HERE BE DRAGONS

In this memoir, a man recounts his extraordinary success as a serial entrepreneur and his attempts to provide affordable health care.

Golinkin contends that passion is a necessary component of leadership. He didn’t discover his life’s true passion—to make health care more accessible and affordable—until after he graduated from Harvard in 1974. While working for Reeves Communications, a producer of television shows, he became intoxicated with the idea of creating health-related programming and started his own company, American Medical Communications, in order to bring his dream to life. In the early ’90s, with the Mayo Clinic as his partner, he launched America’s Health Network, a cable enterprise devoted to wellness and medical issues, which he sold to Fox in 1998. In search of a new challenge and motivated to change a stagnant health care industry, he started RediClinic, an urgent care provider housed in stores such as Rite Aid, Walgreens, and Walmart. The obstacles to success he faced were extraordinary—stiff competition, a difficult business model with high fixed costs, a lumbering economy, and astonishingly prohibitive regulatory restrictions, all lucidly explained by the author, who writes in unfailingly clear prose. Over 35 years, he would serve as the CEO of six companies, including FastMed, another urgent care provider, and would accomplish the seemingly impossible—make a genuine difference in a massive, impossibly complicated, and slow-shifting industry. Golinkin’s accomplishments are quite impressive, and he limns a uniquely edifying view of the health care industry. He’s not a doctor or a “health policy wonk,” but rather a self-professed “capitalist” looking to make key improvements while amassing money. But he recounts the financial histories of his ventures in minute detail, a tendency that will eventually tax the attention of many readers. In addition, the lessons he draws are conventional—leaders should be passionate, maintain a work-life balance, and “find good people and help them grow.” His reflections on the inadequacies of the U.S. health care industry are far more intellectually rigorous; for example, he suggests that costs could be restrained if providers were guaranteed reimbursement for services rendered via “video, digital, telephonic, and even some forms of print communication,” an innovative recommendation. Still, readers will wish the author spent more time ruminating on these vital issues rather than the financial aspects of his businesses.

An engrossing but uneven account about a health care mission.