The 2016 MedTech Boston 40 Under 40 Healthcare Innovators

Neel Shah, MD, MPP
Founder at Cost of Care, Associate Faculty at Ariadne Labs
Dr. Neel Shah knew he wanted to be a doctor from the time he was 18 years old. As a medical student he was inspired by his capacity to help others as a doctor; however, it was also during his training that he encountered a problem he couldn’t ignore. “There was one consistent health system failure that I found particularly striking,” says Shah. “Even though we were providing the most expensive services that most Americans will spend money on in their lifetime, nobody could tell anyone what anything costs.”

Shah took a leave of absence to study the economics of the healthcare system at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He found that economists and policymakers didn’t know how healthcare was actually delivered.“I decided that in my career as a clinician, I wanted to find ways to bridge this gap,” Shah says.

Shah went on to write “Understanding Value-Based Healthcare” to help clinicians understand how to care for patients in an era of value-based care, and co-found Costs of Care, a global NGO that aims to find ways to deliver better healthcare at a lower cost. “We achieve this mission through advocacy—building coalitions, strategically timing and framing core messages,” he says.

In addition to being the executive director of Costs of Care, Shah is a practicing obstetrician-gynecologists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School, and associate faculty at the Ariadne Labs for Health Systems Innovation, where he works to “create scalable healthcare solutions that deliver better care at the most critical moments in people’s lives.”