The P&Q Interview: Babson’s Errol Norwitz On Why Healthcare Needs Entrepreneurs To Fix A Broken System

For nearly three decades, Dr. Errol Norwitz ran a molecular biology and genetics lab studying the mechanisms that regulate labor in term and preterm pregnancies. He earned major grants, published widely, gave talks around the world, and built a reputation as a leading physician-scientist in maternal–fetal medicine. 

Then he had a realization that changed the way he thought about medicine: “Not a single patient has benefited. I wasn’t thinking about impact; I was trying to solve the problem,” says Norwitz, the first executive director of Babson College’s Kerry Murphy Healey Center for Health Innovation and Entrepreneurship. 

“I’ve been a clinician, a scientist, an educator, an administrator, and now an entrepreneur. And what I’ve realized is that academicians fall in love with the problem. Entrepreneurs fall in love with the solution.” 

Norwitz comes to Babson at a moment when the U.S. healthcare system is straining under its own weight. While America spends more than $4.9 trillion per year on healthcare – 17.6% of U.S. GDP and about $14,500 per citizen –  the country still reports some of the worst health outcomes of all 38 OECD nations.

The problems, he argues, are system wide, built into the very structure that binds the individual pieces together.  Misaligned incentives cause hospitals to compete for low-risk patients who could be treated more safely and affordably in community clinics. Insurers benefit when some problems go untreated. Drug pricing and delivery systems shift costs without improving outcomes. 

BUILDING A NEW KIND OF HEALTH INNOVATION HUB

Babson’s Healey Center, founded in 2019, emphasizes entrepreneurship as a tool for redesigning how care is delivered, financed, and scaled. It sits within Babson’s Arthur M. Blank School for Entrepreneurial Leadership and trains innovators across global surgery, digital health, medical devices, and drug development. Its programs range from the Global Surgery Slingshot for low- and middle-income countries to NIH-funded training for startups tackling substance use disorders.

While startups alone can’t fix healthcare, Norwitz says, entrepreneurial thinking encourages experimentation, iteration, and more comfort with failure than traditional medical culture

Norwitz plans to expand the center’s reach with new educational tracks, more global partnerships, and hands-on training that prepares health workers to navigate regulatory systems, payer markets, and healthcare delivery challenges. He wants to bring young people into healthcare early, introduce them to the business side of the industry, and give them tools to solve problems before they become crises.

“Entrepreneurs are all about impact. They’ll try things, and if something doesn’t work, they’ll let it fail and move on,” Norwitz says. “It’s a different approach, and it’s exactly where we need to go in healthcare. We need to try things, iterate, acknowledge the complexity of these systems, figure out what works, and not be afraid to fail.”

Q&A WITH DR. ERROL NORWITZ

Norwitz grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, and entered medical school at 16 according to the British system where med students enter right after high school. He later earned a PhD from Oxford University and an MBA from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

He spent 25 years as a physician-scientist in high-risk obstetrics, holding major leadership roles at Yale and Tufts medical schools. He served as Tufts Medical Center’s Chief Scientific Officer and CEO of Newton-Wellesley Hospital, where he led the community institution through the turmoil of COVID-19. He also built an academic career as a full professor, NIH-funded researcher, and member of the NICHD board.

Eight years ago, he co-founded CognitiveCare, an AI startup that uses predictive models to identify risk early in pregnancy and other diseases. It aims to help clinicians match patients with the right level of care. He believes AI will reshape diagnosis, drug discovery, hospital operations, and risk stratification, and he argues that this next wave requires leaders who understand ethics, incentives, policy, and systems thinking.

We recently sat down with Norwitz to talk about his plans for the Healey Center, the opportunities he sees for entrepreneurial leaders, and the urgent problems he believes healthcare must solve. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

After decades in academic medicine, research, and bedside care, why did Babson feel like the right next step for you professionally?

The wonderful thing about Babson is that it’s an academic playground where you can bring the academic mindset and the entrepreneurial mindset together. That partnership is what creates social impact and economic impact. 

That’s what I hope to build at Babson: bringing these two groups together to solve problems. I know where the problems are because I’ve been in the space for a long time, and we want to develop real solutions that will change how healthcare is delivered and consumed. It’s a big vision — maybe I’m being too ambitious — but I love Babson. I love the culture and the mindset. Let me give you an example.

