Wendy Everett Isn’t Waiting for Health Care to Change; She’s Making It Happen

“I was absolutely too young for that job,” she said, laughing. “They must have been desperate. But I loved every minute.”

It wasn’t simply a crash course in healthcare management; it was a revelation. She began to see that the individual problems she encountered there were symptoms of something larger: policies, structures, and systems that shaped care long before the patient walked through the door.

“I realized pretty quickly that I wanted to fix the system, not just treat the patient,” Everett said boldly.

That realization sent her to Boston for Harvard University’s pioneering master’s program in health policy and management. It was the early days of a field that is now standard. She said, at the time, it felt groundbreaking.

“It was like learning an entirely new language,” Everett said. “Suddenly, I could see where things fit and where they didn’t. It was thrilling.”

She stayed on to pursue a doctorate before returning to California with an expanded sense of what was possible. At the University of California San Francisco, she helped create the Bay Area’s first nurse practitioner training program, at a time when the role was still novel. She also secured funding to train nurses from Africa in women’s health, a practice that was unavailable in their home countries.

“These were issues no one had solved yet,” Everett said. “That’s always the work that attracts me.”

Her willingness to step into the unsolved became the foundation of her defining work. Two decades ago, she set out to do what many considered impossible: bring together hospital executives, biotech leaders, payers, policymakers, and academics to jointly evaluate innovations and influence national health policy.

“Normally, these people only interact when they disagree,” Everett said. “We asked them to check their company hat at the door but bring their expertise. And they did.”

As founding president and CEO of the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation (NEHI), she created a model grounded in impartial research, member-driven priorities, and candor. She focused on convening off-the-record meetings grounded in data, not ideology, with the goal of creating real change in the healthcare system.

“You can’t have people say one thing publicly and another privately,” she explained. “The only way to build trust was to do objective, rigorous research first and put real information on the table. That’s what we (NEHI) did.”

NEHI’s model soon influenced similar efforts nationwide. Under Everett’s leadership, NEHI accelerated the adoption of continuous glucose monitoring, strengthened research supporting HPV vaccine approval, elevated community health workers long before they were mainstream (this work was done in partnership with the Jewish Healthcare Foundation), and informed major funding and regulatory decisions.

“The healthcare system is messy,” she says. “But when you gather committed, creative people with real data and a shared purpose? Amazing things happen.”
After decades of leadership, research, and policy influence, Wendy’s impact is visible across the country—in clinics, legislatures, boardrooms, and homes where patients receive safer, smarter care.

Word spread. Articles appeared. The visibility helped legitimize the model, and soon similar organizations were popping up across the country.

“When you look around and see the approach you created become standard operating procedure,” Everett said with a pause. “That’s something I’m deeply proud of."

Despite decades of progress, Everett remains clear-eyed about the challenges ahead, especially in regard to patient safety and shared decision-making.

“We’ve increased awareness, but we’re nowhere near where we need to be,” she said. “Legislative progress has been painfully slow. Hospitals still have safety issues that are simply unacceptable.”

Everett notes that continued efforts to shape the healthcare system for the better have benefited from her decades-long partnership with Karen Wolk Feinstein, PhD, president and CEO of JHF.

The two first collaborated while developing Grantmakers in Health, where they discovered a shared passion for systemic change and a natural ability to navigate complexity together. They would also partner to help launch JHF’s SWERVE, which eventually led to the formation of the National Patient Safety Board Advocacy Coalition.

“Karen is ‘lightning in a bottle’: she’s a visionary and a uniquely creative person,” Everett said. “We both believed deeply in what we were doing and we combined our separate strengths to solve seemingly intractable problems.”

Their friendship and professional collaboration allowed them to tackle challenges in health care with trust and without ego, something Everett sees as essential in healthcare leadership.

When asked what gives her hope after decades working inside one of the most complex sectors in American life, Everett doesn’t hesitate.

“What gives me hope is that most people in health care are there for the right reasons,” Everett said. “They want to cure disease, ease suffering, and make the system better. When you work alongside people like that, there is always hope.”

She points to ideas she explored 15 years ago—hospital-at-home programs, remote patient monitoring—that are finally gaining national traction.

“For a long time, people thought those ideas were unrealistic. Now they’re becoming standard. That’s what persistence looks like. That’s what superheroes do.”