John Z. Ayanian, MD, MPP, is a professor of medicine and health care policy at Harvard Medical School and a professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is the director of the General Internal Medicine Fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and codirector of the Harvard Medical School Faculty Development and Fellowship Program in General Internal Medicine. 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, as well as 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.

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, the impact of ambulatory care from primary care physicians and cardiologists on the outcomes of Medicare beneficiaries who have survived a heart attack, the relation of surgical volume to outcomes of colorectal cancer, and patients’ perceptions of 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, 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 chairs the National Quality Forum’s Colorectal Cancer Quality of Care Panel, and he is a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Cancer Survivorship and the editorial boards of Circulation and the Journal of Clinical Oncology. He has served previously as deputy editor of Medical Care and a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance. He has received the Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Award of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Young Investigator Award of the Association for Health Services Research, 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. Dr. Ayanian is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.