What happens when a neurologist decides to redesign how people access brain and memory care? In this episode of The Strategic Business Influencer, Paige Velasquez Budde sits down with Dr. Joel Salinas, behavioral neurologist, author, researcher, and Founder & Chief Medical Officer at Isaac Health. Dr. Salinas is doing groundbreaking work making brain and cognitive care more accessible by bringing memory and neurological support online — especially for families who otherwise wouldn’t have access to specialists.
Here are the top five takeaways from my conversation with Dr. Salinas.
1. Access is the real crisis in brain health
The biggest problem in dementia and brain health care isn’t a lack of medical knowledge, it’s access. With year-long wait times, severe specialist shortages, and entire regions designated as “dementia neurology deserts,” patients are often losing critical time before receiving care. Isaac Health was founded to close that gap by meeting patients where they are, virtually and physically.
2. Telehealth works best when it’s built around real human needs
Dr. Salinas emphasized that telehealth alone isn’t enough. The Isaac Health model succeeds because it blends virtual care with hands-on support like in-home aides, care navigators, and multilingual teams. The goal isn’t tech for tech’s sake, it’s making high-quality care feel simple and accessible to patients and caregivers.
3. True healthcare innovation starts with proven models, not reinvention
Rather than building something flashy or experimental, Isaac Health was designed by translating established centers of excellence into a scalable, virtual-first model. The lesson for founders: innovation doesn’t always mean disruption. Sometimes it means taking what already works and removing the barriers that prevent people from accessing it.
4. Health equity requires intentional design, not good intentions
Dr. Salinas’s personal background shaped a deep commitment to equity in care delivery. Language access, cultural understanding, rural reach, and health literacy were designed into the system from day one. Equity isn’t an add-on; it’s operational. If a system doesn’t account for real-world barriers, it will fail the people who need it most.
5. Impact-driven leadership is what makes risk worth taking
Leaving a clear academic path for entrepreneurship wasn’t about ambition; it was about impact. Dr. Salinas framed entrepreneurship as a tool for scale, allowing him to help exponentially more people than traditional clinical or research paths would allow. His leadership lens centers on one question: Where can I create the greatest real-world impact right now?
To learn more about the work Dr. Salinas and his team are doing, visit https://isaac.health/ or https://www.joelsalinasmd.com/.
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Want to dive deeper into how today’s most trusted leaders grow their businesses, brands, and influence? Order my upcoming book, The Strategic Business Influencer, and get the playbook for turning leadership into your most powerful business asset. Below is a transcript of our conversation.
Paige: Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Strategic Business Influencer, my series for leaders who know that in today’s evolving world, trust is the greatest competitive advantage. Today’s guest is Dr. Joel Salinas, Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Isaac Health, a telehealth platform that focuses on brain health and dementia.
He is a Harvard trained behavioral neurologist, speaker and writer with expertise in clinical approaches to brain health. Dr. Salinas has led research on the psychosocial determinants of brain health and authored over 40 academic papers and contributed to eight books on neurology. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.
He is also the Clinical Associate Professor of Neurology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and was previously faculty at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, serving as Clinical Director of the McCann Center for Brain Health.
I am personally excited about this episode because it’ll be a conversation at the intersection of healthcare and business, which we haven’t covered on this series before.So Dr. Salinas, welcome. I’m excited to have you on the series.
Dr. Salinas: Thank you so much. Really happy to be here.
Paige: Well, I know, as I just mentioned in your introduction, you have such a fascinating career as you know, a practicing physician, bestselling author, speaker, researcher, professor. I’m probably leaving a few things out here, but I would really love for you to share your thought process in what it took to make that leap from this background of healthcare and research and teaching into co-founding a company, Isaac Health.
Dr. Salinas: Yeah, it is. You know, taking a leap like that is never easy. It’s, uh, it can be quite scary, you know? Yeah. Coming from the academic world. Um. There it has a really clear path, right? You do these publications, you get these grants, you do X amount of teaching, you have this clinical time, and then as long as you continue to follow that path, there’s a clear trajectory in terms of your academic promotion to eventually becoming a, a full professor.
But one of the things that was really giving me a lot of pause, keeping me up at night really was, whenever I would see patients, especially a new patient for the first time, first thing that they would say to me is something along the lines of, You have no idea how long it took for us to see you. Wow.
And you know, these wait times to see me, were already kind of at about a year or more to see me. And it’s not just me, it’s all these other kind of dementia specialists, these dementia neurologists that usually kind of live and work in these academic medical centers and really specialized memory clinics.
But there just aren’t very many of them. If you think about kind of, how important it is to get access to high quality care from a specialist, when you start to develop signs of cancer, for example, you wanna work with oncologists, I think it’s very true for these conditions as well, like Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of dementia.
