By SGN | 30 Jul 2026
For most of her career, Clara had been in perpetual motion.
She has worked in law, healthcare, and technology, across both start-ups and established institutions, and even across geographies, splitting her time between Singapore and the Bay Area; seamlessly navigating different worlds.
Then, crisis struck. Her father suddenly had to undergo quadruple bypass surgery.
The language of systems, and the shift towards humanity
When someone you love enters the healthcare system, policy stops being an abstraction,” she says. “Suddenly, all that matters is whether the right expertise is available on time, whether decisions can be made swiftly, and whether your family has the support of a functioning system”.
As it dawned on her how delayed decisions could alter the outcome of a patient’s life, and often for the worse, Clara felt herself increasingly drawn to healthcare.
“Healthcare is where law, policy, technology, and human need become inseparable, shaping not only systems of care but the lived experience of dignity, access, and survival,” she reasons.
“It is one of the few sectors where systemic improvements can save or change lives for the better.
While Clara and her family were lucky to have access to skilled clinicians within Singapore’s top-tier healthcare system, she knew this was not the case for many. “A family’s odds can change so dramatically because of where they live,” she reflects.
Deeply conscious of how access to healthcare remains one of the most unequal opportunities in the world, Clara decided to build WhiteCoat, a digital healthcare and teleconsulting service, where patients could video consult with trusted care providers from their smartphones.
Scaling the spine, localising the soul
As WhiteCoat grew beyond Singapore’s borders into Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Hong Kong, Clara and her team ran headfirst into the stark regional disparities that define Southeast Asia’s healthcare landscape.
While patients in Singapore could enjoy the immense privilege of a streamlined, predictable system, the reality changed drastically across archipelagos like Indonesia or the Philippines.
The uncomfortable truth that geography determined healthcare outcomes, and that people’s lives were determined by proximity to general or specialist medical treatment, and speed and affordability of such services unsettled Clara deeply.
“Your postcode should not decide your prognosis, or limit your chances of living a good life.” she says. “Yet, having to travel for hours to a city just to access a hospital is the reality for many living in remote areas in Southeast Asian countries,”
Technology, she hopes, will be the great equaliser. “With WhiteCoat, we want to make sure you consult with a doctor in 15 minutes, regardless of your location in the world,” she says.
To ensure WhiteCoat was able to scale across such vastly different landscapes, Clara developed a core operating thesis: to scale the spine, but localise the soul.
The spine was WhiteCoat’s consistent operating backbone: its technology platform, clinical governance standards, data safeguards, and commitment to accessible care. The soul was what had to be shaped locally: relationships, regulation, culture, and the realities of how patients access healthcare in each market.
“We have local teams on the ground in each market, and work closely with local leaders, regulators, insurance providers, and other healthcare stakeholders to ensure cross-border business soundness,” she explains. “We have had to adapt our strategy market by market, while staying anchored to our mission of accessible healthcare.”
To address this issue, Clara’s team integrated thousands of localised pharmacies into the app’s backend infrastructure. This meant that when a patient connected to a doctor based in the same country, the platform automatically maps the patient’s coordinates, sends the prescription to the nearest local pharmacy, and manages the end-to-end logistics to deliver the medication straight to their door.
“The best infrastructure is completely invisible,” she emphasises. “The patient should never carry the burden of decoding the underlying complexities of the healthcare system. Their focus should be to show up (online), get cured, and exit the system.”
Clara’s ultimate vision is to build (virtual) bridges across these fragmented systems.
“If you happen to be in a remote area abroad and get stung by a jellyfish, you should be able to open our app, video-call your trusted doctor back in Singapore, have them examine the wound virtually, and automatically route the necessary treatment to the closest local pharmacy next to you,” she mentions.
“Healthcare is unnecessarily fragmented, and we want to change that.”
Working with the Singapore government
Building seamless care systems on such a widespread scale requires rewriting the rules of engagement with traditional institutions.
In 2018, when telehealth was still a novel and deeply questioned concept, Clara found herself putting her legal training to use in an unexpected way: working directly with Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH) to help build the nation’s first telehealth regulatory sandbox.
“We approached the Ministry with an open posture — to learn collectively about clinical responsibilities, requirements for patient safety measures, and grapple with new realities brought on by technological changes,” she reflects. “The geeky lawyer in me was incredibly excited.”
Clara’s work with the Ministry of Health helped her arrive at the realisation that not only did good regulation not impede innovation, it made the innovation more trustworthy. This thesis was a key component of her admissions essay for the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“I penned my essay on what mattered the most to me, a prompt which has remained unchanged for generations of applicants,” she shares.
