Kim A. Keck

Company: Blue Cross Blue Shield AssociationTitle: President & CEOIndustry: Financials and InsuranceNotable in 2024: Keck led BCBS to become the first insurer to cover multi-million dollar gene therapies for sickle cell disease, as part of the association's mission to remove barriers to care for all Americans.

The health-care industry continues to face several significant challenges, from wrangling rising costs and drug prices to addressing inequality and inequities that create issues with access, coverage and care.

Kim A. Keck, the first female president and CEO of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, has spent her more than thirty years in the health-care industry working to address these problems.

Named to the role in 2021, Keck leads 33 independent and locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies that provide health-care coverage to more than 118 million members, or one in three Americans.

In that time, Keck has pushed to create a better health system for all Americans. One of her first efforts was launching a National Health Equity Strategy that is taking on racial health disparities in areas like maternal health, behavioral health, diabetes and cardiovascular conditions. Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies have more than 400 programs addressing social drivers of health being established backed by more than a $1 billion investment.

Keck also serves as the chair of Synergie Medication Collective, a medication contracting organization formed by a group of Blue Cross and Blue Shield affiliated companies in 2023 that aims to improve affordability and access to costly drugs. Through Synergie, Blue Cross and Blue Shield became the first insurers to cover lifesaving multimillion-dollar gene therapies for sickle cell disease with an unprecedented guarantee of manufacturer refunds if expected outcomes are not met. (The 2025 Changemakers list also features Dr. Reshma Kewalramani, whose company Vertex Pharmaceuticals became the first biotech to receive U.S. government approval for a sickle cell treatment using the CRISPR gene editing technique.)

One of Keck's biggest focuses in recent years has been around maternal health inequities, something that disproportionally impacts Black and Latina patients. Keck worked directly with the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a U.S. nonprofit that works to improve health care quality, to put forth a new standard for measuring maternal health disparities, a standard that has now been adopted by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"One of the many tragedies of America's maternal health crisis is that so many of these events are preventable," Keck said in a June statement. "We need providers, payers, policymakers and community leaders to work in partnership to create a better system of health — one that ensures every mother and baby goes home healthy and remains healthy."