What a terrific feature story of this great client that ran on the front page, top fold!

Happy reading!

LightBridge CEO leans on hefty experience in evolving health care industry

After more than three decades in the industry, Jill Mendlen has been involved in her share of meetings discussing the unsustainable future of health care costs.

Recognized as a national expert on managed care systems, the president and CEO of San Diego-based LightBridge Hospice and Palliative Care remembers the way industry leaders and policy makers have discussed tackling the years-away medical inflation promised by the country’s changing demographics.

Suddenly, she said, those 15-year timetables got shorter and shorter, until everyone looked up and realized the tidal wave was just off shore.

“We as humans tend to move because we have to,” Mendlen said. “We wait for the heat.”

Mendlen speaks in organized, information-packed spurts, as if making her way through an itemized list of thoughts and sub-thoughts. She explains her industry’s interwoven fields, and the ways those fields intermingle to create the spaghetti of issues facing legislators and industry leaders, the way a color commentator breaks down defensive strategy during a slow-motion replay.

In addition to LightBridge, which she founded in 2003 to deliver hospice and palliative care to individuals in San Diego County, she also founded and currently serves as president and CEO of Family Choice of New York, a company that provides clinical programs through managed care to enhance clinical outcomes while reducing costs.

She started both companies after leaving a national managed-care company she had founded in 1998, Geriatrix Inc.

“Managed care was in its infancy in the Medicare-managed care world at the time; it was evolving and there were huge amounts of money moving around as the government was giving money to managed care groups,” she said.

Jill Mendlen is president and CEO of San Diego-based LightBridge Hospice and Palliative Care. Staff photo: Sarah Strong

Geriatrix had 11 locations in seven states. “That’s what taught me that health care, like real estate, is all local,” she said.

Eventually, the venture capitalists that had backed the company pushed to take it public, and brought in a CEO to do so. Mendlen and the incoming CEO didn’t see eye-to-eye, so she left the company and forged a partnership with two Michigan-based investors that led to the founding of LightBridge and Family Choice.

“She refers to herself as a serial entrepreneur,” said LightBridge Senior VP of Operations Pamela Hough. “She’s always looking for the next solution on the horizon.”

Hough and Mendlen met in 1999 while serving on a Medicare payment advisory committee. Mendlen hired her in 2002 as an executive director at Geriatrix out of Tulsa, before asking if she’d help start LightBridge.

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