Stephen Klasko is President and CEO of Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health. He has led Jefferson to become one of the fastest growing academic health centers in the nation with recent mergers to create one of the nation’s largest delivery systems as well as a comprehensive university. In 2018, Dr. Klasko was named one of the “most creative people in business” by Fast Company for making large-scale healthcare personal.
In August 2017, he was named by Modern Healthcare as one of America’s “100 Most Influential” individuals in healthcare. Also that month, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital was named to US News and World Report‘s Honor Roll as the 16th best hospital in the U.S. Early in 2017, he was named the nation’s 24th most influential physician executive by Modern Healthcare, and among 100 Great Healthcare Leaders by Becker’s Hospital Review.
An advocate for bipartisan transformational change in health care, President Klasko is author of 2016’s We Can Fix Healthcare in America: The Future Is Now, and editor in chief of the journal Healthcare Transformation. Dr. Klasko has extensive experience as a keynote speaker, moderator and panelist. He’s had the opportunity to speak with such icons as Malcolm Gladwell, Jack and Suzy Welch, and other incredible minds from the world of medicine, business and innovation.
A native of Philadelphia, President Klasko returned in 2013 to lead as a change agent for Jefferson. Since then, Jefferson has doubled its employees to 30,000, grown from three hospitals to 13 and over 2-million patient visits, and now draws revenues of $5.1 billion. In 2015, he led the merger of Jefferson with Abington Health in one of the nation’s first shared-governance, “hub and hub” academic medical center mergers. He has also attracted Aria Health System and Kennedy Health System, two premier community academic medical centers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, to join this unique governance system.
In 2017, Jefferson merged with Philadelphia University, a top ten design university in suburban Philadelphia, creating a single comprehensive university dedicated to professional careers.
He is a professor of OB-GYN at Sidney Kimmel Medical College and the founder of Spirit of Women, a grass roots women’s health empowerment organization now utilized at over 150 hospitals and health systems. After the conclusion of his MBA at the Wharton School, he received a $1.5 million grant to investigate the selection and education biases that affect a physician’s ability to negotiate and handle change, which resulted in his previous book, The Phantom Stethoscope: A Field Manual for an Optimistic Future in Medicine.
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He previously served as CEO of USF Health and dean of the Morsani College of Medicine at University of South Florida. He is married to Colleen Wyse, a fashion publishing executive and founder of Philadelphia Trunk Show, and has three children and one grandchild.
No matter the audience, Dr. Klasko has proven time and time again to be inspiring. He treats every event like the performance of his life providing an entertaining presentation of brilliant insights from a mind and heart committed to a brighter, more patient centric future.
