Interview with a Quality Leader: Regina E. Herzlinger on Consumer-Driven Healthcare

Regina E. Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration Chair at the Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA. She received her bachelor's degree from MIT and her doctorate from the Harvard Business School The first woman to be tenured and made a chair at Harvard Business School, she is widely recognized for her innovative research in healthcare, including her early predictions of the unraveling of managed care and the rise of consumer-driven healthcare and healthcare-focusedfactories, two terms that she coined. Money magazine has dubbed her the "godmother of consumer-driven healthcare." Herzlinger's research has been reported in numerous journals and business publications as well as in such recent books as Who Killed Health Care? and Consumer-Driven Health Care: Implications for Providers, Payers, and Policymakers. She has also won the American College of Healthcare Executives' Hamilton Book of the Year award (twice), the Healthcare Financial Management Association's Board of Directors award, and Management Accounting's research prize. Modem Healthcare readers have named her among the "100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare" each year since 2003, and the magazine also named her one of healthcare's top 10 thinkers. In recognition of her work in nonprofit accounting and control, she was named the first Chartered Institute of Management Accountants Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. She has served on the Scientific Advisory Group to the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force and on the boards of many private and publicly traded firms.