The Healthcare Rebel: How Jakob Riis Is Reversing the Polarity of Patient Care
Jun 2025 | Edition 001 | In Conversation with: Jakob Riis of Falck
In the world of healthcare transformation, Jakob Riis isn’t just leading change, he’s completely rewiring the system.
The CEO of Falck, a global emergency response and healthcare provider, envisions a future in which hospitals come to patients rather than the other way around. His vision isn’t just ambitious; it’s revolutionary, shaped by a unique journey that crosses disciplines, industries, and borders.
The Creative Soul in a Structured World
There’s something different about Jakob Riis. He doesn’t fit the typical healthcare executive mold, and that’s by design. His career path reads like a carefully orchestrated plot twist: forestry management, academic research, pharmaceutical leadership, and now healthcare services transformation.
“I’ve never been in the same systems for a long time before I tested the boundaries,”
Riis admits with a quiet confidence that suggests this boundary-testing is less rebellious impulse and more strategic necessity.
This pattern began early, influenced in part by his upbringing as the son of a physician who worked on the Helsinki Declaration establishing ethical principles for medical research.
“Part of my upbringing was around...what are the rules on doing tests on humans?” Riis explains. This early exposure to questioning established thinking in medicine planted seeds that would grow throughout his career.
At Novo Nordisk, where he spent two decades climbing the corporate ladder, he faced a challenge from old-timers who told him he’d never understand sales because he’d “never carried the bag.” Rather than dismiss the critique, Riis did something unexpected. “I moved to the US and carried the bag and went into sales,”
he says, describing a counterintuitive career move for someone already in leadership. This willingness to step backward to move forward reveals something essential about his approach to innovation: genuine understanding trumps traditional career progression.
Years later, after being passed over for the CEO position at Novo Nordisk, Riis made an even more dramatic pivot, joining Falck, an emergency services company then on the brink of collapse. What seemed like a career setback became the canvas for his most ambitious work.
His educational background in forestry, an unusual starting point for a healthcare executive, provided an unexpected advantage, equipping him with systems thinking that views healthcare as an interconnected ecosystem rather than isolated components.
“It took me a little while to realize that in a service company, you don’t have to wait twelve years for a patient to receive a new molecule, so we’re essentially designing services all the time,”
he explains. “Suddenly, I could also become part of the R&D team.”
This realization unlocked something profound: “I’m probably a creative soul who was brought up to understand that if you don’t eat your vegetables, you can’t have any pie.”
The structured pharmaceutical world had channeled his creativity into commercial execution. At Falck, he could finally merge business discipline with creative vision.
The Moment Everything Changed
The seeds of Riis’s healthcare revolution were planted during a high-stakes product launch at Novo Nordisk. Tasked with launching what would become a blockbuster diabetes and weight loss medication, he found himself drowning in complexity.
“We had a big project, more than 500 colleagues in the project globally, all the functions of the company. We built massive Gantt charts and all that,” he recalls. “I remember sitting one Tuesday night realizing this isn’t going to work. We’re just chasing complexity.”
What happened next reveals the radical simplicity that would define his leadership approach.
“I’m just going to tell a story about what happens the day we launch,” he decided. “I’ll tell that story to the organization, and I’ll tell everybody this is what great looks like.”
This narrative-driven approach distilled hundreds of moving parts into seven bullet points on a single page. But simplification came with risk. Riis made the bold decision to dismiss his company’s army of consultants from McKinsey, BCG, and others who had embedded themselves in the project. “They were all telling us, this is super important. You’re doing some things great, but there are things you don’t know how to do, but we can help you,’”
he remembers. “They keep you hanging by your ankles outside the window, saying, We got you, but keep us on because otherwise, we’ll let go and you’re doomed.”
Riis recognized this dependency trap for what it was. “You don’t build a winning team with that,” he says. So he cut them loose, telling his team: “We will be bold. We’ll be simple. We’ll tell the team we can do it, chest up, and then move forward.”
The launch succeeded beyond expectations. More importantly, it crystallized a leadership philosophy: complexity is the enemy of execution, and authentic leadership means having the courage to embrace simplicity.
The Three Forces Breaking Healthcare
When Riis looks at today’s healthcare landscape, he sees a system fundamentally misaligned with patient needs. With surgical precision, he dissects the three forces driving healthcare’s dysfunction:
“There are three forces that drive the development of the medical world,” he explains. “One is centered around the medical doctors and their academic careers, and how that is fueled by what is new and what can be published. It’s not about great numbers for how well you’re treating a population of chronic patients.”
The second force: “Pharma. There’s a lot of focus on what the next product can do.”
And third: “Hospital administration.”
The devastating conclusion: “The force behind making sure that healthcare is delivered to patients’ needs, few actually are arguing that case.”
This critique is informed by his experience in multiple healthcare systems—having worked in both socialized and privatized healthcare environments, he’s uniquely positioned to see how different incentive structures produce different outcomes for patients.
This critique isn’t academic for Riis; it’s the foundation for his radical rethinking of care delivery. “When patients need to live their day-to-day lives with a chronic disease where they don’t need big interventions, they just need a little bit once in a while to keep them making sure they can live their lives to the fullest, those patients are not at the center of anything.”
Reversing the Polarity
Riis’s boldest idea is deceptively simple: what if we reversed the entire polarity of healthcare? Instead of bringing patients to hospitals, what if we brought healthcare to patients?
“When I got here, we were making money on taking patients to the hospital,” he says of Falck’s traditional ambulance business model. “Now, I think when I leave the company, we’re going to make money by not taking them to hospital but actually having a system that keeps them and treats them at home.”
