Superhero, and force for good

Wendy Everett, head of New England Healthcare Institute and inspiration for Daredevil. (john tlumacki/globe staff)

CAMBRIDGE - The neat columns of papers on the table in Wendy Everett's office in Kendall Square suggest that a disciplined, organized woman runs the New England Healthcare Institute. "The Marvel Book," displayed on a nearby shelf, hints at something less orderly.

Everett, 63, NEHI's first president, is the daughter of the late William Blake "Bill" Everett, a founding artist of Marvel Comics who created both the Sub-Mariner and Daredevil. Describing the birth of superhero comics in 1939, he later wrote of "six writers, four artists, and a case of booze . . . with reams of paper littering the floor." Inspired by his legally blind daughter, who now wears contact lenses but as a girl disliked wearing the glasses that corrected her vision, he made Daredevil blind.

NEHI, celebrating its fifth anniversary, bills itself as a "think-and-do" tank that uses research and its broad-based membership - biotech, pharmacy, physicians, patients, academia, insurers, hospitals - to push innovations that make healthcare more efficient and effective. Working with the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, NEHI studied the human and monetary cost of errors in community hospitals that don't computerize prescription writing. Everett herself lost an aunt and a fiance, whose sapphire engagement ring she still wears, to medication errors. Now, in what Everett calls the "poster child" for NEHI's vision, the state will require all hospitals to computerize medication ordering by 2012.

"One thing I carry away from my wonderful relationship with my dad," Everett says, "is the ability to look at every problem that comes along and try to imagine the most creative way to solve it."

Everett, a descendent of both Harvard President Edward Everett and poet William Blake, spent much of her childhood in Concord and Winchester. Though she eventually earned a Harvard doctorate, girls of her time and milieu went to finishing school, not college. Her father refused to pay her tuition, so she attended the University of Rochester on scholarship.

After her socialite mother's sudden death, Everett, then 21, became guardian of her two younger brothers because their distraught, alcoholic father unraveled. In 1969 Everett bought a Volkswagen camper, took her brothers on a 2 1/2-month cross-country trip, and settled with them in San Francisco. She studied nursing and launched her career.

"Part of my role in the family was to take care of people," she says. "That does certainly predispose one to healthcare."

NEHI recruited Everett from the California-based Institute for the Future. Her second marriage was ending, and her 120-pound Bernese mountain dog, Jasper, who accompanied her to work, had died.

Everett has another project: contributing to a book about her father: "He had a wonderful sense of humor and he was eccentric, whereas my mother was much more focused on my being well-bred. If you had a choice between the two, who are you going to go with? Miss Manners or the guy who makes you into a flashing blinking robot on Halloween?" IRENE SEGE