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Matthew Budd, MD

Dr. Budd, a past Harvard Medical School professor, has developed an approach for improving health, well-being, and organizational effectiveness based on the interrelationships of language, emotion, action, behavior and the body. His book on this approach, You Are What You Say, has just been released.

In twenty-five years of practicing medicine with the Harvard Community Health Plan (HCHP) Dr. Budd became aware of the those people who have stress or emotionally based physical symptoms but no physiologically identifiable source of their symptoms. He discovered that this population accounts for a majority of people visiting physicians (approximately sixty percent), and is an immense health care problem with little effective response available to physicians.

To address this issue, Dr. Budd spent ten years in intensive study in the biology of cognition, linguistics, and emotional patterning, and then developed the Ways to Wellness Program that evolved into the Behavioral Medicine Department at HCHP. The goal of this program and the department itself was to supply a missing dimension in health care, the recognition of and intervention in the emotional aspects of wellness and illness in a way that is integrated, not alternative to main stream health care. The program is a major success with patients improving in their general life-function scores, and their rate of appointments with physicians falling 50%. The program has been reported in more than twenty articles in scientific journals and the press, and in a radio special on PBS. In 1995 the program was produced under the name of the "Personal Health Improvement Program" and is now marketed and delivered nationally by a major pharmaceutical company.

To introduce this approach to the physician community, Dr. Budd and a team from HCHP developed the New Physician Orientation Program in 1990. All new primary care physicians joining the plan were students in this year-long effort which focused on building skills for success in managed primary care practice. In this program he observed first hand the difficulties physicians have in succeeding in managed care environments. He subsequently founded HSC Associates, a consulting and education company organized to enable leadership to align their organization around strategy and build internal skills for delivery.

Dr. Budd is a graduate of Amherst College, where he received the Phi Beta Kappa award, and Harvard Medical School, where he was elected to AOA. He trained in Internal Medicine at the University Hospitals of Cleveland and the Massachusetts General Hospital and in Pediatrics at the Boston Children's Hospital. Dr. Budd served as clinical Chief of Internal Medicine at HCHP's Cambridge Center, and twice won the Joseph L. Dorsey award for innovative contributions to the Harvard Community Health Plan. Dr. Budd is a Diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine and Assistant Professor of Medicine (ret.) at Harvard Medical School.

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