Dr. J. Andrew Chacko is a leader in Healthcare Innovation. He is a highly sought after public-speaker and consultant on a broad array of topics from Design Thinking, Leadership, Healthcare, Education, Digital Health, Mental Health and Wellness. As the only practicing clinician to have graduated from the Stanford program that pioneered Design Thinking, he seamlessly knits together years of expertise in three seemingly disparate cultures.
He built his deep understanding of Healthcare through clinical experience as a psychiatrist, attending physician, medical director and clinic director. He became an expert in Design Thinking and Innovation, studying at its pioneering institution, the Product Design graduate program at Stanford, then working at IDEO and finally teaching these principles around the world, starting at Stanford. His hard-won acumen as a leader and team-builder began long before his admittance to the U.S. Naval Academy, and continued through his career as a Naval Officer and beyond. His singular mission is to help institutions and people transform the future of healthcare.
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His unique perspective allows him to conceptualize the problems facing the healthcare industry from multiple angles. He passionately shares that ability with others through his advising and consultation work, and happily cultivates that awareness in clinicians, engineers, designers and entrepreneurs through his courses and lectures on how to implement Design Thinking and Leadership in Healthcare.
He is the founder of ChackoMD, a company he formed to drive Healthcare Innovation. As its principal, he has taught at universities, conferences and institutions around the world, from Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Tokyo University, for the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, to pharmaceutical companies, associations of medical education professionals and Google. He has also advised multiple healthcare institutions, numerous healthcare technology start-ups, including Pear Therapeutics, and design consultancies, and was faculty at NODE: Digital Health University, and Project Zygote, a Health 2.0 accelerator.
He is a Board-Certified Psychiatrist, now running a private clinic in San Francisco, recently having most recently worked for the VA, UCSF and Stanford, as a Medical Director and an attending Psychiatrist. He completed his training at Tripler Army Medical Center, where he was honored as the only civilian selected for a military psychiatry residency, gaining special expertise in PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury.
He earned his MD from Tufts University School of Medicine. He is a graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy, and served 12 years in the Navy, before completing his post-baccalaureate studies through Harvard. He earned his graduate degree at Stanford, studying both Mechanical Engineering and Art in the Joint Program in Design, taking an extra year for an in depth focus on Robotics, working as a designer independently and at IDEO.
He is an accomplished artist in wood-working, painting, and graphic design, and enjoys making just about anything from robots to furniture. His work has been galleried and sold. He loves dancing, has won dance competitions and is a certified Zumba Instructor. He is a certified military parachutist and rescue diver. He loves travel and exploring other cultures, having studied French, Spanish and Japanese. His biggest passion, however, is teaching (which he has done in some form since high-school) and drawing out human potential. His audiences have called him inspiring to life-changing. One of his favorite compliments came from a security guard at a lecture on the difficulties of innovating in healthcare, who later said that he “loved it so much [he] took notes the whole time!”
