Cara’s Story

The Beginning: From Academia to Application

Cara Bohon spent nearly a decade at Stanford, convinced she’d spend her career in academic medicine. Research and innovation drove her—developing interventions that could prevent or treat eating disorders with lasting results. Yet she became disillusioned when she saw that those same treatments rarely left the university walls. Unless a patient lived near Stanford and had the right insurance, the breakthroughs stayed trapped in research papers.

Her first step toward solving that gap was unplanned. A Stanford MBA student approached her about co-founding a startup to translate her body-image research into a digital program. Participants loved it, outcomes were strong, and the model was promising—until investor conversations revealed a hard truth: there was no payer mechanism for prevention. Even the most effective program couldn’t survive without reimbursement or a clear path to scale.

That failure reframed her understanding of innovation:

“In business terms, it was a product-market-fit problem,” she reflected. “It doesn’t matter if people love it. You need alignment among who uses it, who chooses it, and who pays for it.”

The Challenge: Redesigning Care That Can Scale

That insight propelled her into the private sector. Bohon joined Equip Health as one of its earliest clinical leaders, drawn to the company’s mission to expand access to eating-disorder treatment through a family-based virtual model. What impressed her most wasn’t just the model, it was how Equip built scalability directly into its DNA. The company trained its own clinicians in-house, pairing strong generalists with rigorous supervision and outcome tracking.

By embedding training and measurement into operations, Equip could hire great clinicians, teach them the specialty, and deliver consistent, evidence-based results. Bohon helped design systems to ensure clinical quality at scale, turning the shortage of specialized providers into an opportunity to create new ones.

The experience validated what she had suspected: the biggest barriers weren’t scientific, they were structural. Logistical constraints, payer incentives, and clinician training pipelines all dictated whether good care could reach patients.

The Evolution: Building the Next System

After years of building and scaling Equip’s model, Bohon recognized that her passion lay in the earliest stage of innovation, the “zero-to-one” phase. She also realized her expertise now extended beyond eating disorders: she knew how to build scalable, remote clinical systems from the ground up.

The next spark came from a deeply personal place. When her mother-in-law was diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer, Bohon witnessed the same access barriers in oncology that she had fought in mental health. Despite being treated at a top academic center with a psycho-oncology clinic, her mother-in-law waited months for care and received only six sessions. “She needed support during chemo,” Bohon recalled, “but by the time she got an appointment, that window had passed.”

The experience ignited a new mission: ensuring every cancer patient could access behavioral health support as part of standard care.

Through WELL’s Accelerator, Bohon began mapping the behavioral-oncology market: analyzing competitors, payer incentives, and delivery gaps. That groundwork made her ready when she met Carmen, an investor from Juxtapose Ventures, at a WELL networking event.

When Juxtapose decided to fund a new company in the space, Bohon was the clear fit to lead its clinical design.

The Breakthrough: Launching Protocol Health

In early 2024, Bohon co-founded Protocol Health, built around a simple but radical idea: behavioral health should be part of the cancer treatment protocol itself. Partnering with oncology clinics, Protocol embeds collaborative-care mental-health teams that provide measurement-based, integrated support from diagnosis through survivorship.

The company’s model draws directly from Bohon’s previous innovations—robust clinician training, outcome tracking, and payer-aligned design—repurposed for a new population. Clinicians who have never worked in oncology receive targeted education to reduce fear and stigma around cancer care, while patients gain accessible, longitudinal support.

In less than a year, Protocol Health has partnered with major oncology centers and established itself as a new standard for how behavioral health can be woven into specialty care.

What’s Next for Cara

Bohon continues to advise Equip while scaling Protocol Health nationwide. Her focus for the next 12–24 months is demonstrating measurable clinical and financial outcomes—reduced distress, improved adherence, and lower hospitalization rates—to make integrated behavioral care a non-negotiable part of oncology treatment.

Her vision is clear: a future where mental-health support isn’t an optional referral, but an automatic step in every treatment plan. “It should be as standard as chemo,” she says. “That’s the protocol.”