A Healthcare Expert Who Speaks Your Language.
Kathleen O' Connor
Frequently called “The Molly Ivans of Healthcare,” Kathleen uses wit and humor to explain a system totally out of control. She makes health care sound as easy and breezy as watching a ballgame.
Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, she pulls back the curtain to show who the players are, how the system works, why people are behaving as they do as well as what needs to be done to change it.
Kathleen is an activist and takes on an industry and makes it comprehensible, her book: The Buck Stops Nowhere: The Dark Ages of American Healthcare and How We Must Change it. It is a “Cliff Notes” guide to health care, but with levity and wit that leaves people churning through the pages.
Kathleen’s degrees are in Japanese and Comparative Governments, so she speaks three languages English, Japanese and Healthcare. She has been in the industry, but not of it, for over 20 years. Her experience as a marketing communications and community relations professional have led her all on trails with different companies all over the country. Her clients range in size from EDS to the Acupuncture Association of Washington, and everyone in between.
She is a regular contribution columnist for The Seattle Times on healthcare policy and politics, and consults with for profit and not-for-profit organizations on effective communications planning and community relations. She is a seasoned coalition builder, having built two statewide coalitions from scratch and started a national women’s non-profit organization as well.She is a graduate of the Leadership Tomorrow program in Seattle and was a member of the Community Leadership Program sponsored by the Kettering Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation and the National Association of Community Leadership Programs.