Neel Shah: The doctor at the helm of Healthy Moms Healthy Babies America

(Sep 4, 2026) Neel Shah has been named president of Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America, a bipartisan campaign launched by philanthropist Olivia Walton to cut the US maternal death rate in half within five years. From the delivery room to healthcare policy and technology, his career has focused on finding what makes care work better and taking those lessons to more mothers and babies. 

The first time Neel Shah witnessed childbirth was also his first week working in a hospital. It was 2006, and he was a medical student assigned to the night shift at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, one of the busiest maternity units in the United States. “The average American is born at a hospital that delivers about 500 babies a year. Women and Infants delivered 10,000,” Neel later wrote in an essay published on his Substack, The Preprint.

What stayed with him was not just the scale, but the way care was delivered. The unit was staffed with midwives, an exception in the US that had partly emerged out of necessity. “Most of the women I helped care for that year gave birth without an obstetrician in the room. Almost none of them needed one,” he later wrote. Rhode Island’s hospital beds were full and its budgets were thin, and midwives had been integrated into the system to safely handle the volume that the state’s obstetricians could not.

“Midwives taught me how to stop a hemorrhage. How to suture. How to relieve a shoulder caught in the birth canal.” They also taught him something that could not be learned from a textbook, and that was the importance of simply being present.

He learned, as he put it, “how to sit at the bedside and coach, as a mother pushed her baby’s head forward, millimeter by millimeter, needing my solidarity above all else.” Nearly two decades later, that lesson is at the centre of Neel’s latest mission.

In August 2026, he was named president of Healthy Moms Healthy Babies America (HMHBA), a national bipartisan campaign founded by philanthropist Olivia Walton in May 2026, on Mother’s Day. Its ambitious goal is to cut the US maternal death rate in half within five years. Neel will work with Walton and founding Executive Director Robin Reck to lead the campaign’s clinical and scientific agenda and help turn proven maternal-health solutions into measurable improvements for mothers and babies.

The scale of America’s maternal health crisis

The reason a campaign like Healthy Moms Healthy Babies America is needed is stark. “America has the highest infant and maternal death rates in the developed world,” HMHBA states on its website.

The organisation notes that the US has the worst maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country and that the rate has doubled over the last 40 years. Black women die at nearly three times the rate of white women. Most importantly, HMHBA points out that the vast majority of these deaths are preventable.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited by HMHBA, 87 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. Poor maternal health outcomes also carry an estimated annual economic cost of $165 billion, nearly one percent of US GDP, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Heartland Forward.

For Neel, the 87 percent figure changes the way the problem should be viewed. 

87% of (pregnancy-related) deaths are preventable. That’s not a tragedy we’re helpless against — it’s a to-do list. It means the answers already exist, and the job is to organize them and move.

Neel Shah

An Indian-American upbringing

Neel was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In a conversation recounted in Substack GoodMedicine, Neel described himself growing up as “an Indian kid from New Jersey” who was following the “expected, honorable” path of going to medical school.

His parents had come to the US on H-1B visas and built their lives through hard work and integration into their new communities. Yet there was another influence in the family that would become important to the way Neel approached his career. He grew up with what he described as a “healthy respect for radical thought.”

His grandparents had been revolutionaries in India during the Gandhi era, while his great-grandfather participated in the Salt March. His upbringing therefore consisted of the immigrant experience of building a life through education and professional achievement, alongside a family history of questioning the established order.

It is a combination that can be seen in Neel’s career today. He became a physician, but he did not stop at treating individual patients. He repeatedly moved into the larger systems around medicine, asking why care worked differently in different places and what could be done to change that.

From obstetrics to healthcare reform 

Neel Shah earned his Sc.B. in Neuroscience from Brown University in 2004 and his MD in 2009. Obstetrics was an unexpected choice. A lottery placed the specialty first in his clinical rotations, and he was drawn to its combination of surgery, primary care and the experience of helping families begin.

During medical school, he also worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, which he later called his “first startup.” It taught him that solving a problem required more than evidence. Communication, persuasion and policy were equally important.

That insight shaped his career. He earned an MPP in Health Policy from Harvard Kennedy School while completing his medical training, then trained in obstetrics and gynecology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. At Harvard Medical School and Ariadne Labs, he began studying why Caesarean-section rates varied so widely between hospitals.

His work led to TeamBirth, a structured approach that brings mothers, their support teams and clinicians into clearer conversations during labour. The programme has since been adopted by hundreds of hospitals across the US, with improvements in safety and dignity during childbirth.

Taking proven care to a larger scale

Neel’s focus soon expanded beyond obstetrics. He founded Costs of Care in 2009, later co-founded March for Moms and served as a term advisor to the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health. In 2026, he joined the board of the International Confederation of Midwives.

In 2021, he became Chief Medical Officer of Maven Clinic, where he helped oversee a technology-enabled care model that reached 28 million people globally. In August 2026, he moved into a Senior Advisor role at Maven as he took on the presidency of Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America.

A mother’s chance of coming home safely shouldn’t turn on which hospital she reaches or which day she goes into labor. Every mother deserves the same opportunity to thrive.

Neel Shah

 A physician exploring the systems behind childbirth

Neel has also built a public voice around the questions he has spent his career investigating. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and contributed to four books, including as co-author of Understanding Value-Based Healthcare, published by McGraw-Hill.

He writes The Preprint, where he examines healthcare, childbirth and the systems that shape people’s experiences of medicine.

His work has brought him into mainstream media and documentary filmmaking as well. He is featured in the 2023 Emmy-nominated film Aftershock, which examines the US maternal health crisis, and in the documentary The Color of Care, from the Smithsonian Channel and executive producer Oprah Winfrey. His professional profile also lists recognition including the March of Dimes Franklin Delano Roosevelt Humanitarian of the Year Award and Becker’s Hospital Review’s “40 smartest people in healthcare.”

From learning at the bedside to changing the system

Nearly 20 years after Neel first walked into the maternity unit in Providence, where he learned from midwives caring for thousands of women, the lesson he took from that experience remains central to his work.

Much of his career since then has been spent asking why the experience of childbirth can vary so widely depending on the hospital, the healthcare system, the resources available and the people making decisions. Beneath that work, however, has been a simple question. How do you take something that works and make sure more people actually receive it?

That is also why Healthy Mom Healthy Babies America’s leadership sees him as the right person for its ambitious mission. “Neel is the rare leader who can sit with researchers in the morning and with mothers in the afternoon, and make both conversations count,” founder Olivia Walton said while announcing his appointment.

The United States should not be the most dangerous place in the developed world to give birth. Most of those deaths are preventable. We are not failing mothers for lack of knowing. We are failing them for lack of doing.

Neel Shah

Robin Reck, HMHBA’s executive director, sees Neel as well suited to lead the campaign. As she puts it, “this campaign needs someone who won’t wait for the system to fix itself.” She adds, “Over his career, he has consistently found ways to fix calcified systems and make moms and babies safer and stronger.”

The medical student who once learned from midwives at a busy Providence maternity ward is now taking that lesson to a national stage. Safer, more respectful care should not depend on which hospital a mother happens to enter.

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