Co-Founder, Physician Consultant
Chris Leininger, MD is GreyZone’s co-Founder and Physician Consultant. A board-certified Family Medicine Physician, he brings more than four decades of medical expertise and a deep commitment to and appreciation of medical challenges to our team.
Dr. Leininger enjoys learning patients’ stories, helping with the assessment of complex cases, and solving medical mysteries. He is passionate about healthcare improvement and considers medical challenges to be a personal calling. He enjoys working on these cases and serving clients who need his help. At GreyZone, Dr. Leininger is directly involved in the assessment of each new client and helps direct advocacy services and resources alongside our advocates. He is also available for regular check-ins and advocacy level consultations of long-term GreyZone clients. Dr. Leininger does not offer medical services through GreyZone.
He values philanthropy, care access, and medical education. In addition to serving as a non-practicing Physician Consultant at GreyZone, Dr. Chris as most people call him, is a partner in one of the premier concierge medicine practices in town, Seattle Premier Health. He has been practicing and teaching medicine for four decades. He is an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, where he trains medical residents in office surgeries and teaches complex diagnosis. Dr. Leininger weekly donates his time and surgical skills to Project Access Northwest, a non-profit facilitating access to specialty medical care for low-income uninsured people.
Prior to his work at GreyZone and Seattle Premier Health, Dr. Leininger enjoyed a long career in executive hospital roles and healthcare improvement. He was former Chief Information Officer of Swedish Medical Center, as well as former Director of the Swedish Clinical Quality Division. He also served for a decade as a lecturer at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).
Dr. Leininger holds an Executive MBA from the University of Washington, and obtained his Medical Degree (MD) from New York University School of Medicine. He received his Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree in Physics and Mathematics from Amherst College.
Outside of work, Dr. Leininger loves music and traveling. He is a guitar player and his wife a soprano singer and together they have a Jazz band that frequently plays around the city. Their travels have taken them to most continents of the world and to places as remote as Antarctica.