Once in a while you go to a conference and just immediately connect with what’s being shared and who is sharing it. Christi Shaw, a life sciences leader and patient advocate / 30 years in pharma (and more), was one of those moments on Saturday. Why? She’s a leader who just gets it and acts on it - she gets that you can care for the patient, really care for and about patients, AND meet business goals (and in her case, well exceed them). It’s a balancing act for sure - no one is arguing that, but the latter should not replace the former; it’s just ethics.
Having worked in the business of healthcare since 1992 myself and having seen the progression to more business, more integrations, more focus on the patient as customer, more mergers & acquisitions, more tech as the research not just propelling research, you name it, I appreciate her representation of making that balancing act work while in leading roles at companies like Kite, a Gilead company, Lilly, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, to name some, and near and dear to her heart, More Moments More Memories Foundation.
Mike Pykosz joined us at Kellogg as well! He's Oak Street Health's CEO & co-founder + EVP & President at CVS Health, and more. Since Oak Street Health started here in Chicago and created a workable and successful value based care model, with insights that make sense for care focused on the whole-person, long-term health within the U.S. health system, and having professional and personal interests in VBC and 4 parents/in-laws using Medicare, I’ve had an eye on those companies and the CVS/Aetna deal through the years. I appreciated his, we just built it attitude, because it takes the change makers to just go for it, and the fact that his response to competition in the market was something like (paraphrased), I hope there are a lot of game changers - let’s figure out effective ways to make this (value based care with long-term healthy results) work, and model it for everyone else. For me, it's the Kellogg spirit right there - the "high impact/low ego" way.
Shoutout to the student-created, student-run, sold out, Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management Business of Healthcare Conference 2024 -- way to create another entire day of actionable insights in the business of healthcare, with inspirations like Christi as the opening keynote and Mike as the closing one, and so many thoughtful healthcare business leaders in between who are making both care and business impact! Kellogg Healthcare Club Craig Garthwaite
Digital marketing leader @ Premera Blue Cross
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