THE PEOPLE’S
VOICE IN
HEALTHCARE
CANCER SURVIVOR
KEYNOTE
SPEAKER
Author
Provocateur
Movement Builder
30-Year Brain Cancer Survivor.
ABOUT MATTHEW ZACHARY
Matthew Zachary does not give survivor speeches. He gives rooms full of healthcare executives, clinicians, pharma leaders, employers, and policymakers a perspective they cannot get from anyone else on a stage: 30 years on the receiving end of the system, translated into the language of policy, economics, institutional trust, and what happens when the people medicine is supposed to serve stop believing in it.
“Matthew gives future physicians something medical education too often cannot: an unfiltered understanding of what healthcare looks and feels like from the other side of the system. His voice belongs in the education of the next generation of healthcare leaders.”
— Robert A. Winn Excellence in Clinical Trials Award Program
Matthew brings a rare combination of patient credibility, healthcare expertise, humor, and candor. He can engage a sophisticated healthcare audience while offering valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities shaping patient care.” –
— Boehringer Ingelheim
“Matthew challenges senior healthcare executives to think differently about the business they lead through the lens of the patient voice.”
— Point of Care Marketing Association
“Matthew turns decades of experience into insights that challenge clinicians, make them laugh, and change how they think about the care they deliver.”
– Medical College of Wisconsin
MORE CLIENT TESTIMONIALS
Matthew delivers one of the rare keynote experiences that resonates with clinicians, executives, and patient leaders at the same time. He translates lived experience into clear operational insight that healthcare organizations can actually use.
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—Walgreens
“Few voices combine Matthew’s decades of lived experience with his credibility, candor, and ability to connect across the cancer ecosystem."
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—American Brain Tumor Association
Matthew should be on everyone’s top ten celebrity healthcare speakers list. He is engaging, inspirational, personable, hysterical, and very, very real.”
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—Stonybrook Cancer Center
Matthew was bar none one of the best keynotes we've ever had. His storytelling and his music single-handedly mesmerized a theater full of 1,000 medical professionals. He is a must-have speaker at any event.”
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—Academy of Oncology Nurse Navigators
Matthew brought an entire audience of executives to tears, cheers, and back again at our Specialty Summer with his unique story, expertise, and comedic Gen X bent.”
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—Magellin RX Management
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A TRUSTED VOICE IN AMERICAN HEALTHCARE
Named The People's Voice in Healthcare by People Magazine. Called A Pioneer and Provocateur by The Atlantic. Author of the bestselling We The Patients: Understanding, Navigating, and Surviving America's Healthcare Nightmare (Wiley, 2026). Host of Out of Patients, healthcare's longest running independent podcast, 19 years running
He is not a motivational speaker with a diagnosis. He is the founder of Stupid Cancer, the architect of We The Patients, and the only speaker working today who sits at the intersection of patient lived experience, healthcare policy, media, and a national consumer protection movement that pharma, employers, and state legislators are all paying attention to.
His diverse lived experiences enrich his appearances, consistently delivering lasting impact and ensuring that audiences of all sizes leave inspired, motivated, and empowered to live their best lives.
The system is not broken. It is designed. And I have spent 30 years living in it, studying it, and building the movement to fix it.
SIGNATURE KEYNOTES
Matthew Zachary is the only national voice in American healthcare who has been a patient, built a movement, written the book, and is now organizing the constituency. These four keynotes are the four angles of the same argument: the system was built against you, the communication is designed to confuse you, the access machinery is failing you, and the people who could fix it are waiting for you to show up organized. Nobody else is saying all four things from the same chair. Nobody else has the receipts.
KEYNOTE 1
Get Busy Living: Surviving Brain 30 Years Ago and Living To Tell the Tale
The Talk
The personal origin story. Brain cancer at 21. A campus doctor who prescribed Robitussin.
A golf ball sized tumor. The loss of a piano career. Survival. And then thirty years of refusing to let the experience be the whole story.
This keynote is not about inspiration. It is about what happens after you survive something the system was not built to handle, and what you build when you realize nobody is coming to fix it for you.
Audience Takeaway
Every person in the room leaves with a clearer understanding of what it actually costs to navigate a serious diagnosis alone, and why the difference between a patient who survives the system and one who does not is rarely clinical.
Best For
General healthcare conferences · Leadership summits · Patient advocacy organizations · Corporate keynotes · Any audience that needs the room to feel something before they will listen to anything else
KEYNOTE 2
The American Healthcare System Is Not Broken. It Was Built This Way.
The Talk
Drawing on We the Patients: Understanding, Navigating, and Surviving America's Healthcare Nightmare (Wiley, 2026), Matthew traces the deliberate architecture of a system designed to extract profit rather than deliver care, from the 1971 White House tapes to the AI powered denial engines of 2026.
This is not a grievance talk, rather a diagnosis of a political success story that put patients at the bottom on purpose. And it comes with a prescription: the patient community is the largest unorganized missing political constituency in American history, and the moment it recognizes itself as a shared identity, everything changes.
Audience Takeaway
Leaders leave understanding the historical and political architecture behind the system's most persistent failures, why fixing it requires organized patient power rather than better policy arguments, and what their organization's role is in either accelerating or obstructing that change.
Best For
Health policy conferences · Employer benefits events · Life science and pharma leadership · Patient advocacy organizations · Any audience that needs the uncomfortable truth delivered with receipts
KEYNOTE 3
Nobody Cares What You Have to Say
The Talk
Healthcare organizations spend billions communicating with patients.
Almost none of it lands. Not because the message is wrong but because the medium is broken. Advertising works because it makes people feel something. Healthcare communication fails because it has decided that happy is not the point.
Matthew examines why institutional language, compliance shaped messaging, and empty empathy continue to erode trust, and what it actually takes to say something a patient will hear, believe, and act on.
Audience Takeaway
Communications and marketing leaders leave with a clear framework for why institutional language fails patients and what it takes to replace it with something a real person will actually hear, trust, and act on.
Best For
Healthcare marketing and communications teams · Patient engagement leaders · Life science and pharma commercial teams · Point of care marketing · Corporate affairs organizations
KEYNOTE 4
If You Build It, They Won't Come
The Talk
The most sophisticated therapy in history means nothing if it never clears prior authorization, never survives the formulary, never reaches the patient who was diagnosed six months ago and has been fighting the system ever since. Matthew examines market access through the only lens that actually matters: the patient who is waiting. He connects the decisions made in conference rooms to the consequences lived in waiting rooms, and shows what changes when the patient experience becomes the organizing principle of access strategy rather than its afterthought.
Audience Takeaway
Market access and patient services leaders leave with an honest accounting of where access strategy loses the patient, what the experience of that failure actually looks like from the other side, and what changes when patient reality becomes the organizing principle of access design rather than its final consideration
Best For
Life science and pharma market access teams · Patient services and hub strategy leaders · HEOR and reimbursement teams · Any organization asking why their therapy is not reaching the patients it was designed for
Partial Client List
Book Matthew Zachary
Every room he walks into leaves differently than it arrived. If that is what your audience needs, let's talk.
WATCH MATTHEW LIVE
The closing keynote that brought 600 young adult cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers to their feet at CancerCon 2017. Part rally cry, part reckoning. This is what a patient movement sounds like when it finds its voice
What patient autonomy actually looks like when the stakes are your hands, your identity, and your life. A five-minute case study in trust, choice, and what the system gets wrong.
Live piano. Personal narrative. A challenge to every healthcare leader in the room to see the human being behind the data. This is the keynote that launched a national movement.