But it can be really disconcerting when you try to make an appointment and you find out that you have to wait more than a year because so much can happen in a year. You can go from being able to. Make the appointments to not being able to make your own decisions. Uh, also a lot can happen. A lot can be done in that process.
But there aren’t very many dementia specialists like myself out there. The state of Texas, for example, only has 12. Wow. Um, more than half the country has been designated a dementia neurology desert. So this is a public health crisis, I would say, especially given of the aging population, is one of the fastest growing demographics, and those are the people who are at highest risk of developing these conditions.
And so with that, I was trying to figure out what I could do about that situation. Now, you know, research is important that there’s no doubt about that, but the translation to kind of practical solutions can often be on the order of many years. And this felt like a problem that needed to be addressed today and around the time.
That I made the transition out. We were kind of in the second, kind of latter half of the pandemic where doing care virtually was kind of accepted, and it’s been pretty well studied that things like neurology can be done via virtual visits. And this field in particular transits itself very, very well to the virtual medium.
And one day I got a cold email. From my now co-founder Julius Bru asking if I was interested in starting an online memory center. And when I first saw that email, my first reaction was, oh, this has gotta be a scam. Some kind of like phishing email, like somebody from it was gonna say, yep, you fail for it, now you have to do retraining.
Um, but no, I, I looked him up and he was a legitimate person. We happened to actually live about 20 minutes from each other. We’re in the same kind of like general neighborhood. So we met up and. You know, he kind of shared his background, which, you know, he. Uh, trained as a physician at Cambridge University.
Uh, did a PhD in neurodegenerative disease kind of drug discovery, but rather than going the clinical route, he worked at McKinsey for about seven years as a consultant focused in value-based care and, uh, digital health transformation. And so it felt like there was a really good kind of compliment those skills there.
And so, you know, I think taking that same mentality of this is a, a really important problem and one of my. Kind of driving value. So like my one word so to speak, in terms of helping to guide me in all my decisions is impact. So it’s how can I have the greatest impact? Mm-hmm. And this felt like the universe knocking on my door saying like, Hey, this is your, your chance to do it.
And, you know, I’m not getting any younger. Uh, so if I wanted to kind of make the leap to kind of creating something from zero, this felt like the right time to do it. And you know, I’ve, it is been a really. Wild ride and extremely rewarding process since then, I’ve learned so much in the last three years about healthcare, health systems, health plans kind of what the challenges are in public health that I, you know, I’ve, I’ve done a lot of education and training and these are the kinds of things you don’t really learn unless you’re actually really in the, in the middle of it.
And I feel like we’ve been able to do so much now. That’s very practical and tangible, really meeting people where they’re at. With this kind of care going into the communities, um, making sure that people are able to get the right care at the right time. Mm-hmm. Um, and you know, that’s been incredibly em empowering and, you know, it’s a decision that, looking back, I certainly don’t regret.
Paige: Well, what a, what an impactful founding story. You know, everything from the right time to a cold email. And then also, you know, you and Julius are setting out to solve an insanely complex problem when you look at it from 30,000 feet, which has to be daunting. And I know that y’all built Isaac Health around improving access.
Mm-hmm. To memory care and addressing those long wait times, as you said, for patients with cognitive disorders. So how did you design a model of care that is different from either what large hospital systems can provide or other direct to consumer approaches in? What were those barriers as you started to map this out, that you were focused so much on removing?
Dr. Salinas: Yeah. You know, I think. The story. These types of stories always can seem very linear, but in truth, they are quite non-linear. So I think when we even started to have the conversation, we were thinking about focusing on the angle of. For lack of a better word, kind of, prevention. Um, but really it’s about like risk reduction.
‘Cause it seemed like there had been some interest on when we focus on kind of brain health as a general kind of topic. And that people who are much more apt to do virtual visits and really engage might be those that are much more focused on risk factor reduction. But I think. We quickly pivoted when we realized that there was like such a, a huge need and an ability to be able to translate what we know is like really great high quality care.
So there’s these really well established centers of excellence for Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders. And these are really comprehensive, collaborative multidisciplinary centers. They’re all really in this kind of brick and mortar type of setting. Mm-hmm. Um, they’re usually within hospital systems and as you know, with hospital systems, it’s a very.
Very specific business model, um, that they follow. And starting from that ground zero of like what we know really works, like what is the gold standard of, of care, we can continue to ask ourselves, how can we translate this into a format that can reach more people, right? As, as opposed to kind of going to the mountain, how can we bring the mountain to more people?
And, what we really came to realize is that one, so much of that model can be translated to a telehealth model, but we also built in a hybrid component where people who have issues with internet or technology, we send a home care aid to the home Oh wow. To facilitate the visit for them. So that way the only thing that the patient has to do is open the door, have a seat, and that’s it.
