Maria Maldonado-Pareja, Founder & CEO

Maria is an expert in global healthcare and medical tourism with over twenty years of experience working with medical facilities, practitioners, and medical devices manufacturers around the world. She has worked directly or served as a consultant to companies on how to compete successfully in world markets to achieve maximum growth and profit by assisting clients to improve their international distribution network and identify areas of improvement. She has held leading roles in the international business development arena of major medical device manufacturers and healthcare retailers. 
Maria realized early on that her career path would lead her into entrepreneurism in the medical field. She founded and organized two innovative healthcare service companies in two different countries (Portugal & USA). For the European venture, obtained financing through European Union programs for economic development, for being a project that incentivized entrepreneurship, innovation and job creation. She pursued specialized training in audiology and developed treatments for tinnitus, which were used at the four clinics that she founded in Portugal. She received her MBA at Hult International Business School in London, where she led a team that consulted for Google UK (Healthcare Division) on how it could become a connector in the end-to-end customer experience in the medical tourism industry. Her team was awarded the highest score in her MBA cohort for this Final Business Challenge Project. 
Maria has worked in the healthcare sector around the globe both for on profit and philanthropic roles and was surprised to learn patients had long wait times and extreme out-of-pocket costs to get critical surgeries performed--even in countries with good medical care. She then decided to focus her career on connecting patients with the best surgical providers in other countries to provide them with the combination of the best quality, lowest cost, and shortest wait times possible. Her experience in the global medical device marketplace and mastery of several languages enables her to communicate with prospective patients and negotiate with the world's best hospitals and medical facilities to provide the best possible options for her clients as well as consulting opportunities for hospitals on care and process improvement, international patient protocols and department creation and a number of other critical functions with her team.

Michael Olesen, VP Quality & Risk; Trip4Care.com

Michael is an epidemiologist by training and has over 25 years’ experience in healthcare, including roles in pathology, air ambulance, OR and CV lab, transplant, emergency management, and infection prevention. He has been on faculty for APIC to teach the advanced course for infection preventionists. He has been on staff at a number of hospitals either directly or in Allied Health roles and has served as a consultant to hospitals and businesses throughout the US. He has led a 600+ bed hospital through two successful Joint Commission inspections with no infection control findings, which was a first in the history of the hospital and merited comment from the inspectors that they were surprised that they could not find any violations for that chapter in a facility of that size. He has developed a number of policies, procedures, and protocols that have been implemented at many healthcare organizations. He has been active in many local, regional, and national committees around the country. He also serves on a federal disaster medicine team. He has been a keynote speaker at national conferences and has spoken on topics including pandemic preparedness, antibiotic resistance, emergency preparedness, and research quality and methodology. He has taught in a physician's assistant program and has coauthored the guidelines on infection control in alternate care sites and in shelters, on the reuse of respirators, and the textbook chapter "Infectious Disease Surveillance and GIS: Applications for Emergency Management" in GIS in Hospital and Healthcare Emergency Management, and an overview course on incident management for healthcare providers for Saint Louis University. Most recently, he wrote a hypothesis linking influenza activity to Hurricane Sandy that was included in a briefing for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His years of involvement in the OR, quality, risk, safety, and infection prevention fields bring a set of skills to the medical tourism industry that is unique in the field.