Care Triad

About

I am a healthcare consultant with a special interest in empowering patients to participate in their own care.  I am fascinated by ways to bring the knowledge and experience of doctors, the values and preferences of patients and the data together to help patients make the best healthcare decisions for them (I call it the Care Triad).

I’ve had a pretty quirky career. I started out on a traditional path:  biology major in college, followed by medical school, internal medicine residency and fellowship in infectious diseases (including 2 years as a laboratory researcher). The next step was supposed to be a job as a physician scientist but it occurred to me that I didn’t like being a researcher! So I took a  job as a hospital based infectious diseases specialist despite the fact that the chairman of my fellowship program told me I was throwing my career out the window (he was the first of many people to do so over the years).

I loved clinical practice but three factors ultimately led me to move on: the death of my brother in his 20s (and seeing just how broken our healthcare system is from the patient perspective), a lecture on “total quality management” (the business trend at the time which hooked me on applying business principles to healthcare) and the rise of the AIDS epidemic (which taught me about healing without curing).

Since then, I’ve been a managed care medical director, worked on several health internet startups, written and edited for both patients and medical professionals and have done product development, strategy, business development and relationship management. Working as a consultant has allowed me to pull it all together and now I am looking forward to sharing my experiences and insights.