J.D. Kleinke

J.D. Kleinke is a former health care research executive, national health policy expert, and the author of three books and dozens of articles on the US health care system. In a business career spanning 30+ years, he was a leader in the emergence and rapid expansion of the health informatics industry, helping create Truven Health Analytics, HealthGrades, and several other health care information companies. He established Truven’s life sciences research business and directed the company’s analysis and publication of the impact of medical innovation on the US health care economy.

Mr. Kleinke’s first book, Bleeding Edge: The Business of Health Care in the New Century was a systematic critique of the wave of mergers and acquisitions in the 1990s that re-shaped American health care. His second book, Oxymorons: The Myth of a US Health Care System described in detail a health care system rebuilt around consumer choice, patient cost-sharing, mandated coverage, and exchange-based health plan selection – the cornerstones of what would become the Affordable Care Act (ACA). His third book, Catching Babies, is a medical novel about the training of OB/GYNs and culture of childbirth in the US and is currently in development with ABC as a TV series.

Mr. Kleinke was one of the earliest public advocates for the measurement of health care quality, the quantification-based accountability of health care providers, and the computerization of American medicine. From the mid-1990s through mid-2000s, he published several journal-length articles on these subjects in Health Affairs. This work – in particular his “Dot-Gov: Market Failure and the Creation of a National Health Information Technology System” – was used by policymakers to formulate legislation mandating and funding the adoption of electronic medical records by US health care providers, culminating with the Health Information Technology Act of 2009 (HITECH). Kleinke was also an early public supporter of the Affordable Care Act. While a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), he was the first to publish in the national media the conservative origins of the health care law, most notably his “The Conservative Case for Obamacare” in The New York Times.

Mr. Kleinke has served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Merck and Medtronic and the Editorial Boards of Health Affairs and Managed Healthcare Executive. His work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, JAMA, the British Medical Journal, Modern Healthcare, Barron’s, and Forbes.

He has provided guest lectures on the history, structure, economics and culture of the US health care system at the Harvard School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University School of Business, University of Michigan School of Medicine, and Grand Rounds at teaching hospitals around the US.

Mr. Kleinke holds a MS in Business from the Johns Hopkins University and a BS in Economics from the University of Maryland.