John Z. Ayanian, MD, MPP, is professor of health care policy and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor in 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 Senior Faculty Advisor in 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 provides primary care to 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 currently leading a 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 and the effect of Medicare coverage on the health of previously uninsured adults. In his previous research he has studied 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 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, focusing on the quality of cancer care by race, ethnicity, and language. Dr. Ayanian is the principal investigator of a new study analyzing data from the CanCORS Consortium, California Cancer Registry, and Medicare and Medicaid to assess racial and socioeconomic disparities in the processes of care and outcomes of patients with lung cancer. He also leads an NCI-funded study evaluating randomized interventions to improve systems for colorectal cancer screening, including a recent study of electronic messages to patients.

In his teaching, Dr. Ayanian directs the course on Research With Large Databases in the Program in Clinical Effectiveness at the Harvard School of Public Health.  He lectures on Medicare policy and on health care disparities in the Introduction to Health Policy course  for Harvard medical students, and he serves on the core faculty of the Harvard University Ph.D. Program in Health Policy.

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.  He has served on the Institute of Medicine Committee on Health Insurance Status and Its Consequences, the IOM Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance, the IOM Committee on Cancer Survivorship, and the IOM Subcommittee on Standardized Collection of Race/Ethnicity Data for Healthcare Quality Improvement. He currently serves on the IOM Committee on a National Surveillance System for Cardiovascular and Select Chronic Diseases. He has previously served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Oncology and Circulation and as Deputy Editor of Medical Care. 

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 A. Clifford Barger Award for Excellence in Mentoring from Harvard Medical School.  He has also been 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, the Association of American Physicians, and the Institute of Medicine. 

Learn more about Dr. Ayanian's research publications and presentations by viewing the following featured news articles on 9/24/12, 7/24/09, 1/11/08 and news briefs on 1/17/13, 12/16/12, 12/5/12, 1/3/12, 11/9/11, 3/16/11, 1/9/11, 10/29/10, 10/12/10, 3/9/10, 2/16/10, 1/11/10, 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.