Karen Teitelbaum

Former President, CEO & Independent Board Member/Senior Advisor

With expertise in strategy, growth, and turnaround work, Karen Teitelbaum is a nationally recognized leader focused on ensuring corporate viability and development through driving operational excellence and transformation of care.

Karen is the Executive Chair of the board of Advantia Health, past Chair, Compensation Committee and member of the Quality Committee. Advantia is a growth-oriented company transforming women’s health services through technology and best practices. She serves on the Commercial and Operating Committee as a board member for Surgical Solutions, a portfolio company of Grupo Vitalmex, S.A., providing sterile processing solutions to enhance operating room efficiency, quality, and physician satisfaction.

Karen is on the boards of Ingenovis Health, a family of forward-thinking staffing healthcare companies, and on the Compensation Committee of Alliance Physical Therapy Partners, a leading physical therapy network providing services for Physical Therapy practice owners, hospital and physician partners, patients, and industrial worksites.

As a Senior Advisor to Juniper Advisory, Karen provides counsel to firm clients contemplating nonprofit healthcare mergers or acquisitions. She also is a Senior Advisor to TVM Capital Healthcare Partners, an emerging markets-focused healthcare private equity investment firm in Southeast Asia and Middle East/North Africa.

An advocate for utilizing technology to improve healthcare delivery, she joined Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) as a mentor. CDL is a global organization, delivering an objectives-based program for scalable, seed-stage, science- and technology-based companies. Karen is a board member at MATTER, a global healthcare startup incubator, community nexus, and corporate innovation accelerator. She served as Board member/Global Health Advisor for Blink Science, a biotechnology and digital startup providing instantaneous diagnosis of Covid-19.

An early career entrepreneur, after purchasing a rehabilitation services firm, Karen grew the company into the largest of its kind in Chicago before selling it to a publicly traded firm. Following the sale, Karen held increasingly responsible positions in nonprofit and public companies.

As the immediate past President/Chief Executive Officer of Sinai Chicago, a private safety net healthcare system with over $1B in revenues, Karen oversaw a successful turnaround of financial, philanthropic, and operational performance. She drove year-over-year improvement profitability, taking the organization from a loss of $42M to a profit of $32.6M, improved EBIDA from a negative $14.8M to a positive $55.6M and increased philanthropy six-fold to $13.5M. Karen previously served as Executive Vice President/Chief Operating Officer.

Karen has been an influential participant in state and national legislative policy-making agendas, working with legislators of both the Senate and Congress. She was the 2021 Chair of the Illinois Health and Hospital Association Board, having chaired the Finance Committee and serving on the Executive, Governance and Health Equity Committees. Karen also served as a board member of America’s Essential Hospitals on the Governance Committee. She is a Visiting Lecturer at Kenya Methodist University in Nairobi.

Awards include “One of 10 Business Leaders to Watch” by the Chicago Tribune, twice named to Crain’s Chicago Business “Notable Women in Chicago Healthcare” list, the Weizmann Institute “Women of Science” award, a recipient of the National Medical Fellowship “Leadership in Healthcare” award, and the 2021 awardee of “Community Leadership” for the Chicago Health Executives Forum. She is a member of The Chicago Network, Women Corporate Directors, the Commercial Club of Chicago, the Economic Club of Chicago, and Kellogg Executive Women’s Network.

Karen holds an MBA from Northwestern University, J.L. Kellogg School of Management. She is a frequently requested national speaker, world traveler, avid bicyclist, and cook. She resides in Chicago, Illinois.