Biography

Darshak Sanghavi, MD, is one of the first Program Managers at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a newly created multibillion dollar agency in the federal government that President Joe Biden has tasked with developing health programs that are “so bold no one else, not even the private sector, is willing to give them a chance.”

Prior, he was Global Chief Medical and Clinical Operating Officer for Babylon, the global end-to-end digital health care provider serving over a dozen countries and over 24 million people, with the mission of bringing "affordable and accessible health care to everyone on Earth." He was a member of the senior leadership team taking the company public in 2021 and oversaw a team of 1500 in the company’s global operations in the United States, United Kingdom, and Rwanda with revenues exceeding $1B.

He is the former Chief Medical Officer of UnitedHealthcare's Medicare & Retirement, the largest U.S. commercial Medicare program with over $90B in annual revenue, where he directed all major national clinical and affordability programs. Earlier, he was Chief Medical Officer at OptumLabs, the R&D hub of UnitedHealth Group, running a large portfolio of industry-leading projects with dozens of academic, government, and industry partners.

Before then, he was a member of the Obama administration, as the Director of Preventive and Population Health at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, where he directed the development of large pilot programs aimed at improving the nation’s health care costs and quality. In this capacity, he was the architect of numerous initiatives, including the $157 million Accountable Health Communities model, the 3 million member Million Hearts Cardiovascular Risk Reduction model, and the $1 billion Medicare Diabetes Prevention Program.

Dr. Sanghavi was also a fellow and a managing director of the Brookings Institution, and associate professor of pediatrics and the chief of pediatric cardiology at UMass Medical School (where he still sees patients). He is an award-winning medical educator, who has worked in medical settings around the world and published dozens of scientific papers on topics ranging from the molecular biology of cell death to tuberculosis transmission patterns in Peruvian slums.

A frequent guest on NBC's Today and past commentator for NPR's All Things Considered, Dr. Sanghavi is a contributing editor to Parents magazine, a health care columnist with Slate, and has regularly written about health care for the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post. His best-seller, A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician's Tour of the Body, was named a best health book of the year by the Wall Street Journal. He previously worked as a U.S. Indian Health Service pediatrician on a Navajo reservation.

Educated at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, he completed his pediatrics residency and cardiology fellowship at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston.