Adam C. Powell, Ph.D. is President of Payer+Provider Syndicate, a management advisory and operational consulting firm focused on managed care, healthcare delivery, technology adoption, quality, and operations. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Health Care Management and Economics from The Wharton School, and advises healthcare organizations making strategic and operational decisions amid cost pressure, regulatory scrutiny, technological change, and constrained clinical capacity.
Dr. Powell’s work is directly relevant to the conference theme, although it challenges the premise that U.S. healthcare is approaching a discrete tipping point. His forthcoming article, “Structurally Expensive: The Durable Drivers of High U.S. Healthcare Spending,” argues that high U.S. healthcare spending reflects durable structural forces, including labor intensity, expanding medical capability, constrained physician supply, chronic disease burden, administrative complexity, and healthcare’s role as a major regional employment base. His perspective is that bold bets in healthcare should be judged by whether they can produce credible, locally executable improvements within a heavily constrained environment.
Dr. Powell’s research and teaching are grounded in consulting fieldwork. For instance, at HealthHelp, he ran an outcomes research program examining the impact of prior authorization on the quality of care. At Scheurer Health, he helped facilitate the merger of critical access hospitals into a multi-hospital system designed to preserve access to care while strengthening financial sustainability. As a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, he teaches “Introduction to Healthcare Delivery in the United States,” where his opening lecture examines the structural drivers of America’s persistently high healthcare expenditures.