For 25 or 30 years, I ran a basic science, molecular biology, and genetics lab studying the mechanisms that regulate parturition in term and preterm pregnancies. You get a lot of funding, write great papers, get promoted, travel the world giving talks, and not a single patient benefits. I wasn’t thinking about impact; I was trying to solve the problem.

Entrepreneurs are all about impact. They’ll try things, and if something doesn’t work, they’ll let it fail and move on. It’s a different approach, and it’s exactly where we need to go in healthcare. We need to try things, iterate, acknowledge the complexity of these systems, figure out what works, and not be afraid to fail.

In medicine, there’s a deep conservatism. Doctors are scared to fail, and healthcare systems are scared to fail because if you fail, patients may die and you get sued. There’s this idea of primum non nocere – first, do no harm – and while that’s important, it can also be a major barrier to innovation.

Can you start by giving a little context for Babson’s Kerry Murphy Healey Center for Health Innovation and Entrepreneurship? What does it do?

The Healey Center is one of six centers within the Arthur Blank School of Entrepreneurship. My boss is the dean, so our core mission is education. We teach Entrepreneurial Thought and Action at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and that’s what we’ll be doing in our center. We’re not going to stand up companies or co-develop IP. We’re going to teach.

Two weeks ago, for example, I met with a group from Denmark, entrepreneurs coming to us with ideas. I work with Enterprise Ireland as well. These are innovators from companies already started in Ireland who are now trying to enter the U.S. market and scale. They’re supported by the Irish government. Tomorrow I’m meeting with a group from Japan; in two weeks, one from the Middle East. We’ve got a global reach.

People come to us with ideas. Some have prototypes. They’ve de-risked their concepts a bit and moved them further down the pipeline. What they want to understand is how to establish their business model in the U.S., how to navigate regulatory requirements, how to scale, and how to have impact. And that’s what we’re going to teach.

We have a couple of programs already running. One is the Global Surgical Slingshot, where we teach people in low- and middle-income countries how to stand up surgical services and improve access to high-quality surgery in rural areas. Honestly, we should be doing that in the U.S. as well. I tell all my trainees: you don’t have to go to Africa to do global health — you can do global health right here in the U.S.

We also have a major initiative through NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, to address substance use disorder and addiction in this country. We’re standing up novel training programs to support early-stage companies working in that space and teach them how to enter the market and actually have an impact. 

As the first executive director, what is your long-term vision for the center?

This is exactly what I’m putting together now. I’ve only been at Babson for two months. The center has existed for five years, but I’m the first executive director. Now we need a vision.

I want to get young people interested in healthcare. If you don’t mind me getting on my soapbox for two minutes — I love getting in front of undergrads, and I have a couple of points I always make. First, I ask them if they want a job after college. For all the hands that go up, I tell them that healthcare is the single biggest employer in almost every state in the U.S., and it’s one of only two industries that have grown jobs year over year for the past decade. (The other is tech.)

Second, I tell them that they don’t have to go to medical school or nursing school to impact healthcare. There are so many things you can do outside of being a provider, and honestly, I think you can have a bigger impact. I want to reach students early, get them excited about healthcare as a space, and help them find their direction.

Another of my goals is to stand up a healthcare concentration. For undergrads, the first two years are a standard curriculum — no flexibility, no electives. But I want to create modules in healthcare training: understanding tech transfer, understanding the VC environment, understanding the payer environment. Ultimately, I’d like students to graduate with a concentration in healthcare. That’s one of my longer-term goals, and I’m excited about it.

Beyond that, there are other things I want to do — things I’m passionate about.

Like what?

I don’t have to tell you how dysfunctional healthcare is. We spend $4.9 trillion – about $14,500 per person per year or 17.6% of GDP. And what do we get for that investment? Not just poor outcomes, but the worst healthcare outcomes among all 38 OECD nations. What we’re doing isn’t working. We need to think differently.

One of the problems – and I’ve written about this – is that there’s no “health” in healthcare in the U.S. You’ve probably heard this before: it’s all disease care. I want to flip that paradigm and focus on what I call metabolic health and wellness.

Find people early, before they’re 60 years old, overweight, hypertensive, and heading toward cardiac disease or a stent. Find people when they’re 20. Teach them to eat well, sleep well, manage stress, and exercise, which has benefits far beyond weight loss. Teach them how to take back control of their health and prevent these diseases instead of waiting until they have them. Other countries do this much better than we do. We need to reframe the whole model.

