Keith Dunleavy '91 Inducted into Dartmouth's New Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame

Inovalon founder and CEO Keith Dunleavy '91 addresses the crowd during his induction to Dartmouth's Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame. (Photo by Julia Levine '23)

Kicking off the gala celebration in New York City on Thursday, Magnuson founding Executive Director Jamie Coughlin thanked attendees, including several Dartmouth trustees and notable alumni, for helping to "recognize those in our community who, through entrepreneurial spirit, through entrepreneurial conviction, have contributed to a better world."

Introducing Dunleavy, Martin Weinstein '81, a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in Washington, DC, spoke about the daunting personal crises Dunleavy faced before founding Inovalon, a cloud-based software and data-analytics company that has revolutionized health care.

Dunleavy as a young child suffered serious injuries from an accident but recovered and went on to attend Dartmouth. Tragedy struck again when his older brother died in an ice-climbing accident. But Dunleavy soldiered on, attended medical school, and founded a company "with the audacious goal of leveraging data and analytics to improve patient outcomes and to improve the economics of our entire health care system," Weinstein said.

Weinstein said Dunleavy was "the first one in the office in the morning, and the last one to leave the office at night. He employed creativity, courage, tenacity. And he has built something remarkable. Yet none of that defines Keith's superpower. Those magical traits that we talked about are truly exceptional, but nothing when compared to the desire to make life better for others"

Dunleavy thanked his family and friends for their unwavering support, and spoke about the interlocking building blocks of entrepreneurship.

"It's not the market timing, it's not the regulatory system, it's not the clarity of your personal direction, your moral compass—it's not any of that," he said. "It's not the support you got from others, whether financial or emotional. And it's not even your drive or your perseverance, because in fact, it's all of them. It's every single one of them, every single moment of the time."

About Keith Dunleavy '91

Dunleavy, a physician, is the founder and CEO of Inovalon, a cloud-based health care software and data analytics company headquartered in Bowie, Md.

Driven by a desire to help empower a data-driven transformation of health care, Dunleavy has led Inovalon from its founding to its current industry-leading position utilizing advanced, cloud-based software platforms to empower improvements in clinical outcomes and economics for more than 20,000 health plan, hospital, provider system, pharmacy, and life sciences customers across the entire health care ecosystem. Uniquely designed to aggregate and leverage the industry’s largest connected primary-source health care dataset, Inovalon’s software and analytics are trained and informed by data pertaining to more than one million physicians, 640,000 clinical facilities, 372 million unique patients, and 78 billion medical events.

After founding the origins of Inovalon in 1998 while in residency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dunleavy grew the company to become the nation's largest pure-play health care SaaS and data analytics company, taking Inovalon public on the NASDAQ in 2015. In 2021 Inovalon was acquired by a consortium of investors led by Nordic Capital at an all-time stock price high for $7.3 billion.

Dunleavy received a bachelor's degree in biology modified with engineering, with high honors, from Dartmouth. He earned his doctorate in medicine from Harvard Medical School, completed his medical residency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, and practiced and was board certified in internal medicine.