David Muhlestein founded Simple Healthcare in 2023 and leads a team focused on making healthcare data comprehensible and actionable. He is a healthcare research executive with experience spanning strategy, management, product development, business development, and publication, and he specializes in understanding healthcare system transformation and quantifying policy outcomes. Before founding Simple Healthcare, David spent twelve years at Leavitt Partners, rising from analyst to Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Research Officer, and served as Chief Research & Innovation Officer at Health Management Associates. He also founded Torch Insight, a SaaS healthcare market data and analytics platform that grew out of his dissertation research and was acquired by Milliman MedInsight in 2020.
David has been a Visiting Policy Fellow at the Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy since 2017, and previously served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at The Dartmouth Institute and a Visiting Fellow at the Accountable Care Learning Collaborative. He has published extensively on price transparency, accountable care organizations, and value-based care, including "High Prevalence of Ghost Rates in Transparency in Coverage Data" in Health Affairs Scholar, work on payer data completeness in AJMC, and the Duke-Margolis annual review of the Medicare Shared Savings Program. He holds a PhD in Health Services Management and Policy, a Master of Healthcare Administration, and an MS in Public Health from The Ohio State University College of Public Health, a Juris Doctor from the Ohio State Moritz College of Law, and a BA in Philosophy from Brigham Young University.