Board Member Spotlight: Dr. James K. Elsey, Treasurer

Jim spent 36 years in private practice as a general and vascular surgeon in Georgia, and carried a second commitment alongside it. He served in the Army Reserves as Chief of Surgery of the 117th MASH and taught vascular surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center.

He earned his medical degree from the Medical College of Georgia and completed his surgical training at Emory University School of Medicine. Nearly four decades of clinical surgery followed, split evenly between rural and urban Georgia. Today he is a Professor of Surgery at the Medical University of South Carolina, where he lectures and mentors future physicians.

Jim served at nearly every level of leadership in the American College of Surgeons, rising to Vice Chair of the Board of Regents, with a focus on rural surgery, surgical training, gun violence mitigation, and healthcare reform. He has been a visiting professor at Emory, the Medical College of Georgia, and Mercer, has authored many surgical textbook chapters and journal articles, and worked with Covidien and the ACS to develop and teach single incision laparoscopic surgery.

Outside of medicine, he served as a County Commissioner working on economic development and infrastructure. His community work in child abuse prevention and after-school mentoring led to him being named an official torchbearer for the 1996 Olympic Games.

He has also just published a new book, American Healthcare: A Broken System, Proposed Reforms, an in-depth look at how our healthcare system got where it is and what could be done about it. It is available on Amazon.

We are grateful to have Jim on our board. Decades of caring for patients, students, and service members show up in how he serves the veteran families staying at Fisher House Charleston.

You can meet the rest of our board on our leadership page.