Company leader
Yoona Kim
Co-founder and CEO
Arine
Yoona Kim is a pharmacist and health economist who co-founded Arine and leads it as chief executive. Arine's software helps health plans and provider groups find patients whose medications are unsafe, ineffective, or not being taken, and Kim has spent her career measuring what medications do to people's health and to the cost of their care.
Studying at Stanford, UCSF, and UT Austin
Kim earned a bachelor's degree at Stanford University, a Doctor of Pharmacy with an emphasis in health policy and management at the University of California, San Francisco, and a Ph.D. in health economics and outcomes at the University of Texas at Austin, according to her guest bio on The Heart of Healthcare podcast.
Modeling Value at Proteus Digital Health
Before Arine, Kim was head of clinical modeling and analytics at Proteus Digital Health. She was responsible for its health economic and clinical implementation work, and her team built the economic case for its products, from the first concept to business cases to use in the real world.
Starting Arine
Kim and Penjit “Boom” Moorhead, now chief technology officer, founded Arine in 2017. Arine's About page says its founders had spent two decades studying health interventions when they found a gap in medication management that could work at scale, and the company's name comes from a Basque word meaning “light.” Kim writes there: “We started Arine to ensure safe and effective medication therapy for each individual, which in turn has an immediate impact on improving outcomes and reducing costs.”
Arine brought its platform to market in 2019, launching first with a Medicaid plan to reach the patients in greatest need. Kim's podcast bio says Arine has made medication recommendations for more than 15 million patients.
Medication Adherence and Health Equity
Kim often talks about how medication habits differ across groups of patients. “Due to many of the social and economic inequities that have occurred over time, there's certainly disparities in medication adherence among certain races and ethnicities,” she told Managed Healthcare Executive in 2023, pointing to lack of trust, language barriers, and cost. At SCAN Health, she said, Black and Latino members took their medications as prescribed 85% of the time, compared with 88% for white members, and Arine used that data to tailor outreach.
Calling It the Most Solvable Problem
On The Heart of Healthcare podcast, Kim talked about medication mismanagement as a $530 billion problem and the scale of the harm it causes. Her view of it is optimistic: “This is the most solvable problem. We just need to get the medications right, and we can make so many people healthier. We can save lives.”