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Dr. 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 healthcare, including her early predictions of the unraveling of managed care and the rise of consumer-driven healthcare and healthcare-focused factories, two terms that she coined. Moneymagazinehas dubbed her the ‘godmother' of consumer-driven health care.

She was profiled most recently by BusinessWeek in "If Health Care Were Run Like Retail." Her healthcare books have been best sellers in their categories, including her newest book, Who Killed Health Care? (NY: McGraw-Hill, 2007), which was selected by the United States Chamber of Commerce as one of the ten books that changed the debate in 2008. Dr. Merrill Matthews, director of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, noted, "There are two powerful, well-respected and highly accomplished women who are driving the health care reform debate in the United States. One is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, 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.

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 College of Physician Executive. Modern Healthcare's readers regularly 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 in Scotland. In addition, she has delivered many keynote addresses at annual meetings of large health care and business groups and been selected as one of the outstanding instructors of the Harvard Business School MBA Program.

Dr. Herzlinger has served on the Scientific Advisory Group to the United States 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.

Dr. Herzlinger received her bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her doctorate in economics from the Harvard Business School.