Lawton Robert Burns, PhD, MBA is the James Joo-Jin Kim Professor in the Department of Healthcare Management at Wharton. He is also Co-Director of the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management. He taught previously in the business schools at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona. Dr. Burns teaches courses on health care strategy, strategic change, strategic implementation, organization and management, managed care, integrated delivery networks, and the introduction to the U.S. health care ecosystem.
He has analyzed many different sectors of the health care industry. His books cover the institutional supply chain (The Health Care Value Chain, 2002), the technology sectors in healthcare (The Business of Healthcare Innovation, 2020), biomedical innovation (Managing Discovery: Harnessing Creativity to Drive Biomedical Innovation, 2018), hospital consolidation (Big Med: Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America, 2021),an introductory text (The U.S. Healthcare Ecosystem, 2021), the retail supply chain in healthcare (The Healthcare Value Chain: Demystifying the Roles of GPOs and PBMs, 2022), an analysis of why many of our favored solutions to improve health care do not work (Seemed Like a Good Idea, 2022), Healthcare Management: Organization Design and Behavior, 2019), and the health care systems in India (India’s Healthcare Industry, 2014) and China (China’s Healthcare System and Reform, 2017). Dr. Burns received his PhD in Sociology and his MBA in Health Administration from the University of Chicago.
