Speaker
David Shulkin, MD
The Honorable David J. Shulkin was the ninth secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in the Trump administration and the VA’s undersecretary of health in the Obama administration. As such, he was the only member of the Cabinet to have served both presidents and to have been confirmed by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 100 to zero. As secretary, Dr. Shulkin represented the 21 million American veterans and was responsible for the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system. Secretary Shulkin is a widely respected healthcare executive, having served as chief executive of leading hospitals and health systems, including Beth Israel in New York City and Morristown Medical Center in Northern New Jersey, and he currently advises leading health systems. Secretary Shulkin has held numerous physician leadership roles, including CMO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University Hospital and the Medical College of Pennsylvania Hospital. He has held academic positions, including chairman of medicine/vice dean at Drexel University School of Medicine. As an entrepreneur, he founded and served as chairman/CEO of DoctorQuality, one of the first consumer orientated sources of information for quality and safety in healthcare. Secretary Shulkin has served on the boards of managed care companies, technology companies and healthcare organizations. He now works with healthcare organizations that are leading the transformation of medicine around the world. Secretary Shulkin is a board-certified internist. He received his medical degree from the Medical College of Pennsylvania and completed his internship at Yale University School of Medicine and a residency and fellowship in general medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Presbyterian Medical Center. He received advanced training in outcomes research and economics as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. Modern Healthcare has named him one of the “100 Most Influential People in Healthcare.” He continues to advocate on behalf of the country’s veterans by serving on the boards of numerous nonprofits that serve veterans, is the host of the popular Policy Vets podcast and is the author of the book It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Serve Your Country: Our Broken Government and the Plight of Veterans.