About Karen

Karen Shehade

NBC-HWC · CHIE · MBA · MHP · PA-C

From the bedside to the boardroom, Karen Shehade has spent more than 30 years across nearly every corner of the healthcare system: as a clinician, a health-plan executive, and an industry leader. A Board Certified Physician Associate and National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach, she founded A Healthy Impact to put that rare, cross-domain expertise to work for the people and organizations she partners with.

She spent 11 years caring for patients as a hospitalist and ER physician associate in Boston's foremost academic medical centers, with deep experience in internal medicine. That front-line clinical foundation still shapes how she thinks today.

Karen has held progressive leadership roles across health plans: from Business Development at UnitedHealth Group to Vice President of Health Management & Clinical Quality at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, where she led a major redesign of care management programs and led clinical operations in a Value-Based healthcare environment. Today, at Medtronic, she applies her provider and payer expertise to industry, partnering with C-suite leaders to improve outcomes. In her free time, she advises early-stage startups with her broad healthcare expertise.

A longtime advocate for quality and health equity, Karen created and chairs Medtronic's Health Equity Advisory Committee and has served with the National Quality Forum and National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). She is also a passionate advocate for PA education; she is part-time faculty at Northeastern University's Physician Associate Program, where she created and teaches a curriculum on Lifestyle Medicine, serves on the admissions committee, and mentors the next generation of healthcare professionals.