Chitra Akileswaran

About Chitra Akileswaran

Chitra Akileswaran is the Founder and Physician of Avaiyar Private Care, a concierge direct care practice for women's health with particular attention to the needs of South Asian women. She founded Avaiyar in 2026 after five years leading the physician enterprise at Alameda Health System, a large safety-net health system in Oakland, CA where she practiced as an Ob/Gyn beginning in 2015. She served as President and Chief Executive of Alameda Health Medical Group, a 300-provider multispecialty physician group, and most recently as the system's Chief Physician Executive.

She is also the co-founder and former Chief Medical Officer of Cleo, a health tech platform and employer benefit that supports working parents to grow their families and their careers. Cleo is venture-backed by top-tier Silicon Valley firms including Greylock Partners and NEA.

Chitra was born in Portland, OR to parents who emigrated from India and are naturalized citizens. They now live near her in Oakland, CA.

Chitra completed her MD and MBA degrees at Harvard in 2011. She received a BA in Community Health, magna cum laude, from Brown University. She moved to San Francisco in 2011 to complete her residency training in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Chitra has a long history of combining her interests in community-based work on health inequities with innovative approaches to care delivery. As a Fulbright Grantee to South Africa, Chitra studied female migrants' social, sexual, and health-related networks. She traveled to the Dominican Republic to address the needs of Haitian batey communities, and collaborated with a private bank in south India to create a maternity financing product for rural women. Chitra also spent some time at McKinsey & Company.

Through Avaiyar, she is hypothesis-testing what it means for physicians to own the practice of medicine once again — to be in deep, accountable relationships with patients, and to combine clinical depth with cultural fluency in service of South Asian women's health.