Leadership
The Imperative Foundation is governed by a board of directors and supported by an advisory board. Both are being built for the scale and sensitivity of the Foundation’s mission.
Board of Directors
A Foundation is best served by a board of directors who are fully aligned to and proactive for the Foundation’s mission and bring skills and relationships that assist the Foundation in implementing its mission. Board members who meet the Foundation’s qualifications:
- Are committed and proactive advocates for the Foundation’s mission.
- Bring a regional or national presence, reputation, and recognition.
- Have substantive backgrounds in public health, health care delivery, health policy, health benefits (employer, union, or government), medicine, technology, finance, or related fields.
- Offer skills and networks that advance the Foundation’s operations and the execution of its mission.
The Foundation welcomes inquiries from individuals who meet these criteria or who are recommended by others. Please contact us at info@imperativefoundation.org.
Advisory Board
The Foundation is building an advisory board whose members will bring expertise and credibility to the Foundation’s work. Advisors will be drawn from medicine, health policy, health care delivery, technology, data privacy and governance, law, employer health benefits, and philanthropy. The advisory board will develop as the Foundation builds its national presence.
Inquiries from individuals with relevant backgrounds and a commitment to the Foundation’s mission are welcome at info@imperativefoundation.org.
Founder
Thomas Coleman
Tom Coleman is the founder and President of the Imperative Foundation. He has spent four decades working at the intersection of health care, technology, data privacy, and public policy.
He began his career in the health care group of a Fortune 100 industrial conglomerate, where he worked in marketing and came to understand the structural forces as to why U.S. health care was financially and socially unsustainable. He later cofounded a medical device company that developed ambulatory drug infusion technology and was subsequently acquired by Pharmacia (acquired by Pfizer).
He served as a board member and advisor to publicly held and privately held health care and information technology companies, and founded a company in the telecommunications sector.
In 2001 he published It’s Mine Not Yours, a book on personal data privacy, and conducted 46 radio interviews over five weeks in connection with the book’s release. The data privacy principles argued in that work — now twenty-five years old — are foundational to how the Foundation thinks about the governance of modern health data.
The same analytical framework that informed his data privacy work — that systemic problems require structural solutions, not incremental adjustments — has shaped the Foundation’s approach to health care reform. Coleman has spent four decades developing the case for reforming U.S. health care: the diagnosis of why the system fails, the architecture for a viable alternative, and the argument for a National Alliance capable of compelling Congress to act. He founded the Imperative Foundation to put that work into practice.