This vision extends far beyond emergency services. In Colombia, Falck has created what amounts to a healthcare system without buildings, serving 500,000 people who pay a $15 monthly subscription for comprehensive care. “We’re pretty much their healthcare system apart from hospitals. Everything from an ambulance to home visits, all of that,” Riis explains.
When considering adding pharmaceutical distribution to this model, he insisted on a fundamental redesign of incentives.
“We would carry generic versions of the 20 most common pharma products, and include these drugs on a fixed fee basis. Adding about a dollar a month,” he says. “I don’t want any of our doctors or nurses to begin to think whether we’ll make more if we write two prescriptions rather than one. Because then I’m corrupting the model that we stand for.”
This approach reflects a core principle that Riis has developed through his international experience: financial incentives must be aligned with patient outcomes, not treatment volume. This simple insight has profound implications for how healthcare systems are designed.
This approach reveals Riis’s central innovation: decoupling financial incentives from care decisions.
“We are unique because we actually don’t have strong financial incentives to take patients either way,” he notes, adding with quiet gravity: “It has dawned on me that that’s quite unique in healthcare.”
The Virtual Hospital That Doesn’t Exist
Riis’s next frontier? “I’m just contemplating the idea of building a hospital that doesn’t exist,” he says. “It’s a virtual one with 400 doctors, 400 nurses, a healthcare infrastructure that doesn’t have a home. It may have a few outlets, but it exists virtually and also only by home visit.”
This virtual hospital concept directly challenges traditional structures. Coming from one of the world’s digitally advanced societies, Riis naturally sees healthcare’s future as increasingly unbound by physical infrastructure.
“The problem is you have no customers,” he acknowledges, “because they all say that’s not where we are. So I’m designing and building a product that the market is not asking for. Yet.”
That “yet” carries the weight of his conviction. Riis sees the current healthcare model as fundamentally unsustainable, comparing his approach to how Walmart transformed retail:
“The basic structure with hospitals and decentralized [clinics] open in daytime hours run by one or two physicians is doomed once you have a system that can deliver the same but at all times of the day.”
This vision faces enormous resistance, particularly from healthcare professionals protecting their turf. After describing remote-supported care models at a conference, Riis faced significant pushback: “Afterwards I hear that people have been there saying, ‘better not support him’ because, you know, ‘we have nurses, we’ve studied for six years,’ so somebody’s going to be with a patient that doesn’t have that education.” His response: “The system is really trying to protect itself.”
This bold reimagining of healthcare delivery exemplifies Riis’s broader vision, one that extends well beyond the boundaries of his own organization and into the future of global healthcare systems.
The True Legacy: Open-Source Healthcare Transformation
When we asked Jakob about his legacy, Riis didn’t mention company growth or personal accolades. Instead, he envisioned something far more profound: “The wildest dream for me is if somebody said, you know, in Austria, we’re seeing that we get better outcomes, and the system is working. It’s a tremendous success. It was inspired by models that Falck was advocating.”
His ambition transcends organizational boundaries: “My dream is that we end up saving more lives outside, or treating patients better outside of Falck than we’re directly involved in.”
This vision is backed by action. Falck operates as “open source” rather than protecting its innovations. “We don’t hide anything,” Riis emphasizes. “That beacon only shines when you’ve also created an engine that continues to come up with the next thing. And since we’re not protecting it... there is a need to continue to invent.”
The Future of Healthcare
Riis believes we’re approaching a fundamental shift in how healthcare is delivered. “You’re going to see the pendulum swing,” he predicts, driven by unsustainable costs, coordination challenges, and healthcare worker burnout in traditional settings.
The shift isn’t merely technological but structural: “We have no trouble hiring medical doctors, nurses, all that in the networks that we operate. Because we can give them flexibility. And the alternative is to run in a hospital ward. And I can tell you that’s not very attractive these days.”
His prediction? “It may be that the system currently works like this, but let’s not accept that.” He’s positioning Falck to catch the pendulum as it swings from institution-centered to patient-centered care.
The Rebel’s Challenge
Jakob Riis embodies a rare combination: the creative vision to reimagine healthcare and the practical discipline to build sustainable commercial models that deliver that vision. His journey from forestry PhD student to pharmaceutical executive to healthcare transformer reveals how non-linear paths often produce the most revolutionary thinking.
His approach offers a template for change agents across industries: question fundamental assumptions, build models that align incentives with desired outcomes, embrace simplicity as a strategic advantage, and measure success not by organizational growth but by system-wide transformation.
Informed by experiences across different healthcare systems and cultural contexts, Riis brings a global perspective to local challenges. His background in Denmark’s socialized healthcare system gives him insights into alternative models, while his time in the U.S. and developing markets provides practical understanding of diverse healthcare environments.
As healthcare systems face mounting pressures globally, Riis isn’t just predicting the future, he’s building it. His vision of care delivered where patients live, unburdened by misaligned incentives and unnecessary complexity, may soon move from radical to obvious.
When that happens, we’ll look back at conversations like this as the early blueprints for a healthcare revolution that was hiding in plain sight all along, one that began with a forestry nerd who never stopped asking why things couldn’t work differently.
This interview is the first in a series of conversations by the Group Of Humans we’re calling: “Architects of Change: Healthspan Edition”, exploring innovators who are fundamentally rethinking health and wellness, shifting the paradigm from merely treating sickness to actively fostering vitality and extending “healthspan” - the period of life spent in top health.