Wendy Lynch

Vice President, Strategic Development
HCMS Group

Wendy D. Lynch, Ph.D. has led a successful 20-year career as an educator, researcher and consultant in the world of healthcare management. Most recently, Lynch took on the responsibility of vice president for strategic development for HCMS Inc. and research director for the Health as Human Capital Foundation. Both companies,both part of the HCMS Group, are dedicated to helping business owners and leaders, policy makers and consumers make better decisions in healthcare and human capital investments; a commitment and position Lynch has held for more than five years.

 

Today, as vice president and director of research with HCMS, Lynch is passionate about finding ways to make business and healthcare efficient and effective. Along with HCMS founder and president, Dr. Harold H. Gardner,Lynch is the co-author of Aligning Incentives, Information, and Choice: How to Optimize Health and Human Capital Performance. The book not only provides thought-provoking content but also emphasizes the power of individual choice in an environment of varying incentives and information.

 

As an honors graduate of the University of Colorado in 1982, Lynch earned a B.A in Physical Education, then went on to pursue a Masters in Measurement and Exercise Physiology and a Ph.D. in Research and Evaluation Methodology from the University of Colorado.

 

Lynch joined the business sector in 1986 as a program manager for research and evaluation at the Center for Corporate Health Promotion, where she designed and conducted research pertaining to the implementation and evaluation of a comprehensive corporate health promotion program and a 3,600-member exercise program.During the same time period, she served as a faculty member in the School of Public Health at Yale University.After spending three years dedicated to these efforts, Lynch became an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. At both academic posts, Lynch lectured and mentored doctoral students and conducted research in the areas of primary care, health promotion, and preventive medicine.

 

Lynch started her own consulting company, Lynch Consulting, Ltd., in 1996, specializing in evaluation and demand management. In 1998, she joined William M. Mercer, Inc. as a senior consultant of health management.She left William M. Mercer in 2002 and spent the next three years expanding her own consulting company, which focused specifically on health and productivity as well as program evaluation.

 

Lynch stepped in as director of research for the Health as Human Capital Foundation in 2004, just a year after Harold H. Gardner, M.D. founded the company. She is pleased to have gained so much experience over the years as she has applied her skills in research design and evaluation to several pivotal studies in the fields of health management, productivity assessment and human capital management.

 

Founded in 2003, the HCMS Group Human Capital Management Model emphasizes the importance of integrated information in understanding economic incentives and other cost drivers needed for a market solution to the current health benefits cost and quality problem. For more information, please visit www.hhcfoundation.org.