As President and Chief Executive Officer of Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), Mary Ackenhusen leads the largest academic and tertiary health authority in British Columbia, serving a population of 1 million with a budget of $3.4 billion. As a member of the VCH senior executive team since 2007, Mary has distinguished her collaborative leadership style by fostering a patient-centred approach to care, innovation and the redesign of services to enhance quality and efficiency. Mary’s passion is to transform the current public healthcare system that we cherish as Canadians in a manner that will ensure its future financial sustainability in the face of growing demand and finite government funding. An engineer by training, she intends to do this by supporting staff, physicians and partners in the introduction of new service models that will provide better care, at lower cost, while also exploring the use of technology, analytics and electronic health records to improve productivity. Prior to joining VCH, Mary served on the Fraser Health Authority’s leadership team for almost a decade. She led Fraser Health’s facility planning and real estate, systems analysis and performance improvement, and new business development. In 1990, she became Director of Quality and Operations at INSEAD, an international business school based in Fontainebleau, France. Mary is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Master of Business Administration program and the West Virginia University’s Industrial Engineering masters and undergraduate programs. In 2013, she was named one of Canada’s Most Powerful Women by the Women’s Executive Network.

 Health Care