Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/717576
90 17 of the Most Interesting People in Healthcare By Mary Rechtoris and Laura Dyrda H ere are 17 people who have had a huge influence on the healthcare system in the United States. Sylvia Mathews Burwell. Ms. Burwell spent time as the director of the Office of Manage- ment and Budget and President of the Walmart Foundation before being sworn in as the Sec- retary of Health and Human Services in June 2014. She oversees more than 77,000 employ- ees. During her time with OMB she worked with Congress on budget and appropriations issues and oversaw the development of the President's second term management agen- da. Ms. Burwell supports President Barack Obama's healthcare law, having become the public face of ObamaCare, according to Busi- ness Insider. She is committed to moving the ACA forward despite calls from the Republi- can Party and presidential nominee Donald Trump to repeal the law. Jonathan Bush, MBA. Mr. Bush is the CEO, co-founder and president of Watertown, Mass.- based athenahealth. Mr. Bush is the cousin of former U.S. president George W. Bush and nephew of U.S. President George H. W. Bush. In 2000, Mr. Bush raised more than $10 mil- lion in venture capital for athenahealth, which successfully launched an IPO in 2007. Athen- ahealth's mission is to "create the healthcare internet," with Mr. Bush viewing his company as a disrupter, he told Institutional Investor last year. Athenahealth has thrived since inception with its market cap being 7.3 times company sales, while the industry average market cap totals 4.7 times company sales. Mr. Bush ran in the 2007 Boston Marathon and was featured in the Nova Marathon Challenge, a T.V. series which followed runners for one year through- out their training for the Boston Marathon. Toby Cosgrove, MD. Dr. Cosgrove has served as CEO and president of Cleveland Clinic since 2004. He has been a Cleveland Clinic team member since 1975. Dr. Cosgrove performed the first minimally invasive mitral valve surgery via a worldwide web network in 1996. As CEO of Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Cosgrove has main- tained patient care as the number one priority and distributed around 40,000 buttons on his first day as CEO which stated "Patients First." Earlier this month, Dr. Cosgrove published an article on LinkedIn detailing why empathy must drive healthcare organizations. He wrote, "We all know that healthcare is changing. Medi- cal leadership is also changing. e days of arro- gance, isolation and opacity are gone. Honesty, transparency and collaboration have taken their place. Trust is essential. So is empathy. Above all, we must have humility." Michael Dowling. Mr. Dowling is the presi- dent and CEO of New York-based Northwell Health, a large U.S. heath system with annu- al revenue totaling $9.5 billion. Growing up in Limerick, Ireland, Mr. Dowling earned his master's degree from Fordham University and has various honorary doctorates from Univer- sity College Dublin, Hempstead, N.Y.-based Hofstra University and Dowling College in Oakdale, N.Y. Prior to assuming his role as CEO in 2002, he was the senior vice president of Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Mr. Dowling was in the New York State government for 12 years and held roles as state director of health, education and human services. He was also the deputy secretary to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. He is the chair of the Healthcare Institute as well as an Institute of Medicine of the National Academies member. Judy Faulkner. Founder and CEO of Madi- son, Wis.-based Epic Systems, Ms. Faulkner launched the leading health IT company with $6,000 she raised from her own funds as well as from her family members and colleagues. Forbes ranked Ms. Faulkner as the most suc- cessful female technology company founder in May 2016, with her net worth totaling $2.6 billion. As head of Epic, Ms. Faulkner remains dedicated to her customer base. In March 2016, she told Becker's Hospital Review, "I would say if I have one driving force, it is to keep com- mitments to our customers. When I have cor- porate philosophy class with all the new folks who come into Epic, we go over the philoso- phies behind Epic. at is the central message: To keep commitments to customers." David T. Feinberg, MD, MBA. Dr. Feinberg is the president and CEO of Geisinger Health Sys- tem. Triple board certified in child and adoles- cent psychiatry, adult psychiatry and addiction psychiatry, Dr. Feinberg previously served as CEO of UCLA Hospital Systems, where he led the efforts to improve patient care. He spear- headed his effort to revamp UCLA's mission. Once UCLA diverted resources from marketing to focus on one patient at a time, its patient sat- isfaction scores placed the hospital in the 99th percentile. In November 2015, Dr. Feinberg lead the launch of ProvenExperience, a program which offers patients refunds if hospital staff do not meet patient expectations regarding kind- ness and compassion. Dr. Feinberg said, "What matters to me is that every patient is satisfied with their treatment and so I started thinking, 'What is our guar- antee? What is our refund?' We need to be disruptive to move the practice of providing great patient experience forward and so the decision was made to give unsatisfied patients their money back." e Washington Post called the ProvenExperience, "the most unexpected hospital billing development ever." Dr. Feinberg also spearheaded the launch of ProvenCare, a performance-based bundled payment system. Aer implementing the ProvenCare, the hospital had a 10 percent re- duction in readmission, shorter length of stay and reduced hospital charges for coronary ar- tery bypass gra surgery. Atul Gawande, MD. Dr. Gawande practic- es general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and serves as a professor in the department of health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is the executive di- rector of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization with the goal of making surgery safer globally. In addition to his clinical work, Dr. Gawande is a prolific writer, author- ing several books on the New York Times best- sellers list including e Checklist Manifesto and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He has been a staff writer for e New Yorker since 1998 and has earned two National Magazine Awards. In one of his more contro- versial articles, Dr. Gawande made the analogy between healthcare and the Cheesecake Factory processes for efficiency. "I always get a certain amount of flak for the things I write, and it was a little bit provoca- tive," Dr. Gawande told Medscape. "I'm saying, here is the fast-food chain, medium-ly based fast food chain — they serve you at a table. And I was saying that this place runs better than healthcare." John D. Halamka, MD, MS. Dr. Halamka is the chief information officer at Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess. A practicing emergency physi- cian, Dr. Halamka is the chairman of the New En- gland Healthcare Exchange network and co-chair of the HIT Standards Committee. Outside of the health IT world, Dr. Halamka runs a family farm where he cares for alpacas, llamas and ducks. Af- ter joining Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 1998, he launched an effort to develop securely web-enabled clinical information systems with CareWeb, which became the primary platform among Massachusetts hospitals for sharing infor- mation. In an interview with Wachter's World, Dr. Halamka said, "I'm in this field not for fame and fortune but to make a difference. It's pos- sible to make a difference, but you may want to do it in a different context than being in a healthcare delivery organization. Can you cre- ate an app that will revolutionize patient care?