We, also really thought about how can we reach more people from the side of kind of health plan coverage. ’cause health, I mean, what health plan you have really drives who you see and when you see them. And so we, rather than seeing health plans in an adversarial relationship, which is the more typical relationship that health systems might have with a health plan, is really seeing them as an ally and figuring through how can we.
Create a system that not only brings kind of the best care, but really approaches care from a really holistic way that is really value-based, for lack of a better word, but really focused on being really efficient. You get more, more health bang per buck invested. And that involved. Kind of evolving the system to match a little bit more what’s been well established in other research studies, which is these kind of collaborative care models where there’s a lot more of an emphasis put on care management and care navigation, where you’ve got many team members that really guide a patient’s care.
So the, and this is concerned, that’s been really well established to the point that now there’s an alternative payment model available through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services called the Guide Model. Which is stands for guiding and improved Dementia Experience, but it was designed with this in mind where there’s a care navigator that works with the patient.
Uh, you have a 24 7 support line. There’s a lot of supports for the caregivers in the patient. A lot of education and training even, um, kind of access to respite care and other kind of home-based services through a, and so we kind of really. Developed our model to mirror that as much as possible and make it available to as many people as possible.
And then, you know, went to health plans themselves and said, Hey, let us help you manage this really complex patient population that is, you know, three times the cost of a typical like Medicare patient. When you think about it as somebody who has diabetes, it’s very different from somebody who has diabetes and dementia.
Mm-hmm. For other reasons you can imagine it’s much more difficult to manage. And of your medications following with medical appointments, and you’re much more prone to be hospitalized and go to the emergency room, and so. We’ve designed and kind of developed an improved partner model in these types of partnerships where we’re actually doing really proactive screening using our AI algorithms to screen a pop, like an entire population, to find people who are at risk of having undiagnosed cognitive decline.
We do outreach where we call people and really engage them in healthcare. We follow with them over the long term. So I think to me what’s really exciting about it is that it is it. It. We’re not building a UFO here. You know, we’re not building something that is kind of like bizarre and unusual.
All we’re doing is really taking what we know about what, what high quality care looks like, and just designing a system that makes it just much, much more accessible to more people. Mm-hmm.
Paige: Yeah. And. It’s just really incredible to hear it too, how y’all are being so proactive as well. And I, I love this accessibility piece that you’re creating with Isaac Health.
How has your personal background really shaped your thinking in thinking about health equity or access to care?
Dr. Salinas: Oh yeah. I mean, I mean my own personal background, my I’m first generation, my family fled Nicaragua during the early eighties and came to the US under political asylum and, I grew up in a low income household and so, you know, I am no stranger to barriers of access to care.
It’s still still something that, you know, many of my family members struggle with, like issues of health literacy and being able to find kind of like that right specialist care and, you know, when engaging in seeing patients throughout my training and as kind of faculty. I’m usually one of the few Spanish speaking behavioral neurologists or kind of dimension neurologists.
And I see kind of the struggles that this patient population specifically goes through. And I also see how they’re particularly vulnerable when there are straints on the health system of being missed or not getting access to care. Like they might hear, oh, it’s a year out to be seen, so why even pursue it?
Right? And so, you know, for me, this element of improving access to care really does have a really. Critical health equity piece to it, which is bringing this kind of care to people who come from underserved populations. And that includes people who come from geographically isolated areas, like more rural areas as well, who u usually have a harder time accessing care.
And we creating a system that really takes those needs into account where we’re. Bringing on team members who are reflective of the communities that they’re serving, who have an understanding of kind of what their needs are and really being true to that kind of idea of like meeting people where they’re at.
Mm-hmm. So if you. You need extra time to get onto the appointment, we’ll figure that out. If you need to have a, somebody physically in the home to hold the device for you, we’ll figure that out for you. Do you need to have Spanish speaking team members? Let’s figure that out for you. So we, we’ll do whatever we can to really make access.
Happen across the many domains of what access means, which is really, is it kind of affordable? Is it acceptable to patients? Is it like logistically or physically accessible to a patient? So all, all those different pieces. And, and I think to me that’s one of the things that makes this work really rewarding is, you know, really doing the.
The hard work of creating a very complex backend system, but to the patient, it looked very, very straightforward.
Paige: Yes, absolutely. And I, I do think a lot of people don’t realize the challenges of those that live in rural areas and getting that specialty care. Right. I grew up in a rural area in Texas, primarily Spanish speaking, and getting access to those specialists is so incredibly hard, especially if you don’t have the means or the ability to get to the larger cities right.
Of, of where they’re at. So, I, I just love what you’re doing so much, and thank you for, for pouring so much time and energy and resources into this. This is just life changing in terms of care. I wanna switch to the business side a little bit. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Dr. Salinas and talk, talk more about that. So, you recently successfully closed, uh, a series A round in which, you know, was actually in a pretty bearish venture.
