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Lawton Robert Burns, Ph.D., 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, integrated delivery networks, and the introduction to the US healthcare ecosystem.

He has analyzed many different sectors of the healthcare industry. His first two books covered the institutional supply chain (The Health Care Value Chain, Jossey-Bass, 2002) and the technology sectors in healthcare (The Business of Healthcare Innovation, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 3rd Ed). He also co-wrote a text on biomedical innovation (Managing Discovery: Harnessing Creativity to Drive Biomedical Innovation, Cambridge University Press, 2018). More recently, he has co-authored an analysis of hospital consolidation (Big Med: Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America, University of Chicago Press, 2021) and authored an introductory text (The U.S. Healthcare Ecosystem, McGraw-Hill, 2021). He recently completed a book on the retail supply chain in healthcare (The Healthcare Value Chain: Demystifying the Roles of GPOs and PBMs, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and co-authored an analysis of why many of our favored solutions to improve healthcare do not work (Seemed Like a Good Idea, Cambridge University Press, 2022). He is also the lead editor of the major text (Healthcare Management: Organization Design and Behavior, Delmar, 2019). He has also written books on the healthcare systems in India (India’s Healthcare Industry, Cambridge University Press, 2014) and China (China’s Healthcare System and Reform, Cambridge University Press, 2017). He can be reached at: burnsL@wharton.upenn.edu.