Amazon recently decided to name Roy Schoenberg, MD, as the new leader of its health division. Dr. Schoenberg, a physician who co-founded and led telehealth company Amwell for nearly two decades, is the latest in a line of clinicians who traded patient care and academic medicine for a seat at the table inside some of the world’s largest technology companies.
Here are five physicians who made the leap to big tech — and how their careers changed after that.
1. Roy Schoenberg, MD — Amazon Health Services
Dr. Schoenberg spent nearly 20 years building Amwell, the telehealth company he co-founded with his brother Ido in 2006, before stepping down as co-CEO in 2024. He briefly founded Aileen.ai, an AI companion company focused on older adults, before Amazon tapped him to lead its health services division, effective July 1.
Amazon has spent the better part of five years assembling a healthcare portfolio — Amazon Pharmacy, One Medical, Health AI — under a non-physician executive, Neil Lindsay. The decision to now install a physician at the top of that structure, and one with Amwell’s specific background in hybrid care delivery, is a step in a new direction for the company’s healthcare strategy.
2. Sumbul Desai, MD — Apple
Sumbul Desai, MD, was associate chief medical officer at Stanford (Calif.) Health Care and vice chair of strategy and innovation at Stanford Medicine when Apple recruited her in 2017. The move surprised colleagues in academic medicine at the time; she had been instrumental in launching Stanford’s Center for Digital Health and building ClickWell Care, a telemedicine initiative that converted the majority of clinic visits to virtual within a year.
At Apple, Dr. Desai has led the company’s most consequential health product bets: the ECG app, irregular heart rhythm notifications, sleep apnea detection, hearing test features and the Apple Heart Study, a landmark clinical trial conducted with Stanford that enrolled hundreds of thousands of participants in months. She now holds the title of vice president of health and continues to hold a faculty appointment as a clinical associate professor at Stanford Medicine.
At a Stanford Department of Medicine Grand Rounds session in September 2025, Dr. Desai described the governing principle behind Apple’s health work: scientific rigor, actionability and privacy as preconditions for clinical adoption. She also described what drew her out of the hospital in the first place: the realization that a product shipped to hundreds of millions of wrists could change population health in ways that no individual clinician could match from a clinic.
3. Maulik Majmudar, MD — Amazon
In August 2018, Maulik Majmudar, MD, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate director of the hospital’s Healthcare Transformation Lab, announced on social media that he was joining Amazon.
Dr. Majmudar had spent years at the intersection of cardiology and digital health, co-authoring articles on technology’s capacity to upend clinical practice, and his departure from MGH signaled that Big Tech was competing directly with academic medicine for talent.
At Amazon, Dr. Majmudar became the company’s medical officer and oversaw the development and launch of Amazon Halo, a health and wellness membership service. He left in April 2021, after roughly three years, and joined Biofourmis, a Boston-based digital therapeutics company, as its chief medical officer. He had served on Biofourmis’ clinical advisory board since 2015 and its board of directors since 2019.
4. Vin Gupta, MD — Amazon
Vin Gupta, MD, a pulmonologist and critical care physician, had a career that spanned a range of practice settings. Dr. Gupta taught at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle and served as a deployable critical care air transport physician for the U.S. Air Force Reserve, while also writing for NBC News and The New York Times on public health topics. He had previously worked as a consultant for Apple. Amazon added him to its Amazon Care team in January 2020 as a principal scientist.
Dr. Gupta’s role evolved substantially over five years. He served as Amazon’s chief health officer, led its COVID-19 response during the pandemic, oversaw health products in the devices and services unit and ultimately became chief medical officer of Amazon Pharmacy.
He departed Amazon in February 2025, part of a wave of health leadership exits that also included the CEO of One Medical, the chief medical officer of Amazon Health Services and the vice president of healthcare. Dr. Gupta joined Manatt, Phelps & Phillips as a managing director to lead a portfolio dedicated to health innovation.
5. Karen DeSalvo, MD — Google
Before joining Google, Karen DeSalvo, MD, had served as acting assistant secretary for health at HHS and as national coordinator for health information technology during the Obama administration. She had also been health commissioner for the city of New Orleans. Google hired her in 2019 as its first chief health officer.
During her six-year tenure at Google, Dr. DeSalvo oversaw the company’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, managed its efforts to improve the quality and reliability of health information surfaced through search and YouTube and guided an expanding portfolio of AI-driven health tools. She announced her retirement in May 2025. Her successor, Michael Howell, MD, who had served as Google’s chief clinical officer and previously as chief quality officer at University of Chicago Medicine, took over the role.
In a LinkedIn post announcing her departure, Dr. DeSalvo described the pull of the role in terms that other physician-executives in tech have echoed: the scale. “There is no other place to do that at the scale we can than at Google,” she wrote, “where hundreds of millions come to us every day in their most critical moments for information, insights and help along their health journey.”
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