As a pioneer in the healthcare industry, Cynthia Fisher has dedicated her career to bettering the lives of people throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world by revolutionizing healthcare, encouraging transparency, and expanding access.
Fisher began her career at International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) working with clients from hospitals, insurance companies, and the defense industry. Then, after earning her MBA from Harvard’s Business School in 1990, Fisher worked as a product manager for blood processing equipment for Haemonetics Corporation.
In 1993, Fisher founded the revolutionary medical company ViaCord, which collects, tests, types, and freezes umbilical cord blood and placental blood stem cells “as an alternative to bone marrow for treating cancers like leukemia and certain genetic disorders that were life-threatening to both children or adults,” she told IW Features.
“Since I had worked with bone marrow transplants programs around the globe, I thought, ‘Well, someone needs to set up the logistics to bank stem cells from umbilical cord blood and allow any expectant family to be able to preserve, as a type of biological insurance, their newborn baby’s cord blood that’s otherwise thrown out as medical waste yet has lifesaving capabilities for that child if they would ever have a need, or for another family member,’” Fisher explained.
Fisher proudly noted that ViaCord was “price, quality and outcome transparent, charging people all the same price, and yet [set] the gold standard in the industry at one of the lowest costs.”
Just years later in 2000, Fisher co-founded and served as president of ViaCell, another medical services company.
Fisher eventually sold ViaCord, but her role in the medical community didn’t end.
Instead, Fisher turned her attention to the healthcare price transparency fight.
“I was faced with three people that had jobs, good jobs, they had health insurance, and three of them each had absolute financial ruin from healthcare,” Fisher said, adding that “they came to me to individually help them through their situation financially.”
“It was that moment that I knew as a mission I needed to go to Washington because I didn’t know if the bills they were charged or the amounts they were to pay were true,” Fisher said, adding that “the only way we can have truth and integrity and accountability in healthcare is to have all of us be empowered to know prices.”
To accomplish this, Fisher began making trips to Washington, D.C., where she and a handful of lawyers combed through different laws to “study where do we have the right to know prices” — not only as patients but also as employers.
In line with her entrepreneurial spirit, Fisher founded PatientRightsAdvocates.org in 2018 and co-founded Power to the Patients in 2021, two organizations that advocate for price transparency in healthcare. According to Fisher, she and her team “are fighting our own industry … [b]ecause the greed’s run amuck, and we can do better.”
“Everyone has a story of being overcharged in healthcare or being afraid to seek care out of fear of the unknown price,” Fisher said while reflecting on what she has learned along the way.
“Countless stories from everyday Americans inspire and motivate our mission-driven team focused on empowering patients with upfront prices so they can lower their costs and be protected from overcharges,” Fisher said.
One of those stories is that of a 62-year-old retired schoolteacher living with Parkinson’s disease who fought back against a $74,000 bill after a hysterectomy.
“The physician was $8,000 and the hospital was the rest, and the hospital put a lien on her home that she and her husband owned. The insurance denied her care,” Fisher told IW Features, noting that the hospital sued the patient for being unable to pay the exorbitant bill.
However, “once we helped her to look online at the hospital pricing file … we could see that every single bill was way over-billed, and the insurance company did in fact have to cover her because they did have a contract with the hospital to cover her care,” Fisher explained. “And so, they wiped it clean, but it took four months. But because she could take a photograph of the file, the pricing file, and put a picture with her letter, she got that bill off and she got her home back.”
Fisher is optimistic about the ongoing efforts to hold hospitals and insurance companies accountable, expressing gratitude specifically to President Donald Trump’s role in this fight.
“We have come this far only because we have a president who is brave enough to stand up against the special interests of the healthcare industry that seeks to protect its greed and overreach to the detriment of the American people and our economic competitiveness,” Fisher said. “Republicans coined ‘repeal and replace’ for healthcare reform, yet nobody knew what the ‘replace’ would be until President Trump mandated price transparency to allow free market forces to function in healthcare. The Trump administration knew prices empower Americans with competition and choice and billing and payment accountability in healthcare.”
Fisher said her team was able to work with the first Trump administration to find existing laws that gave them the authority to put in place systemwide healthcare price transparency requirements.
Unfortunately, President Joe Biden failed to enforce many of these requirements, despite the widespread bipartisan support they had received. Trump, however, recently renewed his commitment to price transparency in an executive order to “make more meaningful price information available to patients to support a more competitive, innovative, affordable, and higher quality healthcare system.”
“With his leadership and forthcoming rule-making as a result of his executive order, President Trump is paving the way for Americans to truly realize a functional, competitive marketplace in healthcare that drastically lowers the cost of care and coverage for all of us,” Fisher said.
Still, Fisher believes “[i]t’s going to take all of us to stand up to the healthcare cartel and demand upfront prices in healthcare.”
“Why do we say, ‘We have a broken system?’” she asked. “It’s because the healthcare system has paid billions of dollars over the years to protect capitalizing on a patient’s misfortune.”
Such an entrenched system will be difficult to crack. But thanks to Fisher’s advocacy, Americans are several steps closer to a more just, transparent healthcare system.
Every month, Independent Women Features will highlight a new woman for its Champion Women series. If you know a woman who you think should be highlighted, please share her name and a brief description about her background here.
