Deane Waldman

When I decided at age nine to become a doctor, I had no idea who would be my sickest patient. Over the next 45 years I did everything required to become a good pediatric cardiologist. I earned degrees from Yale and Chicago Med. I trained at institutions such as Mayo clinic, Northwestern and Harvard. I practiced in several states and became Chief of my Division. Over the last ten years, after acquiring an MBA at Anderson Schools in New Mexico, I refocused from caring for many small, fragile patients to one big terminal patient: Healthcare. At nine years of age, I never could have known who my most critical “patient” would be.

From having experienced every aspect and phase of healthcare, my perspective is unusually broad. I have practiced in both private and academic settings. As a Chief of Pediatric Cardiology and serving on national committees, I have observed the administrative machinery up close and personal. My research activities include over $3 million in grant support and well over 400 published papers, chapters, and monographs as well as four books. Not only have I been a doctor, researcher and administrator, I have also been a patient. On one particularly memorable occasion, an adverse effect from a procedure to fix a broken bone from bicycle racing landed me in an out-of-state hospital for 10 days worried that I wouldn’t have the use of my hand if I didn’t start responding to antibiotics and later, my insurance refused to pay the bills.

The combination of life and professional experiences with my knowledge of management and strategy makes me particularly qualified to help us understand why healthcare is sick and what we can do to begin its healing. www,WeCanFixHealthcare.info (not dot com) is my blog aimed at spreading the facts and starting a national conversation that will lead to a process to cure patient Healthcare.