Every month or so at a community center in downtown San Diego, Mary West gives a cooking lesson, and serves lunch to a crowd of seniors. “It’s my favorite place to visit; I light up when I go in there,” said West to a gathering of employees at her San Diego-based, non-profit organization West Health.
West, who’s 69, opened the center with her husband Gary five years ago, after seeing elderly people line up for more than a block to get a meal at a community center. Having cared for her mother in old age, she wanted to offer less fortunate seniors a bright place where they can enjoy, free of charge, a healthy meal all year-round, practice yoga, or take a dance class. A staff nurse also helps them manage chronic diseases, monitors their blood pressure, and makes sure they get the care they need. “We knew we wanted to help seniors,” she said.
The center is but a piece of West’s largesse. A one-time billionaire, she has given away a chunk of her fortune in the pursuit of better care and lower health care costs. In its inaugural list of America's self-made women, FORBES estimates she’s now worth $610 million—separately from her husband, money she’s earned as a telemarketing pioneer.
See Full Coverage of America's Richest Self-Made Women
After agreeing to consider questions via email, West later declined an interview. She and her husband keep a low profile, deferring questions about their philanthropies to a cadre of professionals hired to push their health care agenda in Washington, D.C., and through investments in digital health start-ups.
“Most of the [country’s] budgetary problems come from health care and that’s why we chose to take that task on that nobody else seems to have the appetite to do, because that could really make a difference not only to individuals but to the entire economy,” said Gary West, a one-time hospital administrator, at that employee gathering.
As business owners, the Wests saw first hand health care costs rise. Though she never attended college, Mary West founded WATS Telemarketing in 1978 with her husband in the garage of their Omaha, Nebraska home. The inspiration: catching a commercial one night asking viewers to place an order for a Roger Whittaker album, and thinking there must be a better way to sell products than on TV.
After they sold that company in 1980, she founded West TeleServices in 1986 (her husband joined a year later), and took it public in 1996. Private equity investors led by Thomas H. Lee Partners and Quadrangle Group took it private in 2006; at the time, the couple received $1.4 billion in cash but also kept a stake. Mary now owns 9% of
According to IRS filings, she and her husband have given away more than $355 million since 2006 to a foundation and an endowment. With a portion of those contributions, they formed West Health (formerly the Gary & Mary West Wireless Health Institute) in 2009, with three of the top executives coming from the ranks of
One of West Health’s goals is to facilitate communication between medical devices in hospitals. It is spearheading an effort to bring hospitals together and agree on standards for medical device interoperability. The organization estimates that this lack of interoperability costs hospitals, payers, device manufacturers, and patients $30 billion in redundant testing, misdiagnoses, and misallocation of labor.
The Wests also set up a $100 million fund (entirely their money) to invest in digital health start-ups that deploy technology to potentially make health care more efficient and save money. So far, they’ve made 11 investments, and completed four exits, including Humedica which tracks the health of patients with chronic disease, RxAnte which aims to boost medication adherence, and Change Healthcare which allows people to shop for lower cost health care providers.
