John Z. Ayanian, MD, MPP, is professor of medicine and health care policy at Harvard Medical School and professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is the director of the Harvard Medical School Fellowship in General Medicine and Primary Care and the General Internal Medicine Fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In addition, Dr. Ayanian serves as Director of the Health Disparities Research Program of the Harvard Catalyst, Leader of the Outcomes Research Program of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and Medical Director of the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is also a practicing general internist in the Division of General Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he sees patients and teaches medical residents.

Dr. Ayanian’s research focuses on the effect of patients’ race, ethnicity, gender, insurance coverage, and socioeconomic characteristics on access to care and clinical outcomes, and the impact of physicians’ specialty and organizational characteristics on the quality of care. He is the principal investigator of the Harvard/Northern California research team in the Cancer Care Outcomes Research and Surveillance (CanCORS) Consortium, a multiregional initiative funded by the National Cancer Institute to evaluate the experiences and outcomes of patients with colorectal cancer and lung cancer. He leads two other NCI-funded studies evaluating randomized interventions to improve systems for colorectal cancer screening. For more information on Dr. Ayanian's cancer-related research please visit the Dana-Farber/ Harvard Cancer Center website.He is currently leading a new study comparing the quality of care for Medicare beneficiaries in private health plans and in traditional Medicare.

In Dr. Ayanian’s recent research, he has studied trends in quality of care and racial disparities in Medicare managed care plans, the effect of Medicare coverage on previously uninsured adults, and the quality of cancer care by race, ethnicity, and language. His previous research includes studies of the effects of race and gender on access to kidney transplants and cardiac procedures, the impact of ambulatory care from primary care physicians and cardiologists on the outcomes of Medicare beneficiaries who have survived a heart attack, and the quality of care for common medical conditions in teaching and nonteaching hospitals.

Dr. Ayanian received his BA degree summa cum laude from Duke University, his MD degree from Harvard Medical School, and his MPP degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, with a concentration in health policy. Dr. Ayanian is a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Health Insurance Status and Its Consequences and the IOM Subcommittee on Standardized Collection of Race/Ethnicity Data for Healthcare Quality Improvement. He previously served on the IOM Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance and the IOM Committee on Cancer Survivorship. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, and he previously served on the editorial board of Circulation, as Deputy Editor of Medical Care, and as chair of the National Quality Forum's Colorectal Cancer Quality of Care Panel. 

Dr. Ayanian has received the Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Award of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Alice Hersh Young Investigator Award of AcademyHealth, Best Published Research Paper of the Year Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine, and Clifford Barger Award for Excellence in Mentoring from Harvard Medical School. In 2006 he was awarded an Australia-Harvard Fellowship to serve as Visiting Professor at the University of Sydney and the George Institute for International Health. Dr. Ayanian is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. 

Learn more about Dr. Ayanian's research publications and presentations by viewing the following featured news articles on 7/24/09, 1/11/08 and news briefs on 10/9/09, 6/11/09, 5/28/09, 5/4/09, 4/23/09, 3/23/09, 3/16/09, 2/17/09, 12/8/08, 5/14/08, 1/29/08, 10/5/07, 9/25/07, 6/24/07, 3/10/07, 10/30/06.