Longer term, I want the center to have a global reach. I’ve worked in a lot of different healthcare systems and have a huge global network, mainly in maternal–child health. It’s not only about what we can export to other countries, but also what we can import. And there’s a lot we can learn.

Ultimately, though, if we want to hardwire some of these changes, it has to come from public policy and public health. Right now, public health sits underneath medicine. In reality, public health should be elevated above medical care. We should be looking at everything through a public health lens.

And all the research we do should inform public policy, not the other way around.

What are some of the big, critical problems in healthcare that you think really need a business or entrepreneurial approach? What are the opportunities?

Right now, the biggest issue is that our healthcare system is not a system. It was never designed to be a system. People point at payers and blame them for making a fortune, or they blame drug companies, doctors, or hospitals. The truth is, the entire system is broken. It’s a systems problem, and we need to restructure the whole thing. We can’t keep putting Band-Aids on individual pieces. That won’t work.

Especially when every state tries to solve problems differently, payers and drug companies just move around and work around the solution.

Let me give you an example: I analyzed patient flow when I was working in a community hospital and asked how many patients going to academic medical centers actually need high-end tertiary or quaternary care. The answer is 15%.  Eighty-five percent don’t need to be there.

They go because of branding. They think they’ll get better care, but they’ll get the same care they’d get anywhere else, just at higher cost and with more inconvenience. And it drives up TME (total medical expenses) enormously.

If hospital systems saw the right patients — the ones they can bill at higher rates — they’d actually make money. I spent much of my life trying to change healthcare systems from the inside. I realized it doesn’t work. They’re far too entrenched. You have to change healthcare from the outside, and that’s what I’m trying to do now.

But is that something the Healey Center will be able to work on? How would it engage with a problem that complex?

The next couple of years are going to be quite disruptive. Some things will improve, some won’t. Some things will recover, and some will be destroyed forever. It’s going to be a disruptive period. But afterward, there will be an opportunity to rethink how we deliver healthcare. And we need people who are prepared for it.

People need to understand that this is a systems issue. When the moment comes to redesign the system, we need to have proposals and solutions ready to go. That’s where the center comes in.

Obviously, AI will likely be one of the big disruptions. How do you see AI affecting healthcare and the business of healthcare?

AI is going to be massively disruptive. It’s not just a tool that brings the AI clinician and the human clinician closer together. It’s going to fundamentally change the way healthcare is consumed and provided. I think the disruption will happen in four major areas. 

The first area is diagnosis and clinical decision-making. We already know that AI can read chest X-rays more consistently and faster than doctors. It can diagnose a skin lesion more quickly and more accurately than the most experienced dermatologist. This will be incredibly disruptive.

The second area is drug discovery, development, and distribution. AI is going to completely reshape how we identify new medications, validate them, test them, and bring them to market. I don’t personally work in this domain, but I support a couple of companies working on preeclampsia, which is extremely dangerous. The potential disruption here is enormous.

The third area is hospital operations and efficiency. Operational AI bypasses a lot of that regulatory complexity because it’s not diagnosing or treating, it’s improving efficiency. It doesn’t need FDA approval.

The last area , and the one I’m most excited about, is predictive modeling and risk stratification. My company, CognitiveCare, Inc., puts people into the correct “swim lanes.” We use predictive modeling — multimodal data, clinical information, demographics, ultrasounds, metabolomics, genomics, structured and unstructured notes — and run them through 48 AI algorithms to generate a risk score. I tell people it’s like a FICO score for pregnancy. Then we align the care plan with the risk profile.

About 80% of pregnant women are low-risk. They don’t need 13 prenatal visits and five ultrasounds. They don’t need to deliver at an academic medical center. The other 20% are high-risk, and those are the ones we need to identify early and invest in heavily. That’s exactly how healthcare should be run. 

But people get anxious when we talk about resource allocation because they think something is being taken away from them. That’s the challenge. Doctors don’t want it. Patients don’t want it. Hospitals won’t buy it. A shift like this will require state and federal governments. That’s the only way it will scale. 

Anything else you’d like to add?

What I’d love to add is that this model needs to be tested, and Babson is the right place to test it. I’m still getting to know the culture, the organization, what they do, and what they don’t do. But, the wonderful thing about Babson is that they really do live the entrepreneurial mindset every day. 

Their philosophy is: if you can pay for it, you can build it. There aren’t a lot of barriers. Whatever I can fund, I can create. And if it doesn’t work, they don’t mind if it fails. And that’s what entrepreneurship is.

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