J.D. Kleinke is a medical economist, author, health care business strategist, and entrepreneur. He has been instrumental in the creation of four health care information organizations, served on the Boards of several public and privately held health care companies, and advised both sides of the political aisle on pragmatic approaches to health policy and legislation. He is currently a Wall Street Journal Expert Panelist, a mentor to several health care start-ups, and a regular contributor to The Huffington Post.
Companies like Aetna, Amgen, Cigna, Eli Lilly, Genentech, Google, Medtronic, Microsoft, Novartis, Pfizer, United Healthcare and Wellpoint have benefited from his business, product and technology strategy services, which he provides to both start-ups and established companies.
In 2012, he was a Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Prior to joining AEI, Kleinke was Co-Founder and CEO of Mount Tabor, a health care information technology development company created in 2007 to plan, design, build, test and launch systems for the transformation and movement of electronic medical information. In 2004, he founded the Omnimedix Institute, a 501-c-3 charitable organization dedicated to the development and promotion of technologies that give patients and their families safe and secure access to, and control over, their own medical data. Prior to creating Omnimedix, Kleinke helped establish Health Grades Inc., which he served as Executive Vice Chairman of the Board until 2006.
In the 1990s, Kleinke helped grow HCIA / Solucient from a niche hospital data analysis firm into a pioneering, publicly-traded health information products and services company. Before joining HCIA, he was Director of Corporate Programs at Sheppard Pratt Health System, the largest private psychiatric hospital in the U.S. While at Sheppard Pratt, Kleinke developed and managed - at the age of 28 - the nation’s first provider-based, managed mental health care system.
Kleinke is the author of two books on the U.S. health care system - Bleeding Edge: The Business of Health Care in the New Century (1998) and Oxymorons: The Myth of a US Health Care System (2001) - and Catching Babies (2011), a novel that explores the training and culture of obstetric medicine. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Barron’s, Health Affairs, JAMA, the British Medical Journal, Modern Healthcare, Managed Healthcare, Forbes.com, The Health Care Blog, RealClearMarkets, and The Huffington Post.
For both consulting clients and conference audiences across the health care, medical, corporate, policy and patient communities, J.D. provides a pragmatic and often humorous look at the collision of government reform, increasing patient economic empowerment, and emerging information and medical technologies – and their combined effects on the future challenges and opportunities for today’s health care organization.