Our team
Palliative Lens Advisors brings the realities of serious illness care into the rooms where healthcare strategy, investment, operations, and product decisions are made.
Led by founder and CEO Andrew Esch, MD, with consulting partner David Lee, the firm combines frontline clinical insight with disciplined analysis, advisory experience, and hands-on client engagement.
Clients work directly with senior advisors throughout each engagement, keeping discovery, recommendations, and implementation planning connected to the clinical and organizational questions that prompted the work.
Andrew Esch, MD, MBA
Founder & CEO
Dr. Esch is a nationally recognized physician executive with more than two decades of leadership at the intersection of clinical care, healthcare operations, payment innovation, and strategy.
His perspective is grounded in years of caring for people with advanced illness while advising health systems, national organizations, investors, and emerging healthcare companies. He helps leaders translate complex clinical realities into scalable strategies that improve care and support more sustainable healthcare systems.
Dr. Esch works with health systems, private equity firms, digital health companies, AI innovators, and healthcare startups to identify where compassionate care and sound business strategy align. His expertise spans value-based care, serious illness strategy, care model design, clinical operations, workforce innovation, reimbursement, and product development.
He is particularly sought after for helping organizations navigate the practical challenges of serving high-need populations while creating measurable clinical and financial value. His work brings the voice of frontline clinicians into boardrooms, product development, investment decisions, and healthcare policy.
Previously, Dr. Esch spent more than a decade in national leadership with the Center to Advance Palliative Care, where he helped shape educational initiatives and strategic programs that influenced the growth of palliative care across the United States.
He is also the author of The Palliative Lens, a widely read commentary examining modern healthcare through the perspective of serious illness. His writing and speaking challenge conventional wisdom while exploring the economic, ethical, and operational forces shaping medicine.
At Palliative Lens Advisors, Dr. Esch believes organizations willing to confront healthcare's hardest problems with honesty, innovation, and disciplined execution can build systems that are both more humane and more effective.
David Lee, MBA
Co-founder & Consulting Partner
David brings experience in analytics, advisory work, and client engagement to the firm's consulting practice. He works alongside Dr. Esch to frame complex questions, organize discovery, evaluate information, and turn findings into clear strategic options for clients.
His analytical background strengthens the firm's ability to connect qualitative insight with operational and business considerations. Across engagements, David helps maintain a disciplined view of project goals, stakeholder needs, evidence, tradeoffs, and the practical steps required to move from assessment to action.
David also supports the relationship side of the work—preparing and facilitating client conversations, keeping leadership teams aligned, and ensuring recommendations remain responsive to each organization's context. His advisory approach helps clients maintain momentum while navigating decisions that cross clinical, financial, and operational boundaries.
Collaborating experts
As needed, Palliative Lens Advisors can bring in additional clinical, operational, or financial experts whose experience matches a project's specific questions and setting.
How we work
Each engagement is tailored to the organization, goals, stakeholders, and timeline so the advisory support remains focused, transparent, and practical.
What physician-led consulting adds
Serious illness strategy sits at the intersection of patient care, clinician workflow, operations, finance, and organizational change. Physician-led guidance helps leadership teams test strategic ideas against the realities of clinical practice while keeping patient and family needs visible in every decision.
Clinical credibility
Recommendations reflect the day-to-day realities of caring for people with serious illness and collaborating with referring clinicians.
System perspective
Clinical goals are considered alongside governance, operations, workforce, quality, and financial sustainability.
Focused decisions
Complex choices are translated into clear options, tradeoffs, priorities, and an actionable path forward.
Practical partnership
Senior advisors remain connected to the work rather than handing the engagement off after the initial conversation.