ReachMD

Matthew Holt has spent more than 15 years in healthcare as a researcher, generalist forecaster, and strategist. He's conducted in-depth studies about the healthcare market, information technology and policy for public release and private clients. He learned from some of the best in forecasting, policy and survey organizations, like Institute for the Future and Harris Interactive. These days though, he's best known as the opinionated founder and author of The Health Care Blog and as the co-founder of the Health 2.0 Conference. For that he's been mostly self-taught!

Mr. Holt's analysis spans a wide variety of issues concerning the finance and provision of healthcare in the industrialized world. He is a leading authority on the use of the Internet by patients and physicians and all things concerning Health 2.0. But he's also a frequent author and commentator on the overall US healthcare system. He monitors developments in policy and financing, delivery systems, and medical and information technology. In his consulting work, he helps IT vendors, payers, providers and medical technology companies create strategies to deal with their developing marketplace. Mr. Holt is also a frequent speaker at conferences, and strategic planning sessions, and is quoted frequently in the health care press.

Before becoming an independent consultant, Mr. Holt was vice president of strategy and business development at i-Beacon, a health care IT tools and data service provider that focused on the health plan, PBM and pharmaceutical markets. Prior to that, he was a vice president with Harris Interactive, where he conducted two landmark survey research studies, Computing in the Physician's Practice and The 10,000 Patients Study. He was also a major contributor to Harris' Strategic Health Perspectives project, which interprets the strategic implications of system change for major healthcare clients.

In the mid-1990s, Mr. Holt was a director at the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a think-tank in the Menlo Park, California. There, he was responsible for the Health Information Infrastructure Outlook project, a multi-client program that helped industry stakeholders assess the future of information technology in healthcare. He was a major contributor to all IFTF healthcare projects and led the research areas in healthcare financing, delivery, and information technology He was also the main author of the 1998 RWJF-sponsored Ten Year Forecast of Health and Health Care in America.

Prior to joining IFTF, he spent three years with the Comparative Health Care Policy Research Project at Stanford University's Asia-Pacific Research Center, and he has graduate degrees in health services research and political science from Stanford. Before coming to the United States, Mr. Holt lived in London, where he worked as a broker dealing in Japanese and US Treasury Bond futures. Allegations that he caused the 1987 stock market crash are mostly unfounded.