An Independent Fiduciary Institution
The family office
healthcare never had.
Wealth has stewards. Estates have stewards. Governance has stewards. Healthcare — the most consequential domain of family life — has never had an independent institution responsible for it. Galen Family Health Office was founded to change that.
The Governance Gap
Healthcare has become one of the most complex systems a family must navigate. Medical knowledge continues to expand. Clinical specialization continues to deepen. Patients now routinely receive care from multiple physicians practicing across entirely different organizations — each responsible for a specialty, none responsible for the whole.
This is fundamentally a governance problem.
Every other complex system families rely on evolved an institution to coordinate it. Capital markets developed investment banks. Corporations developed boards of directors. Wealthy families developed family offices to coordinate their financial, legal, and tax advisors across generations.
Healthcare has never developed an equivalent independent fiduciary — a single institution responsible for integrating a family's health decisions over time, free of the conflicts that come with selling care, coverage, or medication.
Galen exists to be that institution: an independent advisory office that improves the quality of healthcare decisions for multigenerational families through physician expertise, structured governance, and AI-enabled institutional intelligence — while remaining conflict-free of every provider, insurer, and pharmaceutical interest it works alongside.
What Galen Provides
Three capabilities, one continuous relationship.
Galen does not replace your physicians or your hospital. It sits above the entire system of care — preparing your family before a crisis, governing decisions during one, and staying engaged in the years between.
-
Before
Preparation
A family's healthcare decisions are made long before a crisis arrives — in the planning done while everyone is well.
- Health planning
- Provider evaluation
- Preventive strategy
- Emergency preparedness
- Advance care planning
-
During
Crisis Navigation & Healthcare Governance
When a serious diagnosis arrives, Galen convenes independent physician judgment around your family — not around a single institution's referral pattern.
- Multidisciplinary physician review
- Medical record synthesis
- Treatment option evaluation
- Independent clinical guidance
- Family decision support
-
Always
Ongoing Support & Continuity
Between crises, Galen remains the constant thread — the one institution that carries a family's full health history across decades and generations.
- Chronic disease management
- Medication oversight
- Long-term care planning
- Healthcare coordination
- Family health governance
Galen uses artificial intelligence to help our physicians organize, synthesize, and evaluate complex clinical information faster and more completely than any one specialist could alone. Clinical judgment, however, always remains the responsibility of experienced physicians. AI extends our clinicians' reach — it never substitutes for their judgment.
Membership
Galen is structured the way a family office is structured: one relationship, one annual membership, covering the whole family across generations.
A single membership includes the full range of Galen's services across preparation, crisis navigation, and ongoing continuity — for every generation of the family, not just its founding members. There is no episodic billing and no incentive tied to how much care is delivered. Galen's only incentive is the long-term quality of your family's health decisions.
Who We Serve
Families who already expect independent counsel.
Galen's founding members are multigenerational families with the scale and complexity to warrant continuous fiduciary oversight — families who already maintain sophisticated advisory relationships across wealth, estate, tax, and governance, and for whom healthcare is the one remaining domain without an equivalent.
For Families
Multigenerational families with significant, complex wealth — for whom "peace of mind" about a loved one's health has, until now, had no institutional answer. Galen becomes the family's independent, standing physician-led counsel across every generation.
For Advisors
Galen grows through the trusted professionals who already serve these families. We work alongside — never in competition with — the advisors who represent every other domain of a family's affairs.
- Family offices
- Private wealth advisors
- Estate planning attorneys
- Trust companies
- Private banks
- Concierge physicians
- Academic medical centers
Why Galen
Galen does not compete with physicians, hospitals, insurers, or digital health platforms. It occupies a position that has been open within healthcare all along: an independent institution accountable only to the family.
Independence
Free of the conflicts inherent in delivering care, selling insurance, or dispensing medication.
Physician-led governance
Every recommendation is grounded in multidisciplinary physician judgment, not algorithmic output alone.
AI-enabled intelligence
Institutional memory and clinical synthesis at a speed and completeness no single advisor can match alone.
A relationship built for generations
Galen is structured to serve a family across decades, not a single episode of care.
A trusted counselor, not a vendor
Growth comes from stewardship and referral — never from maximizing utilization.
Leadership
Built by people who have sat on every side of the table.
Galen's leadership spans medicine, healthcare delivery, management consulting, artificial intelligence, corporate governance, and finance — collective judgment drawn from decades inside nearly every major institution in the healthcare system.
Board of Directors
Arthur Rubenstein, MD
Board Chair, Academic Medicine
Chicago · Mt Sinai NY · Penn Medicine
Kevin B. Johnson, MD, MS
Board Chair, Digital Health & AI
Johns Hopkins · Stanford · Vanderbilt · Penn Medicine · Penn Engineering
Rochelle Walensky, MD
Board Chair, Clinical Health
CDC · Johns Hopkins · Harvard · Mass General Brigham
Dave Ogans, MBA
Board Chair, Finance Committee
University of Virginia · Goldman Sachs
Executive Team
David B. Friend, MD, MBA
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
McKinsey · Wharton/Penn LDI · Willis Towers Watson · UConn Medicine
Susan Ruskin, MD
Chief Medical Officer
Harvard · Mt Sinai NY · UCSF · Blue Cross
Robert Blank, MD, PhD
Chief Innovation Officer
Columbia · Cambridge · NYU Langone · Medical College of Wisconsin
Daniel Friend, MBA
President & Chief Operating Officer
Optum · Humana · Penn · Vanderbilt
Bobby Guy, JD
General Counsel
Polsinelli Shareholder · Vanderbilt
"While individual healthcare organizations continued to improve within their own domains, no institution assumed fiduciary responsibility for helping families integrate increasingly complex healthcare decisions over time. That observation became the foundation for Galen Family Health Office."— David B. Friend, MD, MBA, Founder, Chairman & CEO
Request a private consultation.
Membership begins with a confidential conversation about your family's circumstances. Tell us a little about yourself and a member of our team will respond directly.