Environment. It’s not an easy environment right now to, to raise capital. What were some of the biggest lessons that you learned about raising capital for a healthcare startup, especially when a solution like yours is something that might be unfamiliar to investors or, or more technical to investors.
Dr. Salinas: Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. It, you know, it was a, a bear cut of market. You know, I think we actually were fortunate. In that we, we had some experience in our belt because we also raised our seed round during a bear market. So we already had a sense of kind of, uh, what to, what to expect. But I think a couple of the learnings that came from that, I’d say one, is that it usually takes more time than you anticipate.
So you really have to plan for that. I think another piece of that is that. You have to make sure that you’ve got all of the data and evidence to back up whatever you’re claiming. You know, the more bear the market, the more data and evidence that’s required. Mm-hmm. Um, and you have to really be able to understand kind of how to articulate.
What it is that you’re looking to build and why it is so promising from an investment standpoint and healthcare is so complex and it moves so slow, so it’s generally very unappealing. But yeah. If you find investors who already have. But into kind of the hypothesis that investing in healthcare will lead to improvements in health, or we have at least a basic foundational background that makes the conversations move a lot easier.
So I would say whenever we engaged with investors who already had a lot of experience in investing in health tech or tech enabled healthcare delivery, you know, it, it was always just. It was like sipping a dream through a straw. It was just so easy to kind of work together ’cause we were working from a similar kind of place.
Sure. I think for those that didn’t have that background, there’s a little bit of having to bring in some familiar cognitive frameworks for them and then kind of build off of that. But I think when you’re looking at an environment where people are gonna be less risk tolerant, you’re gonna wanna work with investors who have seen it.
And know kind of what’s possible. Mm-hmm. And do you have an appetite for that kind of risk? Partly because they have the knowledge base and the networks and the resources to kind of really be in, in the room with you as a collaborator as well, and not just an investor.
Paige: Absolutely. Yeah. And, and like you said, I think, you know, a lot of that is just you being able, you being, having you in the room as the thought leader and being able to share, um, your experiences and, and like you said, your story is so powerful as well.
Now, Dr. Salinas, there are two questions that mm-hmm. That I love to ask every person who is on this show, and I’m very excited to hear your answers here. The first one is, who are you in addition to being a founder?
Dr. Salinas: Um, I would say I am a neurologist. You know, someone who cares for people and, you know, not just their central nervous system, but their whole selves, their whole health.
Mm-hmm. In, I would say I’m also a friend in family members, so. And I really cherish the relationships that I make. I’ve done a lot of research in social relationships, so I always have to practice what I preach, but I always like to think of myself, of someone, of my, of my word and try to be as, you know, earnest and honest and a, a person of, of integrity.
And I bring in a lot of these elements of like hard work that I really learned from, from my parents, which is a very typical of kind of the immigrant story.
Paige: Mm-hmm. I love that. And my second question is, what is the impact that you wanna have at the end of every single day?
Dr. Salinas: Mm.
I would say moving, this is gonna sound so like over the top, ambitious, but just moving humankind with the human species, even if just. A millimeter or like a fraction of, a fraction of a millimeter more towards kind of a, a, a better stage of, of being, you know, moving towards the next stage of who we are.
I mean, I know that my life, like all of ours is, are relatively short on mm-hmm. On this blue earth. And just thinking, you know, how can I leave a small dent on. In, in the universe, in the words of Steve Jobs. I think how, however that is, even if it’s just one person is really meaningful.
Paige: Wow.
Well, I have no doubt Dr. Salinas, that you are doing that every single day or, or making your way towards that every single day. So I appreciate all that you do, and you are so brilliant. We probably could have spent hours here talking about all of the incredible things that, that you do in the important work that you do.
But if people wanna go and learn more about you and your work, or wanna learn more about Isaac Health, where could they go?
Dr. Salinas: I would say first place, you can just go to our website. It’s Isaac Health. It’s IS AAC Health, Isaac, like the name, or, sorry, Isaac Newton. You can also just call a number at (888) 818-2059.
Um, if you wanna learn more about me personally, you can go to. Personal website, which is joel salinas md.com. And then I would also invite folks to check out my latest book, which published earlier this year. It’s called Conflict Resilience, with my co-author Bob Rone, which is really focused on how to negotiate this agreement without giving up or giving in.
You know, it’s a pressing topic. And so I would encourage folks to give it a read. You can find it anywhere where books are sold.
Paige: Amazing. And it has been a very successful book. So be sure to grab your copy. And Dr. Salinas, thank you so much again for coming on today. Thank you. Wonderful. Well, I will see y’all all next time.