Dr. Patrick Lee will present on Central Health's foundational values of Growth, Unity, Innovation, Direction, and Empowerment, emphasizing how love and trust serve as the central business model driving relationships with patients, team members, partners, and the broader community. He will speak to Central Health's commitment to eliminating health disparities by closing the 10-20 year life expectancy gap between neighborhoods east and west of I-35 and addressing the more than $1 billion annual cost of health inequities in Travis County through whole-person care that meets people where they are while creating comprehensive pre- and post-hospital care systems. Dr. Lee will also discuss FY26 as "The Year of Access," outlining Central Health's unified approach to building a safety-net system that works better for everyone in Travis County by closing measured gaps in primary, specialty, dental, mental health, homeless health, and post-acute care while ensuring hospital stays occur only when absolutely necessary.
About our Speaker:
Dr. Pat Lee is President and CEO of Central Health, the hospital district serving Austin and all of Travis County, Texas. He leads the creation of a local payer-provider public system—an integrated partnership among Central Health, CommUnityCare Health Centers, and Sendero Health Plans—dedicated to becoming Travis County’s most trusted provider of care for those who need it most.
Dr. Lee’s vision is to make care free or highly affordable at the point of service while delivering high-quality, ambulatory-driven, whole-person care that is seamless, upstream, and deeply connected to community needs. Through Central Health’s multi-year Healthcare Equity Plan and the FY2026 “Year of Access,” he is advancing a system that delivers exceptional long-term value to taxpayers by solving for fragmentation—one system united in purpose, one team thriving, one trunk many branches.
Before joining Central Health, Dr. Lee served as System Chair of Medicine at One Brooklyn Health and as Chair of Medicine at Mass General Brigham Salem Hospital. He earned a BA in English & Creative Writing from Princeton University, an MD from the University of California San Francisco, an Executive MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and completed his residency in Internal Medicine & Primary Care at Mass General Hospital and fellowship in medical education at Harvard Medical School.
