John Z. Ayanian, MD, MPP
University of Michigan
Over his 30-plus-year career, John Z. Ayanian, MD, MPP, inaugural director of the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation at the University of Michigan, has systematically documented racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in health outcomes. His work has helped advance the national understanding of inequities in health care access, insurance coverage, and quality of care, and his scholarship, national policy engagement, and institutional leadership have played major roles in changing the national dialogue around health care disparities and equity.
His contributions began in 1991 with the publication of a landmark paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) demonstrating that men were more likely than women to receive interventional procedures after a heart attack. This led to a nationwide review and the development of women-focused cardiology programs at a host of academic health systems around the country. Two subsequent NEJM papers in 1999 and 2000 showed that Black patients with kidney failure were significantly less likely to be referred to a transplantation center. These findings spurred further evaluation by the United Network for Organ Sharing and expanded outreach to different patient populations. His research also informed the groundbreaking 2003 Institute of Medicine report, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, which helped galvanize national attention to the problem of disparities in health care and stimulated policy and practice efforts aimed at reducing them. These are just a few examples of how Dr. Ayanian’s more than 400 publications have inspired direct action in governments and health care organizations at the local, state, and national levels.
Between 2000 and 2009, Dr. Ayanian, who also served as founding editor-in-chief of the journal, JAMA Health Forum, was a key member of two Institute of Medicine committees that issued seven reports on the consequences of the lack of insurance for individuals, families, communities, and the nation. His Congressional testimony about these reports as the Affordable Care Act was being drafted in 2009 advanced the clinical and policy rationale for expanding insurance coverage to more than 20 million Americans. Since 2014, Dr. Ayanian has served as principal investigator for the evaluation of Michigan’s Medicaid expansion through the Healthy Michigan Plan, leading an interdisciplinary team of researchers.
A respected educator, Dr. Ayanian teaches at all levels of the University of Michigan Medical School and the schools of public health and public policy. As primary mentor for more than 60 junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and medical students over the past 25 years, he has supported the development of academic leaders who promote health equity at medical schools and health systems nationally.
Dr. Ayanian has received numerous accolades, including his 2010 election to the National Academy of Medicine, the 2012 John M. Eisenberg Award for Career Achievement in Research from the Society of General Internal Medicine, and the 2017 Distinguished Investigator Award from AcademyHealth. In 2019, the University of Michigan named him the Alice Hamilton Distinguished University Professor of Medicine and Healthcare Policy.
Dr. Ayanian earned a BA from Duke University in 1982. In 1987, he received his MD from Harvard Medical School and his MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School. He completed internal medicine residency training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 1990 and postdoctoral fellowship training at Harvard Medical School in 1992.