Joe Flower thinks differently and has always maintained his independence as an analyst and visionary of healthcare.

He recognized long ago that healthcare could not possibly make sense until seen as a system-as-a-whole. He has devoted his long career to understanding the dynamics of this complex adaptive system, observing the multi-level interactions of deep, underlying trends in technology, demographics, and economics that have driven the evolution (or devolution) of the healthcare that we know today.

Flower has interviewed many in and outside of healthcare who have driven conceptual and technological innovation, and has learned from their mistakes. It's all brought him to a vision of a future healthcare that is far better, far more available, and far less expensive than today's, a future that is achievable and, in some places, is being achieved.

Flower is the author of thousands of articles over the last 37 years on healthcare, a contributing editor at TheHealthcareBlog.com, a featured columnist for The American Hospital Association's H&HN (Hospitals & Health Networks) Daily, and a member of the AHA's speaking faculty. His most recent two books explore the practical possibility of a better healthcare system that costs half as much, and the trends and tools that may be getting us there: Healthcare Beyond Reform (2012) and How To Get What We Pay For: A Handbook for Healthcare Revolutionaries (2015).

Flower's hundreds of speaking and consulting clients have included a wide array of organizations from the U.N.'s World Health Organization, the U.S. Defense Department, and the Centers for Disease Control, to governments around the world, most U.S. state and Canadian provincial hospital associations, many Fortune 500 companies, the giants of the health insurance industry, major medical systems such as Kaiser, Cleveland Clinic, and Johns Hopkins, to small community hospitals and associations of free clinics.

When he's not traveling or at the computer keyboard, he plays guitar, hosts the Writer's Conference on The Well, or reads history and economics until his eyes cross.