Regina E. Herzlinger

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, a term that she coined. Money has dubbed her the “Godmother” of consumer-driven health care.

Her views on health care were most recently profiled in an interview with Managed Care journal (July 18, 2011), HealthBlawg.com’s interview Health Care Reform and Other Health Care Innovations (July 7, 2011), and in Brazil’s Gestão em Saúde Diagnóstico (Jan/Feb/Mar, 2011). She is currently completing two text and cases books on Innovating in Health Care, one for the life sciences and the other for health care insurance and delivery.

All of her health care books have been best sellers in their categories. Market Driven Health Care (Boston: Perseus, 2000) is widely viewed as a transformational work for its introduction of the concepts of health care focused factories, which provide integrated care for diseases and disabilities, and the need for a governmental health care transparency agency. Her latest book, Who Killed Health Care? (NY: McGraw-Hill, 2007) was profiled in a full-page article in The Economist. Her prior book, Consumer-Driven Health Care: Implications for Providers, Payers, and Policymakers (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), received a research award and its research results were profiled by The Wall Street Journal (November 2002) and Managed Health Care Executive (June 2003, cover).

Regina Herzlinger briefed the Majority of the U.S. House of Representatives on health care at their annual retreat. She 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 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 students as one of the outstanding instructors of the Harvard Business School’s MBA Program.

Professor 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.

Regina 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 46 years. Both their children graduated from Harvard College. Her daughter is an Endocrinologist; her son, a business man, is a decorated Infantry Captain in the U.S. Army who served two tours in Iraq, and later graduated from Harvard Business School.