Mark Smith, who began his career at Penn as a RWJF Clinical Scholar and MBA student before going on to become one of the country’s leading authorities on health care innovation and reform, was the speaker (above) at LDI’s 2018 Charles C. Leighton Memorial Lecture.

Smith, MD, MBA, is a Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and founder of the California Health Care Foundation that has funded more than $720 million in health system delivery-related research.

Penn alumnus
As a 1980s’ Wharton School MBA student, LDI Senior Fellow, and RWJF Clinical Scholar, Smith became the founding Director of the Philadelphia Commission on AIDS at the very dawn of that disease’s widespread national outbreak.

In the intervening years between Penn and UCSF, Smith was a top executive at the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, served as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Public Health, and was a Senior Policy Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. 

Fully modernizing health care
Entitled, “Patient Engagement and 21st Century Health Care,” Smith’s Leighton lecture focused on the widespread confusion over the exact meaning of the term “patient engagement” that has become such an integral part of the ongoing national health care reform discussion. In his remarks, he suggested a number of sweeping, fundamental changes that would be necessary to fully modernize as well as ultimately control the costs of health care delivery.

The Charles Leighton Memorial Lecture is one of a series of such events that brings top health services and policy researchers from across the country to speak at LDI. The annual event honors the memory of the late Charles C. Leighton, MD, Senior Vice President of Administration, Planning and Science Policy at Merck & Co.