As healthcare technology accelerates, one truth has become increasingly clear: the most successful digital health products are built with clinicians, not simply reviewed by them at the end. Yet for many organizations, integrating clinical expertise into product development remains elusive.
In this episode of Leadership Rounds, Dr. Reena Pande sits down with Carolyn Bradner Jasik, MD, a pediatrician and product leader whose career spans academia, community health, digital health scale-ups, and now, AI-enabled care at Verily. Their conversation offers a rare, practical blueprint for how clinicians can lead and thrive inside product-driven organizations.
Carolyn’s career began with a clear motivation in population-level impact. Drawn to preventive health and behavior change, she pursued pediatrics, public health, and community-based obesity interventions, running programs in schools, after-school settings, and local communities.
Like many clinicians, she initially pursued an academic path, devoting significant time to research, grants, and institutional programs. But a pivotal moment changed everything. While implementing Epic at her hospital, Carolyn saw firsthand how technology could instantly reach millions and go far beyond the limits of any single clinic or community program.
She became compelled to scale impact through technology. That realization led her into health tech startups and ultimately to Omada Health, where she spent eight years helping build and scale digital chronic care programs that reached millions of people with diabetes and cardiometabolic disease.
Reena and Carolyn quickly surface a tension familiar to many clinician-operators: moving from environments where clinicians “call the shots” to product teams where influence must be earned differently.
Clinical training rewards decisiveness. Product development rewards curiosity, iteration, and collaboration.
Carolyn attributes her success to an early mindset shift. Rather than entering product rooms with authority, she entered with curiosity, asking, “What can I learn from you?” Whether working with engineers, designers, or business leaders, she treated every conversation as a chance to understand the “why” behind decisions.
This approach proved essential. In one example, a product team designed a diabetes A1C visualization that showed only a single data point. Clinically, this felt wrong, as A1C trends matter. But instead of dismissing the work, Carolyn asked why it had been built that way. The answer revealed constraints around screen size, user friction, and earlier clinical input. The outcome wasn’t conflict, it was better design. The product ultimately had patient-friendly views paired with clinician-appropriate trend data. In that instance, curiosity unlocked influence faster than credentials.
One of the most powerful themes in the conversation is healthy conflict. Carolyn describes being surprised by how conflict-averse many tech organizations are compared to clinical environments.
In medicine, debate is routine and necessary. Teams argue vigorously because patients’ lives are at stake. In tech, disagreement is often misread as dysfunction.
At Omada, Carolyn received feedback that she was “difficult” for challenging ideas directly. Over time, she realized two things:
Learning to balance directness with empathy (and understanding how her own voice landed) was critical to her leadership growth. Her takeaway is simple but radical. Nothing changes when everyone is being polite.
A recurring frustration for clinician leaders is being brought into product decisions too late. Carolyn experienced this firsthand and then changed it. Rather than demanding inclusion based on expertise, she reframed the question: What value can clinicians add earlier in the process? At Omada, she helped implement several concrete mechanisms:
Short, targeted sessions at the start of sprints explaining clinical concepts (e.g., “What is A1C?”). These sessions built shared understanding and positioned clinicians as collaborators, not gatekeepers.
Before Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) were written, clinical teams authored CRDs outlining evidence, priorities, clinical KPIs, and intended patient experience. Product then built from that foundation.
Carolyn built a clinical product team, training clinicians in agile development and embedding them directly into product squads. These roles weren’t operational. They were intellectual partners.
As Omada scaled, innovation increasingly came from human care workflows rather than just technology. The roadmap evolved from “product” to “program,” with shared decision-making between clinical and product leadership.
Together, these shifts transformed inclusion from an ask into a default.
Another insight clinicians bring to tech is comfort with chaos. Contrary to stereotypes, Carolyn argues that clinicians don’t panic under pressure. They stabilize it. She compares product crunches to medical codes: the best leaders know when to “slow down to go fast.” They are experts at pausing, reassessing, and instilling calm within the team to gain clarity and make the right decisions. In health tech, where rushed decisions can harm patients, this instinct is invaluable. Perfect may be the enemy of shipped, but rushed is the enemy of good.
Today, Carolyn brings this philosophy to her work at Verily, where she’s focused on AI-enabled care delivery for cardiometabolic disease.
Her role centers on a fundamental question: How much AI can we safely integrate into direct patient care? Answering it requires deep clinical insight, regulatory fluency, and cultural alignment with clinicians. These are all areas where clinician-leaders are indispensable.
At Oxeon, we work with organizations and leaders navigating exactly these challenges: integrating clinical expertise into product, scaling responsibly, and building interdisciplinary teams that deliver both outcomes and trust, and Carolyn’s journey offers a clear message to clinicians and companies alike. The future of healthcare depends on clinicians who are willing to learn new languages and organizations willing to meet them halfway.
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Carolyn Bradner Jasik, MD, is a board-certified Clinical Informatics physician with experience in both hospital-based technology innovation and creating digital solutions for health behavior change.
At Omada Health, she directs the clinical and research teams to create and test the next generation of chronic disease programming. In the past year, she has led the launch of expanded programming in diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and mental health. Prior to joining Omada, she worked at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she led implementation of the Epic electronic health record, integrated digital health programming into clinical practice, and conducted clinical trials of health technologies.
She completed her undergraduate degree in public policy at Princeton University, MD at the University of Chicago, and her research training at UCSF. Dr. Jasik continues to practice at UCSF, where she is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics.
