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Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
Focus: Catalysts
Not your typical physician Dr. Matt Davis uses policy to tackle health disparities
D
r. Matthew Davis is not your typical physician. Sure, he attended medical school and completed a residency, just like his peers. But while continuing his studies as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Chicago, Davis also earned a master’s degree in public policy. Davis still sees and serves primary care patients through his practice with the University of Michigan Health System, but his public policy training, and what he’s done with it over the years, is allowing him to serve the health needs of much larger communities, in much broader ways. These days, he’s doing that as chief medical executive for the state of Michigan— a role he took on in March of this year.
“Sometimes the questions that I ask, and the problems I find compelling, sound and look more familiar to my colleagues in policy than to my peers in health care, but that’s not a problem…it’s an asset.” Matthew Davis
What’s in the job description for Michigan’s chief medical executive? Simply put, informing policy decision-making in the Department of Community Health, the largest of the state’s 18 agencies. For Davis, that’s meant helping to craft the state’s response to public health threats like heat waves, communicable disease outbreaks like whooping cough and Middle East respiratory syndrome, and, of particular interest to someone with a longstanding passion for policy, Michigan’s statewide implementation of new legislation like the Healthy Michigan Act—the state’s answer to the federal Affordable Care Act.
Davis’s interest in health and health care policy is nothing new. Since 2000, the professor of public policy, pediatrics and communicable diseases, and internal medicine has developed and taught a series of well-received courses on health policy and health care reform for students at the Ford School, the Medical School, and the School of Public Health. While many of the students Davis teaches go on to serve the organizations that craft and refine health and health care policy, Davis jumped at the opportunity to play a leadership role himself—specifically in addressing one of the Affordable Care Act’s larger goals, eliminating socioeconomic health disparities. “Whole books have been written about why it’s so difficult to reduce socioeconomic health disparities,” says Davis. “But the persistent challenges relate mainly to variable access to timely, appropriate, and effective health care, and the choices that individuals and families make, or fail to make, to protect and improve their own health.” To address these challenges, state legislators recently crafted the Healthy Michigan Act, signed by Governor Rick Snyder just a few months ago, that is intended to increase both the number of lowincome residents covered by Medicaid and the range of services, including preventive services, these residents can access. As a member of the leadership team within the Department of Community Health, Davis was directly involved in working with the Michigan legislature to ensure that the Healthy Michigan Act has the best chance to benefit patients living in the state. Now that Healthy Michigan has been enacted, Davis is part of the team working to implement the plan for launch in 2014. Davis is hopeful that the Healthy Michigan Act, and the increased coverage it offers, will help reduce the state’s long-term struggles with socioeconomic health disparities. “Trying to move the needle in Michigan is tough; we rank in the bottom half, if not in the bottom third, of states when it comes to most racial, ethnic, and income-related disparities in health and