I met Kara when we spoke on the same program at Ohio State University.

Kara Trott is the founder and CEO of Quantum Health, Inc., a health plan management firm located in Columbus, Ohio. 

Kara entered the healthcare field in a roundabout fashion.  She began her career in the consumer behavior and strategic planning industry, where she led marketing and strategy projects for Fortune 500 consumer goods, retailing and services companies, including Citibank, Ford and Kmart.  Later, she earned her law degree and became a healthcare attorney, spending much of the early 1990s structuring scores of physician-hospital integration entities.

Her observations about what the industry was doing, and how little it resembled the understanding of consumer behavior and decision making found in other industries, led her to develop a program called “Coordinated Health/Care” that is used by self-insured employers to help employees navigate through healthcare and at the same time reduce unnecessary costs. 

As it has expanded across the country, this program has held employers’ cost trend to less than 5% over the past six years without cost-shifting, and has been featured in BusinessWeek, on Harvard University’s innovator’s website, and was named the Most Effective Benefit Design for Mid-Sized Employers in 2006 by Consumer Health World.  Kara received the Ernst & Young regional Entrepreneur of the Year award, is on the KeyBank Key for Women advisory board, and in 2005 was selected to meet with President Bush to share Quantum Health’s approach to the healthcare industry.