Pooja Ika
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Pooja Ika is the founder and CEO of eternalHealth. At the age of 24, she is the youngest woman to launch a new Medicare Advantage Health Plan in the United States.

A 2019 Babson College graduate, Pooja founded eternalHealth to deliver high quality, affordable care to her fellow Massachusetts residents. Committed to doing things the right way, eternalHealth was built on trust, transparency, and integrity. Pooja has been working tirelessly to be make healthcare accessible for all, while also acting as an advocate and educator for her members. Driven to make eternalHealth a catalyst for change in the health insurance industry, Pooja is not scared to tackle what some might call impossible. Ika states, “Nothing is impossible, with the right team and the right thought process, anything is possible. I wake up every morning, grateful to have the opportunity to do what I love and be an advocate for our members.”

Although she officially launched eternalHealth in later half of 2020, Pooja has been surrounded by the healthcare industry for as long as she can remember. Born and raised in Massachusetts, her mother is a primary care physician in Worcester, MA and her father is a healthcare entrepreneur. She credits her father for instilling in her a passion for entrepreneurship, and her mother for her love for healthcare and her commitment to always placing the member at the center of every decision eternalHealth makes. This passion and commitment to make a positive difference has shaped her into who she is today: a resilient, fearless, and innovative leader.

Page Last Updated On: September 27, 2022
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Tom Cunniffe

Tom Cunniffe

Director of Operations 

Tom Cunniffe comes to eternalHealth with over 20 years of healthcare operations’ experience, having held leadership positions in Call Center, Enrollment, Credentialing, UAT and Reimbursement teams. Tom has worked with Medicaid, Commercial and Medicare lines of business and has consistently built teams who are metrics driven with proven successful outcomes. Making sure our business strives for an efficient, best-in-class customer experience is at the center of Tom’s philosophy.

Tom has a bachelor’s degree from Fordham University and a master’s in business administration from University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Tom Lawless

Tom Lawless

Chief Financial Officer

Tom Lawless has spent the past 20+ years building, sustaining, and growing new healthcare-related programs that balance fiscal responsibility & prudence with creativity & innovation, focusing on models of care that are novel, person-centered, and improve the social welfare of those who are served. He is very excited to continue doing so in his role as the Chief Financial Officer of eternalHealth.

Tom comes to eternalHealth from a not-for-profit, member-centric, health insurance cooperative. He helped the company continuously strive toward its dual goals of thriving financially, while keeping members at the very epicenter of its mission and service model. While there, Tom also spearheaded the creation of a brand new private, charitable foundation, which will be meaningfully giving back to those in need in the surrounding communities for years to come. Previously, Tom worked in the finance department of a successful hospice that provided high-quality care to persons experiencing their unique and poignant end-of-life journeys, assuring that the appropriate financing was always available. Tom’s career began as a civil servant in the Wisconsin Medicaid program, where he helped to create a program that expanded the institutional entitlement to care into home and community-based settings. Starting with only a blueprint in hand, the program now serves more than 57,000 frail elders and disabled adults and is considered a national model. Growing into a senior leadership role, Tom was a key architect of an innovative financing model, through which the public and private sectors successfully collaborated to better the lives of persons in great need.

Tom holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, with additional graduate work in economics completed at the University Wisconsin-Madison.

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