‘It’s About Integration’.

Dean’s Advisory Board member Donato J. Tramuto and the Tramuto Foundation will honor collaboration with partners, including the School of Public Health, at the foundation’s 15th anniversary celebration on October 1 in Maine. Alumni are encouraged to attend the celebration, which will benefit the Tramuto Foundation’s partners, including supporting the School’s Tramuto Foundation International Scholarship Fund.

As chief executive officer of Healthways, Inc. (NASDAQ: HWAY), Tramuto brings more than 35 years of healthcare experience as a recognized innovator and industry leader. Tramuto has a deep commitment to global healthcare access, a steadfast focus on patient outcomes, and a keen understanding of digital engagement solutions.

Tramuto became a member of Healthways board of directors in 2013 and chairman of the board in 2014. He founded Physicians Interactive Holdings, now called Aptus Health, a global provider of insight-driven digital engagement solutions for healthcare professionals and consumers, where he served as CEO and Chairman prior to joining Healthways. Under his leadership, Physicians Interactive was successfully sold to Merck Global Health Innovation Fund in 2013.

Tramuto has expertise in both the product and service segments of the healthcare industry and has held executive positions with Allscripts, i3 (a division of a UnitedHealth Group company), and Protocare, a large provider of drug development services, which he co-founded. Earlier in his career, Tramuto championed the development of a national disease management program for HIV/AIDS as an executive at Caremark.

Tramuto is committed to improving healthcare access, education, and quality of life for individuals around the world. In 2011, he founded Health eVillages, a nonprofit organization which provides state-of-the-art mobile health technology to medical professionals in the most challenging clinical environments. He is also the chairman and founder of the Tramuto Foundation, which helps individuals and organizations achieve their educational and healthcare goals, and has supported more than 50 organizations worldwide since 2001.

Tramuto has been widely recognized for his professional and philanthropic contributions. In 2014, he was honored alongside Hillary Clinton, Robert DeNiro, and Tony Bennett with the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Ripple of Hope Award for his more than three decades of commitment to social change.

In addition, he has been recognized by The New York Times, PharmaVoice, the Boston Globe, Healthcare IT News, and PM 360 magazine for his role as a healthcare leader, innovator, and global healthcare activist. In 2015, Tramuto was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the College of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell in recognition of his contributions.

In addition to the Dean’s Advisory Board, Tramuto serves on several executive leadership boards: Brown University Healthcare Leadership Board, York Community Hospital Board of Trustees, and Chairman of the Board of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Europe.

In 2013, the Tramuto Foundation endowed a scholarship fund at SPH to provide support for outstanding international students close to completing the MPH degree.

On October 1, the Tramuto Foundation will hold a 15th anniversary celebration and benefit to honor and support its partners: SPH, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the Frannie Peabody Center, Health eVillages, and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art. The benefit will be held at the Velveteen Habit Farmhouse Restaurant.

Tramuto recently spoke with us about global health, collaboration, and little things that provoke great change.

What first led you to healthcare?

I had several events happen in my life. One is, at the age of 8 I had significant hearing loss that was a result of a middle-ear infection, and for almost a decade after that I was faced with many different surgeries and an enormous amount of challenges in that time period. And then the year that I had my last surgery was also the year that my sister-in-law went into the hospital to deliver her second child, and she died giving birth as the result of a medication error.

I think those two situations really prompted me to want to do something in terms of giving back, and I chose the path of healthcare.

What led you to healthcare-promoting philanthropy and the creation of the Tramuto Foundation?

For me it was the recognition that we are not segmented creatures. I felt very strongly that the integration of my personal and professional lives was critically important to how I made a contribution. But like I think everything else in life—and like I say in a book I will release later this year—I think you have to go through challenges and adversity to really understand what you want to do in terms of giving back. For my professional “why,” it was the loss of my hearing and the death of my sister-in-law that moved me to that point.

My personal “why” emerged on September 11, 2001. I had been scheduled to be on a flight with my two friends and their 3-year-old, and because of a toothache I left the day before, but they ended up getting on United Flight 175, which left Boston for Los Angeles and unfortunately, as you know, terrorists flew it into the North Tower. They lost their lives.

That was 15 years ago, and it was at that time that I discovered it’s not just about pursuing your professional “why,” it’s also about giving back. So I launched the Tramuto Foundation in the fall of 2001, and then launched a second not-for-profit which is called Health eVillages five years ago, and those two have become, for me, the opportunity to give back and the opportunity to balance my professional “why” with my personal “why.”

What has been most rewarding about this work to date, and what impact from these efforts do you hope to see in the future?

What has been the most satisfying is to know that it’s not about doing any one great thing, it’s about doing little things that have the capacity to drive great change. For me that’s all we’re doing, we’re doing little things that empower people to have great change.

In Lwala, [Kenya,] where we launched the Health eVillages program, we went in there and brought our commercial medical app that I had developed in my commercial company, and we simply moved it from there to Health eVillages, and we’ve helped to lower infant mortality from 100 deaths per 1,000 births down to 30.

