About Deb Gordon
Deb Gordon has spent her career trying to level the health care playing field for consumers and now advises start-ups and innovators trying to make health care better for everyone.
Deb is a seasoned executive specializing in health care innovation, strategy, marketing, communications, and growth. She has held a variety of executive roles in health care, including spending nearly a decade leading marketing for a health plan that served low- and moderate-income Massachusetts residents. As Chief Marketing Officer for that plan, she led efforts to enroll people in subsidized health insurance and tried hard to eradicate (or at least reduce) insurance jargon. In her first job after graduating from Brown University, she supported clinics in the federally funded Health Care for the Homeless program, and developed deeper appreciation for the interrelationship between health care needs and financial vulnerability.
In 2017, after the acquisition of a health technology turnaround she led, Deb became a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, she conducted extensive research on health care consumerism. Her research into health care consumerism -- in search of consumer-driven solutions to American health care woes -- spawned The Health Care Consumer's Manifesto.
Deb is an Aspen Institute Health Innovators Fellow and an Eisenhower Fellow. In 2013, she traveled to Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore to explore the role of consumers in high-performing health systems. Deb was recognized as a 2011 Boston Business Journal “40 Under 40” honoree, an award highlighting Boston’s most influential business and civic leaders. She volunteers as a mentor in the MIT Delta V and Boston University health care programs.
Deb earned a Bachelor of Arts in Biomedical Ethics from Brown University in Providence, R.I., and a Master of Business Administration with distinction from Harvard Business School.
She loves and hates to shop for everything. She enjoys traveling to places she’s never been, and visits markets wherever she goes. As the only one in her family willing to negotiate, she has practiced her skills haggling in many a far-away market.
Deb writing The Manifesto book proposal