Ishani Ganguli

Ishani Ganguli, MD, MPH, is a physician-researcher whose career spans medicine, health policy, and public communication. Ganguli is an associate professor of medicine, health services researcher, and practicing primary care physician at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. She received her AB, MD, and MPH from Harvard University and completed internal medicine and primary care residency as well as a health policy and management fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her clinical experience and academic training inform her perspective on the challenges facing American health care.

Ganguli's research focuses on primary care payment, delivery, and policy; the use and consequences of low-value care; innovation and tradeoffs in ambulatory care for older adults; and gender equity in medicine. Her work has documented a national decline in primary care visit rates, evaluated the use and impact of Medicare's Annual Wellness Visit, assessed how physician payment models affect the gender wage gap, and examined how low-value services such as certain pre-operative electrocardiograms can lead to additional downstream services with potential harm to patients and clinicians. Ganguli also led a study analyzing the impact of widespread telemedicine adoption on low-value testing, using Medicare claims data from more than 2 million beneficiaries across health systems with varying telemedicine adoption rates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ganguli received a K23 career development award from the National Institute on Aging and has been funded by organizations including the Commonwealth Fund, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Arnold Ventures. She serves as an associate editor at JAMA Internal Medicine and as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Standing Committee on Primary Care. The American Journal of Managed Care recognized her with the Seema S. Sonnad Emerging Leader in Managed Care Research Award, presented at the Annual Patient-Centered Oncology Care conference.

Ganguli is also a former journalist who has written about science and health care for The Boston Globe, Reuters, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among other publications. She began her writing career covering basic sciences and medicine, spent a year between college and medical school writing full time, and continued to observe and report on health care delivery and payment challenges throughout her clinical training. This combination of scientific research, health policy expertise, and journalistic communication positions Ganguli as a leading voice in primary care, health services research, and health policy in the United States.