Since its founding in 1988, Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy has been a pioneer, investigating today’s critical policy issues and teaching those who will help shape tomorrow’s policy decisions.
One of the few medical schools with an academic department dedicated to health policy, HMS caught the attention of Joel Freedman, president of Paladin Healthcare Capital, LLC, and co-founder of Avanti Hospitals, LLC. “Harvard Medical School has been at the forefront of science and medicine for a couple hundred years now, but the fact that 30 years ago they had the foresight to include health care policy as part of their core work is truly visionary,” says Freedman.
The $21.3 million profit is a significant milestone for the challenged hospital, whose financial condition hit a low in fiscal 2014 with a $58 million loss. The university hired turnaround specialist Paladin Healthcare Capital, an El Segundo, California, company to take over Howard’s operations in October 2014.
A founding member of HMS’s Advisory Council on Health Care Policy, Freedman and his wife, Stella, are committed to transforming care delivery for underserved and disadvantaged communities. Believing that the School has the clinical and economic depth to help those who need it most within their own communities and care centers, the Freedmans are giving $100,000 to support the HealthCare Markets and Regulation Lab.
“This gift from Joel and Stella Freedman leverages much of the work that our department does, particularly with regard to disseminating our policy work in a variety of critical areas, including the care of the disadvantaged and the aging,” says Barbara McNeil, MD ’66, PhD ’77, AMP ’86, acting dean and the Ridley Watts Professor and chair of the Department of Health Care Policy at HMS.
“Under the strong leadership of Barbara McNeil and other distinguished faculty, including Michael Chernew, Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy has become a leading force in innovation at the policy and clinical level,” says Freedman. “It is a quite a privilege for me to be associated with a department that has the potential to achieve equal access to quality care for all.”
The Freedmans have also given a second $100,000 gift to support aging research at HMS, explaining that gaining a better understanding of the diseases that affect people in their later years may not only improve quality of life, but will have a profound impact on the greatest financial challenge facing the U.S. health care market: our aging population.
Source: The Benefactor, Harvard Medical School – Fall 2016 Issue