Thursday, October 7, 1:00–1:45 p.m.

Regina E. Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She was the first woman to be tenured and chaired at Harvard Business School and the first to serve on a number of corporate boards. She is widely recognized for her innovative research in health care, including her early predictions of the unraveling of managed care and the rise of consumer-driven health care and health care focused factories, two terms that she coined. Money has dubbed her the “Godmother” of consumer-driven health care.

In early 2009, she predicted that the Congressional health care reforms will not pass, a prediction supported by the surprising election of a Republican Senator in 2010 who upended the Democrats’ unitary control of the Congress. Herzlinger supports universal coverage but felt that the Congressional plans for affecting it would not pass muster with American people.

All her health care books have been best sellers in their categories. Her newest book Who Killed Health Care? (NY: McGraw-Hill, 2007) was selected by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as one of the ten books that change the debate in 2008 and profiled in a full-page article in The Economist. Noted Merrill Matthews: “There are two powerful, well-respected and highly accomplished women who are driving the health care reform debate in the United States. One is  Hillary Clinton (D-NY), former first lady whose first attempt at dramatically reforming the U.S. health care system turned into a political disaster. The other is Harvard Business School economist Regina Herzlinger, one of the country’s most knowledgeable and articulate experts on the U.S. health care system, who has been pointing the way toward a ‘consumer-driven’ system for years.”

Her prior book, Consumer-Driven Health Care: Implications for Providers, Payers, and Policymakers (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004) received the 2004 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year award for History and Public Policy. Earlier research results were profiled by The Wall Street Journal (November 2002) and Managed Health Care Executive (June 2003, cover). Her July 2002 Harvard Business Review article, “Let’s Put Consumers in Charge of Health Care,” was an Amazon eBooks best seller. Market Driven Health Care (Boston: Perseus, paperback, 2000) is widely viewed as a transformational work.

Herzlinger has won the Consumers' for Health Care Choices Pioneer in Health Economics award, 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. She was inducted as an honorary fellow by the American College of Physician Executives. Modern Healthcare's readers selected her as among the “100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare” and Managed Healthcare named her one of health care’s top ten 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. She has delivered many keynote addresses at meetings of large health care and business groups and been selected by the students as one of the outstanding instructors of the Harvard Business School’s MBA Program.

Herzlinger has served on the Scientific Advisory Group to the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force and as a board member of many private and publicly-traded firms, mostly in the consumer-driven health care space, often as chair of the Governance and Audit subcommittees.

Herzlinger received her Bachelor’s Degree from MIT and her Doctorate from the Harvard Business School.

She has been married to Dr. George Herzlinger, her MIT classmate, for 44 years. Both of their children graduated from Harvard College. Her daughter is a Fellow in Endocrinology; her son, an Infantry Captain in the U.S. Army who served two tours in Iraq and obtained an MBA from the Harvard Business School, is in the medical device sector. The Herzlingers have three grandchildren. 

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