Gentell President & CEO
David Navazio
Since he founded the company in 1994, David Navazio has built Gentell from a small medical supply company to the largest vertically-integrated wound care company in the world. His visionary leadership, commitment to customers and patients, and his unwavering support of Gentell employees, makes Gentell what it is today.
David is a recognized leader in his field, receiving the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige Foundation Leadership Award in 2025. He is a thought leader in wound care who is often a featured speaker at wound care and medical device industry events. He is also a philanthropist who contributes his time and talents to many civic and charitable organizations.
In 2025, The Malcolm Baldrige Foundation honored David with Foundation’s Leadership Award in recognition of his outstanding business influence, management values and principles.
You can learn more about the Baldrige Foundation Leadership Awards here.
David began his career by founding a home medical equipment and respiratory company. Through a series of acquisitions and a consistently increasing customer base, the company soon became a leader in the industry and was the first company to develop wound healing protocols exclusively for nursing homes. These protocols were the preamble of Gentell and revolutionized wound care by providing education along with treatment options.
David worked tirelessly with the National Association for the Support of Long Term Care (NASL) and co-chaired the committee responsible for having the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) recognize advanced wound care products. The result was a Congressional change to the Medicare Coverage Policies (Section 2079) to recognize wound care and provide coverage for advanced wound care products. Today, most insurance companies utilize Medicare parameters with regard to wound care product benefits.
An active philanthropist, David is Board Chair Emeritus of Pearl S. Buck International. He serves as Trustee of Liguori Academy in Philadelphia and has been involved with many charitable organizations, including as the Assistant Governor for Rotary District 7510, past president of the Rotary Club of Trenton, NJ and Vice Chair of the Advisory Board of the Salvation Army, West Central New Jersey region. He proudly supports the KB Foundation youth mentoring program, based in his hometown of Philadelphia, PA.
“It is always a good idea to have one physician coordinate all medications and review them once a year for changes, which happens less frequently than you would think,” said David Navazio, CEO of Gentell, a medical wound-care company. Navazio said, “Newer versions or different drugs may be able to replace multiple prescriptions, thereby lowering costs. But you only get this type of evaluation if prescriptions are managed by one care provider.”
“For manufacturing in the medical device space, David Navazio, CEO of US wound care company Gentell notes that there is a "whole regulatory approach", meaning that disentanglement from using China as a manufacturing hub is not an easy thing to accomplish.”
"Those clinics are the ones who are the most vulnerable to closure," Navazio said. Navazio said the American health care system still struggles to provide medical services to the uninsured, who are often workers in lower-paying sectors or for smaller businesses whose health care plans are not affordable. "The uninsured are really the working poor," he said.”
Thought Leadership
Speaking on the panel at the American Medical Device Summit on "Visionary Strategies for Small to Midsize Companies: Mastering Market Expansion and Building Effective Teams"
At the Advanced Wound Care Summit, David presented on the topic of "Artificial Intelligence in Wound Care" which was followed by a boisterous Question & Answer Session
David is a supporter of the military and serves as Honorary Commander of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, a United States Air Force base located in central New Jersey, approximately 25 miles from Gentell’s headquarters
Rainmaker's Roundup
Learn about the founding of Gentell
In our most popular video, David Navazio talks about the found of Gentell