Michael is the co-founder and CEO of Common Citizen (CC) and Michigan Pure Med (MPM), the largest vertically-integrated license holder in the State of Michigan to date.

Michael has spent over 21 years re-engineering healthcare operations, leading organizational improvement, cultural transformation and sustaining change. Most recently, Michael was the CEO and founder of Elias Group Corp, an international consulting practice specializing in large healthcare transformations world-wide. He has traveled all over the world, taking over underperforming health systems and strategically transforming their clinical and non-clinical business practices.  

He was a major catalyst of transformational change at North York General Hospital (NYGH) in Toronto, Canada as the Chief Transformation Officer of the system. He develop, deployed and sustained NYGH’s award-winning improvement system utilizing Lean and Six Sigma principles.   NYGH was recently named the second best hospital in Canada by Newsweek Magazine, and ranked among the top 100 in the world in terms of efficiency and clinical outcomes.

A native of Michigan, Michael has a Bachelor of Science from Michigan State University. He attended Wayne State School of Medicine Master’s program in Community Medicine. In addition, he has a cognate in Applied Statistics.  He is a Master Black Belt and holds two certifications from the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center and General Electric (GE) Medical Systems.