Michael Apkon

Michael Apkon, MD, PhD, MBA

Board Member

Biography

Dr. Michael Apkon, MBA, MD, PhD is the President of Sand Street Advisors, a healthcare management and strategy consultancy.

Dr. Apkon is a physician executive and physician scientist serving in C-level leadership roles at several top academic hospitals in the United States and Canada. He has a unique perspective on both the US system and the Canadian single payer system. He most recently served as the CEO at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. In that capacity, he led a 415 bed hospital staffed by 6,000 employees, scientists, medical staff, students and volunteers with a $1 BB budget. The Medical Center comprised a number of subsidiaries including the New England Quality Care Alliance (NEQCA), a network of 1800 physicians, as well as the Tufts Physician Organization.

Prior to his role at Tufts Medical Center, Dr. Apkon was the President and CEO at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto Ontario, recently ranked the world’s top children’s hospital. Dr. Apkon has also held senior executive and academic roles at top academic health science centers including Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs and the Chief Medical Officer for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) as well as roles at Yale University School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Health System including being the Vice President for Performance Management at the Yale New Haven Health System and the Vice President/Executive Director leading Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital. He has held faculty positions at the University of Toronto, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University’s School of Medicine and School of Management.

Dr. Apkon has extensive international management experience in both pediatric and adult-oriented healthcare, working with organizations and governments in the UK, Europe, China, Africa, and the Middle East as well as North America. He has consulted widely on business development, capacity development, and management systems as well as quality and safety improvement. He is an expert in strategy, systems development, and operations management, as well as the application of lean and high reliability organizational thinking to drive improvements in quality, safety, and efficiency.

In addition to deep expertise in healthcare strategy and management Dr. Apkon has considerable experience with corporate governance and with government relations. He has served as a Trustee for not-for-profit healthcare organizations and for other charitable organizations as well as serving as a Director for MaRS Innovation, a commercialization cooperative and incubator for the life sciences and technology industries in the greater Toronto area and as an advisor or director for several early-phase life sciences companies as well as Venture Capital funds. He also has considerable experience working with Provincial and State governments as well as with Federal and international governments.

Dr. Apkon has a BSc degree in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University as well as MD and PhD degrees from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and an MBA from the Yale School of Management where he taught healthcare management.