Fabiola Molina, MD, MHS, is a practicing hospitalist and assistant professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine and Yale New Haven Hospital. An immigrant from Mexico, her experiences straddling 2 worlds, while attempting to navigate with her family the complicated safety-net system for health care in Texas, were key influences to her ardent focus on health equity.
Throughout February, The American Journal of Managed Care® will be introducing you to the next generation of great thinkers and groundbreakers in health care. They represent the fields of oncology, public health, and managed care and are fast making their marks as key opinion leaders in their fields.
Fabiola Molina, MD, MHS, is a practicing hospitalist and assistant professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine and Yale New Haven Hospital. An immigrant from Mexico, she is the first in her family to go to college, during which she participated in PRIME (Programs in Medical Education) while attending medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. Her experiences straddling 2 worlds, while attempting to navigate with her family the complicated safety-net system for health care in Texas were key influences to her ardent focus on health equity.
“A lot of the mentors that I had—who had what from the outside look like these incredible careers that I wanted to model after—for a lot of them, the common thread was, “What's your why?” Whether it's personal experiences, whether it's experiences that people have had taking care of patients, I think going back to that in moments of uncertainty is what keeps you on the path and what will eventually help prevent some of that burnout that can creep in in such a challenging career,” she underscores. “Whatever that means for a young person, having their trusted network, having their why written in their journal, or however they want to keep the presence of mind for that is what I would recommend.”
We hope you enjoy getting to know Dr. Molina and uncovering the motivation behind her passion for health equity, her interests in helping underserved populations receive the care they need and deserve, and how her lived experiences were the jumping off point for her career in medicine.
For our previous interviews in this series, you can click on any of the names below:
Managed Care Reflections: A Q&A With A. Mark Fendrick, MD, and Michael E. Chernew, PhD
December 2nd 2025To mark the 30th anniversary of The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), each issue in 2025 includes a special feature: reflections from a thought leader on what has changed—and what has not—over the past 3 decades and what’s next for managed care. The December issue features a conversation with AJMC Co–Editors in Chief A. Mark Fendrick, MD, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design and a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and Michael E. Chernew, PhD, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and the director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
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