Thomas Fisher is a board-certified emergency medicine physician at The University of Chicago and the author of The Emergency: A year of healing and heartbreak in a Chicago ER. For two decades he’s worked to improve healthcare, with experience in government, industry and company creation. In his 2022 Penguin Random House publication, he brings readers into the ER with him to reveal how society causes unnecessary suffering and then our health care system adds insult to our injuries. Dr. Fisher’s work to improve health care includes serving as a 2010-11 White House Fellow at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services where, as special assistant to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius he worked on ACA regulations and led the development of the HHS Action Plan for Reducing Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. He then joined Health Care Service Corporation as Vice President of Health Delivery Transformation. There Dr. Fisher implemented components of the Affordable Care Act for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Montana. These lessons led him to NextLevel Health a Medicaid managed care plan. As President, Dr. Fisher was responsible for standing up and growing the enterprise to serve eighty thousand Cook County Medicaid members. Dr. Fisher uses his broad experience to build interventions that promise to improve everyone’s health through company creation, board service and as a Venture Chair at Redesign Health. Dr. Fisher continues to deliver care at The University of Chicago Medical Center serving the same South Side Chicago community where he was raised. Thomas holds a Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College, a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a medical degree from The University of Chicago. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, Crain’s Chicago Business 40 under 40, and Fellow of the Aspen Institute’s Health Innovators Fellowship.