In her essay, Clara talked about the hypothesis that the world was increasingly trapped in a binary state, with regulation and innovation occupying two opposing poles.
“My experiences in Singapore taught me it doesn’t have to be that way,” she says. “We can reject that binary, and create an environment where we learn together, test assumptions, and identify robust safeguards before a new model ever operates.”
This collaborative framework gave WhiteCoat an edge that resonated even at the frontier of Silicon Valley.
“People in the Bay Area frequently ask me about our sandbox experience with the Ministry of Health,” she notes. “That same principle is now shaping healthcare AI sandboxes: new technologies need room to be tested, but only within frameworks that earn public trust. What we stand for is a serious, ongoing dialogue between possibility and trust.”
This trust was hard-earned. In the early days of teleconsultations, the skepticism was palpable. Critics frequently questioned Clara, asking how a doctor could accurately diagnose without a physical examination, or worrying that the system would merely be abused by individuals looking to fabricate medical certificates (MCs).
“We didn’t shy away from those concerns,” Clara says. “We actively monitored those metrics alongside the Ministry to prove that this was the right, secure direction for the future of healthcare.”
Exploring artificial intelligence frontiers overseas
Eager to unlock the next frontier of her business, Clara decided to relocate to Stanford and the Bay Area. “Here, healthcare AI is moving at an unprecedented pace, and it’s important for me to leverage opportunities early on, and bring them back home,” she shares.
While she agrees that artificial intelligence will not replace doctors completely, it will resolve several areas of friction in the field of healthcare.
“WhiteCoat is leveraging artificial intelligence to automate workflows,” she admits. “For instance, we use large language models (LLMs) to triage whether a patient should opt for teleconsultation, or go in-patient, and process patient claims.”
Crucially, Clara looks at the technology through a dual lens.
Beyond optimising workflows, she notes that AI models are incredibly powerful for synthesizing vast numbers of data points from both patients and providers to identify behavioural patterns.
“Another area that I think is very important is the detection of fraud, waste, and abuse,” she points out. “AI helps us identify exactly who in the system is committing fraud—such as rendering more consultations than what is clinically necessary.”
But as she puts her lawyer hat back on, Clara is clear that this power requires strict boundaries. While she notes that AI is dramatically shifting the pace at which a lean team can analyse, communicate, and execute, her ultimate stance remains fiercely anchored in human oversight.
“Healthcare AI must be governed around safety, privacy, and absolute human accountability,” she insists. “The doctor is always involved in clinical governance.”
The alchemy of two worlds
Living in the Silicon Valley ecosystem has forced Clara to confront not just new technologies, but distinct cultural frameworks of ambition.
While her Asian upbringing and cultural background kept her deeply grounded and pragmatic, her exposure to Bay Area-modalities showed her refreshing new possibilities.
“People here are willing to imagine companies and technologies on a grander, global scale, which encourages me to experiment and converse with experts across different disciplines,” she shares.
For Clara, combining these two worlds is an incredibly potent mix.
“Asia lends discipline and structure to our imaginations,” she explains. “We can experiment as much as we like, but in order to build something that endures, you’ve got to put in the hard work”.
While the US has made her more ambitious about looking toward loftier goals, her Asian roots ensure she can deliver on those visions.
“What drives my work in Southeast Asia is attention to detail, discipline of working with institutions and partners, and a mindset of truly knuckling down and working hard to execute,” she affirms.
This synthesis of global imagination and local pragmatism has also fundamentally altered how she views opportunity — lessons she is passionate about sharing with younger Singaporeans who may hold themselves back due to ingrained patterns of risk aversion.
“As Singaporeans, we may be often culturally tuned to figure out exactly why something won’t work, or to say ‘no’ to ourselves before we even step into the ring,” Clara says. “We talk ourselves out of opportunities. But in order to grow, we need to discard our old operating playbook.”
She points to her own experiences on campus, such as cold-emailing the former CFO of Oracle, which ultimately unlocked a long-term professional mentor. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” she says. “If you ask, the absolute worst thing someone can say to you is ‘no’.”
Clara’s openness has resulted in several lucrative opportunities for her. “I’d love to open doors for my fellow Singaporeans, which is the true definition of homecoming for me,” she shares.
“The goal is to go out into the world to be changed, but to bring that transformative change right back home.”
About Clara
Currently based in the US at Stanford University, Clara Leow is leveraging frontier healthcare AI and systems leadership to learn how to lead at the scale of the global problems she cares about. She is dedicated to building the invisible, trusted healthcare infrastructure that her own family once needed — and that millions around the world still need today.
Connect with her here.