In the Tramuto Foundation, being able to read these letters that come in from young kids who would have had a lot of difficulty—I just got a letter a couple of weeks ago, and it’s very interesting, because you get these letters as you’re more involved, you’re always cringing to wonder whether you’re connecting with the right folks, and this was a letter from the mother of a daughter that we had helped, a three page letter where she said her daughter would not have been able to pursue her educational dreams had it not been for the Tramuto Foundation [international student scholarship]. When you read letters like that you think, ‘Gosh, I didn’t think that we were doing anything great,’ and it’s the reality that we really aren’t trying to do anything great, we’re trying to do little things that empower individuals to do for themselves what fate has not done for them, and so I think that has been the greatest satisfaction in the establishment of the Foundation.

What have been the biggest health challenges in your work to promote global health?

I’ll give you an example. I just came back from Kenya, and two and a half years ago when I was there I was in, I guess you could call it a maternity ward, and I was just horrified that mothers who were about ready to deliver babies, some were crowded in the room, others were on the floor waiting to deliver a baby, and I was just horrified that this could be the situation. We asked, “What can we do to help change this?” And they said, “If you can go and raise the money we could probably build a new ward and dedicate it to maternity care,” and that’s exactly what we did.

When I went back six weeks ago to open the doors and to be there for the ribbon-cutting ceremony, what struck me was that we had corrected that problem, but now we had a new problem: now they had three mothers on the bed. They were not on the cement floor anymore, but now there were multiple mothers on the bed, and this one mother had just delivered her baby, and the baby was right next to her with two other mothers sitting on the bed. I just said, “My gosh, are we really making a difference?”

I think the struggle is that you have to realize that you’re going to move the needle, and that needle may not move, it’s almost like what Jim Collins says in his book, Good to Great, it’s like moving a 5,000-pound flywheel—at first it doesn’t go anywhere and then it moves slowly. You can’t get disenchanted, you can’t get disappointed, that you’re not going to see immediate and complete change, but you have to start somewhere, and I think that those individuals were so happy when we’re able to give them some hope and some perspective that we can help move the needle a little bit.

As I always say, the only difference between somebody living in Kenya and somebody living in Haiti, versus our own selves in the United States, is fate. That’s the only difference. These are folks that are just as smart, just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’re not smart—the only difference, the only difference, is that fate has given them a different scenario than ourselves.

I hope that I don’t lose my perspective. I think each time I go I leave with a new idea. Case in point, when I left Kenya six weeks ago, because we’ve been able to save more babies we’ve discovered another problem, and that’s pediatric mortality. Because more babies are living, they’re dying from 1 day to 5 years old, and so we launched a new program with the community called Thrive to Five, so rather than just bemoan my frustration, I’m going to jump right in and see if we can address the next problem that surfaces.

You’ve been very involved with and supportive of the School of Public Health. What motivates your relationship with SPH?

For me it’s about collaborative IQ. The sooner you recognize that you can’t change it all on your own, the sooner you recognize that you have got to partner with other folks—I believe today it’s not about innovation, it’s about integration. There has been enough innovation done. Case in point, there are over 100,000 medical apps and less than 10 percent are used.

I feel it’s terrific if you can partner with someone who brings things that you don’t bring, and that’s what I like about BU. You partner with them, and then you partner together with someone else, and before you know it you’re able to embark upon an enormous amount of change.

I love the passion. I’ve gone through two deans, I’ve been on the School of Public Health [Dean’s Advisory] Board for four years, I’ve seen two deans, and both deans have captured my interest. They’re passionate, they’re focused on global health, which is what I am focused on, and so it was a no-brainer when the foundation, three years ago, started to say, “the 15th anniversary is coming up,” which is really amazing, and the board wanted to do something—it also happens to be the year that I turn 60, I don’t need any gifts, I don’t want any gifts, but what I wanted to do was to help out other organizations, which could be the greatest gift and legacy for myself. It was a no-brainer to choose the Boston University School of Public Health among the five partners that we will be honoring October 1.

I don’t have any regrets, I just love their passion, I love their commitment, and I respect the thought leadership that they bring to this area.

Our Class of 2016 just graduated—any parting words of advice for them?

I think it’s three things.

Mark Twain once said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why,” and so I think that you have to know what your “why” is. People will tell you what to do and what to be, however until you know that you want to do something, you will never, ever realize the kind of potential that you want. That’s lesson number one.

Lesson number two: You will fail along the way, but failure in a lifetime journey will lead to success, so recognize and embrace those failures and make them a part of who you are in terms of how you develop, rather than bemoan them.

Last but not least, the higher your “collaborative IQ,” the sooner you recognize working with one another will allow for more change in the world, then I think you’ll make an immediate difference. It took me a long time to realize that I no longer had to be an innovator, I no longer had to just innovate new ideas, but rather if I could integrate a problem-solving technique with a solution that someone else had, and I was able to partner with that individual, wow, I could get a lot more done. That’s exactly what I think I’ve done in my last 10 years, and I would have loved to have known that in my earlier years.