Empowering. Transforming.
Saving Lives.

Chris Riopelle

Chris has spent almost his entire career working to better the lives of under-served patient populations in a way that drives alignment and value for patients, providers, and payors. Chris entered the healthcare world in 1995 and joined GeriMed, a geriatric value-based care company that sparked his interest in both underserved patient populations and risk-bearing healthcare businesses. He spent 10 years in the kidney care industry in a variety of roles at Gambro and DaVita, culminating in leading a $1 billion division of the dialysis company. Chris also served as COO of LaVie Care Centers a $1 billion private-equity backed skilled nursing company, where he was part of a team that led the cultural, financial, and operational turnaround and sale of the company. In 2013, he was recruited to serve as CEO of NorthStar Anesthesia, a private-equity backed anesthesia management company that grew from $130 million to nearly $500 million in revenue.

After NorthStar was sold in 2018, Chris began to focus on the next chapter. He was intent on taking a large swing at a large problem, with a focus on chronic diseases and poor transitions in healthcare. He quickly narrowed in on a set of patients he loves who deserve a better patient journey – kidney patients. Co-founding Strive has allowed Chris to blend his professional experiences and his passion for serving patients in need. He is deeply committed to fundamentally changing how kidney care works in America and helping to build an amazing company while he’s at it.

When he finds some downtime, he loves to spend time in the outdoors with his wife and his daughter, mountain biking, skiing and boating. He and his family divide their time between Denver and Crested Butte, CO.

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Will Stokes

Will has spent his career focused on the launch and growth of transformational healthcare businesses. Will started his career as a Strategy Consultant in Deloitte Consulting’s healthcare practice, where he worked with some of the largest healthcare companies in the country to make internal and external investments in clinical and business model innovation. He then joined Oxeon’s Venture Studio, where he worked to build healthcare technology and services companies from scratch. Will spent his first year at Oxeon as a primary architect in the build of Empiric Health, an analytics-enabled service that optimizes physician decision-making, developed in partnership with Intermountain Healthcare. Through his work with Empiric, he gained experience taking a company from concept to launch and was ready to apply this experience to a new problem in healthcare. After Empiric launched, Will set to work exploring the kidney care space, looking for ways to fill the gaps in care while aligning value in the system for all participants. From this work, the idea for Strive Health was born. Will led the initial funding and launch of Strive from within the Oxeon Venture Studio before joining Strive as Chief Strategy Officer, where he leads all things “go-to-market”, bringing Strive’s model to life through payor and provider partnerships.

When he’s not focused on healthcare innovation, he’s outside in the mountains, lamenting another disappointing Tennessee Titans football season, or planning the next trip abroad with his wife.

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Aaron Molitor

Aaron has spent his entire career in the healthcare world, working across a variety of segments. He started with Hospital Corporation of America in the early 90s, helping the company establish the infrastructure to take full risk and delegation of services from payors in the State of Florida. From there, Aaron moved to the payor world, where he spent the next 15 years working in markets across the country in leadership positions that spanned the Commercial, Medicaid, and Medicare Advantage lines of business, managing P&Ls of up to $3 billion in revenue. 10 years of that time were spent with Coventry Health Care in various corporate and market-based leadership roles around the country.

Most recently Aaron spent 7 years at Evolent Health focused on helping provider entities transform to value-based care models and scaling Evolent’s operations from early stage startup to post IPO operations. He served in various leadership roles, including as Market and Regional President over various Evolent businesses, Solution President of Health Plan Operations and COO of the True Health division. During his tenure, he helped grow the business from

When not working Aaron spends time with his wife and 3 boys, traveling, boating and supporting the Kansas State Wildcats, where two of his sons attend college.

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Shika Pappoe

Shika is a pioneer and a nephrologist. She has blended medicine, public health and business administration to give her a perspective that is unlikely to be shared by many others.  

She joined Strive to have the opportunity to build, deliver and scale a best-in-class kidney care model. She saw it as an opportunity to take the lessons from all her work in kidney care in various care settings (academia, private practice, with payors and more) and use a value-based care framework to build a solution that would improve the patient experience and optimize outcomes.

Shika completed her undergraduate and medical degrees at Yale University, followed by her internal medicine residency and nephrology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. During her fellowship, she returned to the classroom to add a Master of Public health degree from Harvard University. She also has an MBA — with majors in finance and management — from Wharton.

After completing her MPH, Shika moved to California and joined the Royalty Nephrology Medical Group. Although she loved practicing community nephrology, she was eager to return to an academic setting where she could teach, participate in research and work in an innovative care setting. She therefore moved to the nephrology division of the Keck School of Medicine. She was assigned to work at Los Angeles County Hospital, one of the country’s largest safety-net hospitals, where she was able to focus her energies on providing care to underserved communities. 

Prior to joining Strive, Shika was the Director of Nephrology and Kidney Disease Prevention at CareMore. There, she learned best practices around value-based care, as well as the importance and impact of a mission-driven clinical culture and tech-enabled solutions.  

In her spare time, Shika likes to travel, dance, cook, garden and learn new languages (currently French and Spanish). 

Renee George

As the Senior Vice President of Market Operations, Renee leads thriving markets across the United States that are transforming how kidney care is delivered. 

For the past 20 years, Renee has served in various executive roles in health systems, physician organizations, and provider-sponsored health plans. She has extensive experience in various alternative payment models and is passionate about transforming how healthcare is delivered and reimbursed so that patient care is improved. She spent over 10 years advocating for payment transparency while serving as Vice President of Revenue Cycle at Mercy Health and later Premier Health. 

Renee received her Bachelor of Health Sciences degree in Health Administration from the University of Kentucky, where she graduated with distinction. She received her MBA with a concentration in Management from Georgia State University.

Renee resides in Springboro, Ohio, where she enjoys hiking, kayaking and boating with her husband and two daughters.

Masoud Nourmohammadi

Before joining Strive, Masoud had an impressive rise in the healthcare technology world. He has earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the University of Utah. He started working for Mountain Medical Physicians Specialists as a Senior Software Engineer in 2005, rising to serve as Chief Technology Officer in 2014. In this role, he gained first-hand experience working with physicians, nurses, and caregivers to deliver to the best in class software solutions. He then moved to Health Catalyst, where he served as Vice President of Engineering. While at Health Catalyst, Masoud built the largest healthcare data repository in the world, often called the Google of Healthcare.

Masoud was attracted to Strive because of the opportunity to build a new model from the ground up. Rather than a standalone product, he is building an analytics, dispatch, and decision-making hub that will improve patient lives every day. Masoud is passionate about building great technology, but even more so, is passionate about building world-class, innovative technology teams. Masoud believes in DevOps principles and building lean world-class engineering teams. Today, he is the founding Chief Technology Officer at Strive Health and is managing a fast-growing team of skilled software developers.

When Masoud isn’t behind a computer, he enjoys spending time with his kids, playing soccer, and searching for a new place to eat.

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