Who We Are

Veenu Aulakh is the Executive Director of the Medicaid Innovation Collaborative, a program of Acumen America. She is responsible for building the strategy and partnerships to improve the health and well-being of people on Medicaid by advancing the adoption of tech-enabled innovations.

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For almost 10 years, Veenu served as the President of the Center for Care Innovations (CCI) where she grew the organization’s staff, budget, and strategy to focus on strengthening the health of under-invested communities. She was responsible for building critical partnerships and implementing the overall strategy to support and spread innovation in safety net healthcare systems. Before joining CCI, Veenu worked as a senior program officer at the California Health Care Foundation, where she managed programs and investments to improve access to care and health outcomes.

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Veenu holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science in health policy and management from Harvard University.

Ray Pedden is an MIC advisor.

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Ray has had the privilege to develop a two-year medical school into a full four-year school, assist in the start-up of two new four-year medical schools, improve and implement the governance structure in several nationally recognized healthcare organizations, develop and implement new technologies that have increased the efficiency of healthcare operations, and install complex healthcare information systems.

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Ray now focuses on developing and implementing a framework to foster innovation in the healthcare safety net. This framework is envisioned to be an environment within which we can test and evaluate innovations that will address our overwhelming need for patient access, patient engagement, management of complex patients and overall population management challenges.

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Ray's professional achievements include winning the Modern Healthcare Innovation Award for the Memorial Care project in 1998 and Laureate status in the 2002 Computerworld Heroes in Healthcare for his case study on the e-health environment. He is a faculty member of the High Performance Physician Institute.