Brynn Bowman grew up on a farm and traces her interest in geriatrics and advance care planning to the times spent with her grandparents. “I always cared about older adults. And the reason I cared about it is that I saw two great grandmothers and grandmother who had a good old age and then terrible experiences with illness and healthcare near the end of their lives. It felt so obviously unnecessary and avoidable.”
Although she originally planned to be a doctor, her career took a different route, and after a detour into the tech world, she landed at the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) where she could start “making the change towards the things she cared about,” specifically healthcare delivery for people with serious illness and palliative care.
Over time, she learned how the system worked and “how to break the rules.” A task that took on new urgency during COVID and the social unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder: “We’re coming out of the pandemic. We’re coming out of the most acutely focused conversations about race in a decade. We’re seeing a US population getting older and older, sicker and sicker.” Palliative care at scale, she says, can address disparities and lay the groundwork for more equity in healthcare for all patients, whatever their age, ethnicity or zip code.
As CAPC CEO and a self-described “activist in a business suit,” she specializes in palliative care program design, financing and workforce education with an eye toward “disruption and innovation.” She has also served on a number of advisory groups, including the C-TAC Summit Development Committee and Moonshot, a relationship she describes as “a very good complementary partnership” and believes that C-TAC’s ACT Index is key to “changing the culture of care for patients with serious illness.”
For Bowman and other advocates in this space, what distinguishes palliative care from other specialties is its emphasis on the individual patient’s experience. The patient is the North Star, and the ultimate beneficiary of a changed and transformed system.
Like our partners at CAPC, C-TAC is relentlessly focused on bringing about policies that deliver high quality and equitable patient- and community-centered care. Learn more about our changemakers and how to join them.
