Margo Wickersham
Patient Advocate • Consultant • Speaker • Author
Bringing the patient perspective into the decisions that shape healthcare.
Margo Wickersham brings something unusual to healthcare conversations: the perspective of the patient, the experience of a business leader, and the skills of a communicator who knows how to bring people together.
She works with healthcare and life-sciences organizations, patient advocacy organizations, and others committed to making healthcare more patient-centered—bringing lived experience, strategic thinking, and a deep understanding of the patient journey to consulting, advisory, and speaking engagements.
Margo doesn't believe the patient voice belongs at the end of the process, after the important decisions have already been made.
Patients should be part of the conversation from the beginning.
From Patient to Partner
Margo's advocacy work began with her own experience navigating a rare and aggressive bladder cancer. A second opinion at MD Anderson Cancer Center revealed that her cancer required a very different treatment approach from the one initially recommended.
That experience changed more than her life. It changed the way she understood healthcare.
She saw firsthand the difference between designing healthcare for patients and designing it with patients—and the enormous value of having someone at the table who understands what the system looks like from the other side.
Today, Margo works to help close that gap.
Her advocacy includes collaboration with researchers, clinicians, patient advocacy organizations, and industry, as well as participation in international efforts focused on incorporating the patient perspective into healthcare decision-making.
She serves not simply as a voice telling her own story, but as a patient partner who can translate lived experience into insight that organizations can use.
More Than Lived Experience
Margo's perspective isn't limited to what she has experienced as a patient.
Before becoming a full-time advocate and speaker, she spent more than two decades building businesses, leading teams, developing customer relationships, driving sales and marketing strategies, and helping organizations navigate change across multiple industries.
That experience matters.
It means Margo understands that organizations have goals, constraints, competing priorities, budgets, timelines, and stakeholders. She knows how decisions get made inside organizations—and how difficult it can be to turn good intentions into meaningful action.
She understands both sides of the table.
That combination allows Margo to do more than tell a compelling patient story. She can help organizations listen differently, ask better questions, and translate patient insight into practical strategies and decisions.
A Communicator at Heart
Margo is also an author and experienced speaker who has presented to audiences ranging from healthcare and patient advocacy communities to corporate and professional organizations.
Her style is candid, thoughtful, occasionally irreverent, and grounded in real life.
She doesn't pretend that difficult experiences have easy answers. Instead, she brings curiosity, humor, humanity, and the willingness to say the thing that sometimes needs to be said.
Her bestselling book, Gratitude in the Storm: When Not Dying Is Enough to Keep Fighting, grew out of her experience navigating cancer, loss, uncertainty, and the challenge of finding a way forward when "staying positive" simply isn't enough.
What Drives Her
Margo believes healthcare is better when patients are treated not simply as recipients of care, but as experts in their own experience.
She believes patient engagement should be meaningful—not performative.
And she believes the most valuable patient perspective isn't necessarily the one that is easiest to hear.
Sometimes the most useful thing a patient can do is challenge an assumption, identify a blind spot, ask the uncomfortable question, or explain what something actually feels like on the receiving end.
That's the perspective Margo brings to the table.
Let's put the patient perspective where it belongs.
At the table.