Karen Silgen is General Manager and Vice President of Virtual Care at UnitedHealthcare, where she focuses on developing the commercial strategy and virtual care programs for 25+ million consumers and hundreds of thousands of large and small businesses. In her role, Karen helps simplify members' health care experience including the ability to connect with a provider with the click of a button and to help improve access to quality care – no matter where people are. Prior to this role, Karen led the telehealth evolution as a result of COVID-19 for UnitedHealthcare’s provider networks by helping providers through best practices in telehealth billing, clinical scenarios, workflow management, technology procurement, digital security and more.

Karen has also served as a Vice President at Optum, where she developed programs that helped consumers with complex conditions such as end stage renal disease, sickle cell disease and infertility. Karen has a long and diverse history with UnitedHealth Group since 2005, and her career spans more than twenty years serving in leadership positions within product development and management, provider networks and marketing.

Recognized for her leadership and forward thinking, UnitedHealth Group awarded Karen the Innovation Leadership Shadow Award which is bestowed upon select leaders who make innovation a priority while demonstrating the company’s values. Karen was also selected by UnitedHealth Group executives to attend the Executive Development Program at Stanford in addition to numerous other innovation awards.

Karen earned a BA and MBA from the University of St. Thomas and is a certified Executive Coach through the Hudson Institute and the International Coaching Federation. Karen currently serves as a Board Member for the Epilepsy Foundation of Minnesota, serves as a mentor for executives at Menttium, and as a mentor to students from her alma mater.