Samuel Nathan Regenstrief was born in Vienna, Austria in 1910. He came to America with his family when he was nine years old and settled in Indianapolis, Indiana. After high school, his talents and ingenuity led to successful careers in accounting and management counseling and then to becoming Vice-President of the Refrigeration Division of Philco in Connersville, Indiana. In 1958, Regenstrief left Philco and organized Design & Manufacturing Corporation in Connersville. He believed that many families would purchase dishwashers to free housewives from this menial chore. He organized D&M to mass produce dishwashers and by the mid-1970's, D&M employed 2,000 people and produced about 37% of the world's dishwashers.

"Sam" Regenstrief was recognized nationally as an authority on industrial production techniques. It was his contention that innovation and new technology applied to medical problems would provide better health care for more people at less cost. Sam joined forces with a nationally recognized authority in the health field, Dr. John B. Hickam, then Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine, and the Regenstrief Foundation and the Regenstrief Institute for Health Care were founded in 1969.

The Regenstrief Institute for Health Care is a joint enterprise of the Regenstrief Foundation, Inc., the Indiana University School of Medicine, and the Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County, Indiana. It was the hope of the founders that the techniques of biomedical science, computer science and industrial engineering could be applied directly to health care settings to improve medical care, to provide rational methods for marshaling resources, and to foster the use of quantitative methods in medical decision and policy making.

These original goals, which are being aggressively pursued by Institute investigators, are even more relevant to today's health care environment than when the Institute was originally formed.