Dr. John Golenski cofounded Kairoi Health in 2014 and has guided its growth and evolution from a services group to a company creating products that target the most urgent issues in healthcare. His depth of experience spans clinical services management, health policy, physician leader training, and primary care redesign. Over his long career of industry leadership, he has worked in 49 of the 50 United States, in widely varied regional medical cultures and both inpatient and outpatient settings, on key issues from benefits design to personnel management, and from patient bedsides to forums of national and international health policy.
A native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Dr. Golenski earned his doctorate in human development at Harvard University. Early in his career he was executive director of the Shanti Project, and chaplain and director of psychological services for the PICU and NICU at Children’s Hospital, Oakland. In 1982, he founded PediatriCare, one of the nation’s first pediatric home care hospices. The Bioethics Consultation Group, which he founded in 1985, trained the institutional ethics committees of 300-plus hospitals, health systems and health plans, and worked with large corporations to design health benefits.
In 1986, he founded Health Priorities Group, a multidisciplinary healthcare and health policy consulting group. HPG advised community hospitals, university medical centers, hospital systems, armed services hospitals, medical groups, health plans and insurers, large employers, and every level of government in the United States, as well as foreign insurers and governments, in the areas of healthcare delivery and health policy. Dr. Golenski helped design and facilitate the pilot project for the Oregon Health Plan, the Blue Shield of California Foundation’s proposal for universal access, and the Ryan White Care Act prioritization process for San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties. HPG also worked with the California Institute for Nursing and Healthcare and for Kaiser Permanente, where they created a still-ongoing Situation Management program in all twelve Kaiser regions and the national program office.
From 1999–2001, Dr. Golenski was founding executive director of RxHealthValue in Washington, DC, a national coalition of major stakeholders formed to improve Americans’ access to prescription drugs. For more than a decade, he served as Ethicist on the CVSCaremark and RxSolutions national Pharmacy & Therapeutics Committees. From 2004 to 2009, he returned to pediatric care as executive director of the George Mark Children’s House in San Leandro, California, the nation’s first residential pediatric end-of-life facility. At the time of Kairoi’s inception, he was engaged in a long-term project with California Pacific Medical Center, advising on internal management and community relations. A former member of the Jesuits for 25 years, he was received as a priest of the Episcopal Church in 2003.
