this StartUp Health NOW podcast episode, Yelpaala will share his vision for a Health Equity Moonshot and why it is necessary today.

Want to join this Health Equity Moonshot? If you’re an investor who believes in this vision, we want to hear from you. Are you a founder focused on breaking down health barriers for historically marginalized communities or who has been held back based on systemic bias in race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation? We want to hear from you.


Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com

Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots healthmoonshots.com
Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content.
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KP Yelpaala of InOn Health: Health Equity Isn’t Just the Right Thing to Do, It’s Also Good for Business



Today’s guest is Kaakpema “KP” Yelpaala, the CEO and Co-founder of InOn Health, a StartUp Health portfolio company that delivers patient engagement solutions with an emphasis on cross-cultural communication. This conversation you’ll hear is pulled from a Fireside Chat at the StartUp Health Festival @ ViVE and is hosted by Katya Hancock, a partner at StartUp Health. The two discuss KP’s work at InOn Health, which centers around health literacy and patient communication. And they also dig into health equity – an area of particular passion and focus for KP – to try to get beyond the hype and the buzzwords. They tackle the question: what is it going to take to break down barriers and open up access to care for all people? For one thing, he says, we have to realize that health equity isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also good for business.

Learn more and connect with the team at InOn Health.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com

Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots healthmoonshots.com
Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content.
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