Ettore Sansavini

Having left Lugo fifty years ago as a qualified accountant and with a dream of setting up in Italy a highly complex private healthcare system based on the American model, this self-made man from Forlì now heads up a multinational group, the Gruppo Villa Maria, with turnover of over 700 million euros employing nearly 9000 people in 31 clinics in Italy and 12 abroad, and a company, Eurosets, acquired in 1998, which are the two faces of a single vision: combining technology and medicine to ensure the best treatments in the world.

The pioneer of Italian private healthcare has, on the one hand with GVM Care & Research, become a benchmark of excellence in cardiac surgery (14% of heart operations in the country take place in his hospitals), while, on the other, with Eurosets, he is competing by means of research and innovation with American biomedical multinationals 100 times bigger.