Advocate Health Appoints Dr. J. Nwando Olayiwola as President of Advocate National Center for Health Equity

Advocate Health recently named Dr. J. Nwando Olayiwola as the president of the Advocate National Center for Health Equity.

Olayiwola is a leader in health equity who brings more than 20 years of expertise in clinical, community and academic medicine, health technology innovation, health services research, public health leadership and health system transformation.

As a board-certified family physician, she has spent her career serving medically underserved populations and will continue to practice medicine in this role.

The Advocate National Center for Health Equity will serve Advocate Health communities across the nation. It is designed to disrupt the root causes of disparities, creating the largest health equity data repository in the country and rewiring all of Advocate Health’s care models to ensure it is delivering on health equity for all, with an emphasis on equitable application of clinical discoveries and research.

Olayiwola will work alongside senior clinical, corporate, academic and community leaders to integrate the health equity strategy throughout the health system, including the care delivery system and the academic learning system.

“Striving for equity in all of its forms is a defining part of our organization’s DNA,” said Kinneil Coltman, executive vice president and chief community and social impact officer for Advocate Health. “With the selection of Dr. Olayiwola to lead the Advocate National Center for Health Equity, we believe we can make significant strides to disrupt and eliminate existing barriers and ensure access to high quality health care for underserved populations.”

“It is tremendously exciting to join Advocate Health and bring to life the Advocate National Center for Health Equity, while laying the groundwork for change for all,” Olayiwola said. “By using data and community engagement principles to design and accelerate programs, we will help underserved populations gain equitable access to health care, eliminate care gaps, remove social and environmental barriers to care and build healthier communities.

“I’m confident that through the Advocate National Center for Health Equity, we can positively impact the troubling fact that, in the world’s most prosperous country, the opportunities that life affords and the quality of health care are still typically determined by your racial or ethnic background, socioeconomic status or the ZIP code you come from,” she added.

In her previous role, Olayiwola served as Humana’s first chief health equity officer, developing and implementing strategies to ensure patients and members of the communities served by the organization had access to equitable care. She founded a global health services consultancy group, as well as an association for minority women professionals. She is also a published author of more than 100 scholarly publications and four books.

Olayiwola received both her bachelor’s degree and doctor of medicine from The Ohio State University, where she later served as chair and a professor of the department of family and community medicine at the OSU College of Medicine while also practicing medicine at the OSU Wexner Medical Center. She completed her family medicine residency at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University, where she was a chief resident. She also earned a master’s degree in public health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she was a Commonwealth Fund Fellow in minority health policy and a Presidential Scholar.

Olayiwola’s appointment is effective Aug. 19, 2024.