Our Founder - Nancy Chockley

We created NIHCM to inform and bring together policy experts and business leaders for a bipartisan exploration of ways to increase health care access, quality, and affordability.

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Even as a small child living in Calcutta with her parents and traveling extensively through communities in the developing world, Nancy Chockley grasped the tremendous toll poverty and poor health took on people’s lives. After returning to the United States and beginning to pursue her career, Nancy’s girlhood memories remained and sparked a determination to improve the health of vulnerable people across our nation.

A natural leader and expert strategist, Nancy graduated with her MBA with distinction from the University of Virginia and embarked on a successful career as a consultant to leaders of the business world at a firm that is now part of Oliver Wyman. While she excelled at that work, she decided to step out on her own, become an entrepreneur, and create a new type of organization — NIHCM — where she could inform, shape, and share strategies for addressing critical issues in health care.

NIHCM LLC was created first, as a valuable forum and resource for some of the most powerful CEOs in the health care industry. Working with a group of forward-thinking, maverick CEOs, NIHCM Foundation was created, with an initial focus on maternal and child health. The Foundation’s early projects —supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other key federal agencies — were a success, but Nancy realized that the nation’s health care landscape was becoming increasingly complex and expanded NIHCM Foundation’s work to include grants for health care researchers exploring cutting-edge evidence on the health care industry and public health. When she began to understand just how difficult it was to get that research translated into action, she created a grant program to inform policy and support the work of leading health journalists, and added an award’s program to further recognize and encourage the best health care journalism and research.

As NIHCM’s portfolio grew, so did its reputation for excellence, gravitas, depth, and driving positive change in health care. The organization pioneered critical work on pharmaceutical pricing that gained the attention of 60 Minutes. NIHCM-supported researchers broke new ground on the opioid crisis, consolidation in health care, informed game-changing legislation on surprise billing, private equity in health care, and other issues that were just beginning to become a part of the public conversation. Top media organizations including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, ABC, and NBC News, joined 60 Minutes in seeking Nancy’s expertise on health care. Nancy ensured that NIHCM was always a step ahead in creating programming that was unique in the health policy space.

Nancy’s vision and her many accomplishments over the past 30 years created the powerful NIHCM LLC and Foundation that we have today. A Board of Directors with a combined revenue of nearly $400 billion and an Advisory Board of some of the top health care thought leaders and experts in the nation. A Foundation that gives $1 million a year to journalists and researchers whose independent work is a catalyst for positive change in health care, a programming portfolio that informs and educates thousands of policymakers, health care leaders, community health workers, and health advocates each year. An awards program that has given $1.2 million to recognize and encourage the work of top journalists and researchers. In addition to supporting the work of NIHCM Foundation, NIHCM LLC’s charitable giving program has also donated more than $1 million to address food insecurity, homelessness, and the needs of children.

Nancy Chockley, CEO, never forgot the lessons she learned in Calcutta as a small child — that there are millions of vulnerable people in our world who need our compassion and support.