About J.D.

J.D. Kleinke is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a pioneering health care information entrepreneur, medical economist, author, and business strategist.

Instrumental in creating four health care information organizations, he has served as a health care business columnist for The Wall Street Journal, advised both sides of the political aisle on pragmatic approaches to health policy and legislation, and long been a leading advocate for a smarter, data-driven, post-partisan health care system.

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.

J.D. helped establish Health Grades Inc., a publicly traded health care information company based in Denver, which he served as vice chairman of the board until 2008.

From 2007 until 2011, Mr. Kleinke was the CEO of Mount Tabor, a Portland-based health care strategy and information technology consulting company founded to help Google, Microsoft and its partners build, test and launch systems for the transformation and movement of electronic medical information.

In 2004, Mr. Kleinke established the Omnimedix Institute, the non-profit that helped define, lead and safeguard the way for patients’ access to their medical information on the Web.

During the 1990s, he was a founding executive of HCIA/Solucient, the nation’s first pure-play health care information company. Before HCIA/Solucient, J.D. was director of corporate programs at Sheppard Pratt Health System, the largest private psychiatric hospital in the U.S. While at Sheppard Pratt - and only 28 years old at the time - Mr. Kleinke developed and managed the nation’s first provider-based, managed mental health care system.

J.D.'s books, Bleeding Edge: The Business of Health Care in the New Century and Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System are required reading in many physician-executive MBA programs and health administration graduate programs in the U.S. His third book, Catching Babies - a novel about the training and culture of obstetrician/gynecologists - was published in 2011.

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.