Dr. Michael Averbukh

No sensible person, Dr. Michael Averbukh points out, calls a financial adviser only after losing money. Wealth is planned. Tax, investment and preservation sit inside a strategy that is built long before anything goes wrong. People cherish their financial assets, he observes, often more than their health, and it shows: health is handled the other way round. “We wait until a problem appears,” he says, and then, under pressure, we go looking for answers from Dr. Google or an AI chatbot. His alternative is disarmingly simple: “Treat your health as your financial assets.”

That idea runs through Serenity Medical Fiduciary Group, the company Averbukh co-founded and now leads as CEO. Its premise is that a person facing a complex health problem should not have to manage it alone, and should not be meeting their guide for the first time in the middle of a crisis. Members place their trust in a professional trustee who already knows them. Serenity calls the role a medical fiduciary.

Averbukh comes to the idea with unusual depth. “I am the fourth generation of doctors,” he says, and his daughter is now studying medicine, which he puts down, with a doctor's dry humour, to something in the genes. What has kept him in the profession is the chance to combine clinical knowledge and experience with “a profound human touch”, and to guide his patients “properly, clearly and accurately, even when they needed specialists that weren't me.”

He did not arrive in leadership from above. He began as a volunteer in the emergency room of a tertiary hospital while a second-year student, then worked on an ambulance, in the ER, in battle and on the wards. He became a senior physician, a clinical coordinator for students and a lecturer, moved through junior and senior management of healthcare organisations, and served as CEO of hospitals before co-founding Serenity. Along the way, he says frankly, he made an enormous number of mistakes. Then comes the perspective: “I did not kill anyone, and yes, saved some lives.” More important to him is that he learned from every one of them. “Very little can today surprise me or catch me off guard.”

That experience does not make Serenity perfect, and he is the first to say so. What it does, he argues, is make the organisation thorough, humble, honest and professional enough to look for the best solution rather than the easy or quick one.

The problem Serenity exists to solve is one most people never notice. “Very few people see the gap we're talking about until we show them,” he says. In his description, modern healthcare systems are highly developed, innovative and quick to embrace technology, and physicians are better trained than ever, yet ever more specialised in narrow fields. “They are the best in what they do. But what they do is highly segmented.” Step back and look at the whole, he says, and “you see numerous silos in a big system that was never planned to be simple.”

On the other side of those silos stands the patient: confused by the variety of options, paralysed by the inability to decide, or forced by circumstance to become the CEO or project manager of their own health journey. Even the brightest managers and leaders, Averbukh notes, were never trained to run a health project, and it is a project that does not easily forgive mistakes. He describes the underlying difficulty as a paradox of excess of access. An abundance of doctors, treatments and information sounds like an advantage, but without a guiding hand it can leave people unable to act.

The Serenity method answers that with a relationship. Each member is assigned a case manager, always a medical professional, who gets to know them well beyond the medical chart: family, personal preferences and goals, communication skills, personality. Members are also assigned a primary care physician. That deep acquaintance, built over the long term and backed by clinical experience, is what Averbukh believes gives the team complete oversight of a member's health. A client is always one phone call or one message away from a trusted case manager, whether the matter is clinical or administrative, such as insurance. The question underneath never changes: what works best for the client.

In the era of AI and digital tools, Serenity is deliberately built on human interaction, which he concedes is less popular today. “And yet, we do not give up on this human connection and interaction.” He recalls a client who, at a difficult moment, did not need another specialist at all. He needed someone to talk to. For Averbukh, that is the difference between having access to information and having someone who genuinely knows you.

It brings him back to the comparison with money. Plan, he urges, define goals, and be helped by experts who manage the whole journey rather than only repairing the broken parts.

Looking ahead, his focus is on consistently delivering the best possible outcomes and an excellent client experience. But the measure of success he cares about most has nothing to do with organisational metrics. It will come, he says, when members tell friends over dinner, with nobody from Serenity in the room, that joining was the best decision they ever made about their healthcare. It is a test he will never see taken, and that is precisely the point.