Dr. Michele Harper
Emergency room physician and author of the New York Times-bestselling The Beauty in Breaking
Dr. Thomas Fisher
Emergency room physician and author of The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER
Thomas Fisher (author of The Emergency) at the FYE® Conference 2023
Photo Credit: Jeff Sciortino
With experience in clinical practice, working at the White House, and as an entrepreneur, Dr. Thomas Fisher is an expert on America's healthcare system. He has seen firsthand the racial and wealth disparities in providing care from wait times to accessibility. In his thought-provoking lectures, he speaks on how our country’s healthcare system often treats the poor as expendable and how a three-tiered pandemic has exacerbated the longstanding and increasingly fraught inequities in access.
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About Thomas Fisher
Dr. Thomas Fisher is a board-certified emergency medicine physician at The University of Chicago Medical Center and a Venture Chair at Redesign Health. There, he uses lessons he learned serving Chicago’s South Side to build new companies that improve care for all, especially the poor and people of color. In his powerful and moving lectures, Dr. Fisher speaks on the racial and wealth disparities in our country’s health. He calls for reform that offers a fresh vision of health care as a foundation of social justice.
As an emergency medicine physician at The University of Chicago Medical Center, Dr. Thomas Fisher works in the same South Side community where he was raised. Committed to providing medical care to the Black community, Dr. Fisher experienced firsthand the crushing pandemic and a violent summer, amidst a failing healthcare system. He documented his harrowing experience in his memoir, The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER. He writes about the limited time and resources to treat incoming patients—for patients who came into the ward, sometimes he only had three minutes to spend with them. In this riveting, pulse-pounding story of a year in the life of an emergency room doctor, Dr. Fisher connects these human stories to the unjust, profit-hungry healthcare system and pleads for structural reform that will better serve the community.
Dr. Thomas Fisher started out his career as an assistant professor at The University of Chicago, where he built community partnerships to improve patient care. From 2010 to 2011, he served as a White House Fellow at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Obama administration. During his time at the White House, he worked on Affordable Care Act regulations and led the development of the Health and Human Services Action Plan for Reducing Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. He also held multiple leadership roles in health care insurance and delivery.
Dr. Thomas Fisher holds a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Dartmouth College, a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a medical degree from The University of Chicago. He was the recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, Crain’s Chicago Business 40 under 40, Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honors Society, and a 2020 Diversity Leadership Alumni Award at The University of Chicago. He is also a Fellow of the Health Innovators Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.
Contact us for more information about bringing Dr. Thomas Fisher to your next event.
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Speaking Topics
Rescuing Patients from the System
Healthcare systems are pitted against the individual. Resources are distributed according to opaque and bureaucratic processes, which determine health and illness in both intended and unintended ways. Individual physicians and patients are no match for this orchestration. And because of their obscure actions, even those in charge of these systems point to individuals as responsible and systems as powerless. In this talk, Dr. Fisher outlines how addressing healthcare inequity requires making these systems visible, and ways to address inequity in practice.
People vs. Profit
In our society, we take profit's role in shaping our lives for granted. In healthcare, with slogans like "no margin, no mission," money shapes what care is given, to whom, and when. The collateral damage to this tension is bodies and lives. In this talk, Dr. Fisher shares intimate patient stories that illuminate the practical and moral implications of prioritizing profit in healthcare.
Triaging Solutions for our Healthcare Systems
It's no mystery that our healthcare system desperately needs reform. But even if we were to miraculously earn the power to fix everything right now, future healthcare will require solutions that don't yet exist. In the meantime, what can be done? Dr. Thomas Fisher shares short-term plans and actions that can create a better and more equitable system today, as well as steps to work towards long-term goals for planning a better future.
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Praise for Thomas Fisher
Praise for The Emergency
This book reminds us how permanently interesting our bodies are, especially when they go wrong. Fisher’s account of his days is gripping. . . . His frustration, his outraged intelligence, is palpable on every page. . . . the best account I’ve read about working in a busy hospital during Covid.
— The New York TimesWith scalpel-like precision and searing patient stories, Thomas Fisher exposes the battlefield of medicine and the scarring—and often fatal—wounds of inequality. The Emergency is a bat call. Health care doesn’t care, inequality kills, and we must do better.
— Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, author of What the Eyes Don’t SeeA briskly paced, heartfelt, often harrowing year in the life of an ER doctor on Chicago’s historically Black South Side.
— San Francisco ChronicleThe Emergency is a doctor’s-eye view of the layered crises afflicting a single Chicago community and the entire nation that surrounds it. By turns brutal and beautiful, this is a tale of life, death, and the people whose efforts often determine which of those two will prevail.
— Jelani Cobb, co-editor of The Matter of Black Lives“Tired of reading about COVID-19? Don’t make the mistake of missing the best book about it to date. The Emergency is Thomas Fisher’s memoir of the first year of the pandemic’s grip on Chicago’s South Side, where he grew up and where he battled the disease, along with every other ailment and injury that reached his emergency room. This is no past-tense memoir but a gripping account of events as they happen. It’s beautifully rendered in the present tense and leavened by a series of letters he composed to, and in honor of, his patients. But this is also a book about our country, a wrenching and tender reflection on an aphorism Fisher invokes: When America catches a cold, black America catches pneumonia. It won’t take you long to read this fast-paced account, but you won’t forget it anytime soon.
— Paul Farmer, M.D., author of Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the PoorRiveting . . . [Fisher] eloquently captures the intensity of the situation . . . and shares heartrending stories of victims. . . . The result is a powerful reckoning with racial injustice and a moving portrait of everyday heroism..
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)Dramatic . . . well written and compassionate . . . a persuasive, sympathetic . . . insider’s report on a broken system.
— Kirkus Reviews -
Books by Thomas Fisher
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Media About Thomas Fisher
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and Availability
- 212 572-2013
- Thomas Fisher travels from Chicago, Illinois
Featured Title
The Emergency
“The Emergency is graphic and gut-wrenching, as it should be. It is an undeniable call for a just health-care system, as it will be.”—Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist
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