Bradford S. Koles, Jr. is an Executive Director and the national spokesperson for the Advisory Board Company, a for-profit, publicly-traded research, technology and consulting firm. The Advisory Board serves more than 4,400 leading hospitals and health systems. Mr. Koles is one of the firm's preeminent thought-leaders in the area of health system economics and strategy, heading the faculty at the annual series of Chief Executive Officer meetings. He is also the keynote speaker at the annual series of Health Care Advisory Board meetings, the firm's flagship program. Mr. Koles is one of the best known and most requested speakers in the health care industry. Mr. Koles is a health care economist by training with a wide-range of expertise in the provider industry. He has been a dominant figure in the evolution and communication of every major Advisory Board Company research initiative since 1994, leaving him conversant in the history and current status of all the significant reform initiatives: coverage expansion, vertical integration and physician partnership models, managed care and payer contracting, horizontal integration and system economics of scale, quality-based competition and consumerism. Mr. Koles has been with the Advisory Board for twenty-four years. Previous to his employment with the Advisory Board Company, he worked as a management consultant for both the Hay Group and Ernst & Young. Mr. Koles received his Master's Degree in economics from Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor's Degree from Kenyon College.