Lawton Burns

James Joo-Jin Kim Professor, Professor of Healthcare Management The Wharton School
Professor of Management, The Wharton School

Lawton Robert Burns, PhD, MBA, is the James Joo-Jin Kim Professor, Professor of Healthcare Management, and Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is also Co-Director of the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management. He received his doctorate in sociology and his MBA in health administration from the University of Chicago. Dr. Burns taught previously in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago and the College of Business Administration at the University of Arizona. Dr. Burns teaches courses on healthcare strategy, strategic change, strategic implementation, organization and management, managed care, and integrated delivery networks. He has analyzed many different sectors of the healthcare industry. He completed a book on supply chain management in the healthcare industry, The Health Care Value Chain (Jossey-Bass, 2002), and is also the lead editor of the major text Healthcare Management: Organization Design and Behavior (Delmar, 2019). He has written two books on the healthcare systems in other countries: India’s Healthcare Industry (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and China’s Healthcare System and Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2017). More recently, along with two colleagues, he published Managing Discovery: Harnessing Creativity to Drive Biomedical Innovation (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has two new books forthcoming in early 2021: Big Med: Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America. (University of Chicago Press) and The U.S. Healthcare Ecosystem (McGraw-Hill).