Cardiologist has worked in medicine and public policy under two different US administrations
Garth Graham, MD, Head of Youtube Health, is this year’s Wilder Penfield Lecturer. A cardiologist, researcher and public health expert, Dr. Graham previously served in two US administrations as US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health, and was Assistant Dean for Health Policy and Chief of Health Services Research in the department of medicine at the University of Florida School of Medicine, President of the Aetna Foundation as well as Vice President & Chief Community Health Officer at CVS Health.
An elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, Dr. Graham obtained his MD at Yale University School of Medicine, MPH at Yale School of Public Health, Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Cardiology fellowship at Johns Hopkins.
You’ve worked as a cardiologist, researcher, public health official, health care executive, and tech leader. Which of those experiences has most changed the way you think about health and why?
I think my experience in tech has probably shifted a lot of what I think about healthcare, probably oversizing the thought pattern that a lot of healthcare happens outside of the doctor’s office or outside of the hospital setting, and that patients gather information and make decisions on a day-to-day basis that inform what their genuine, actual health is.
Clinicians like myself, we deal with the tip of the iceberg because we see patients for 50 minutes, half an hour at a time. But day-to-day, minute to minute, people are making decisions that actually drive their physiology and their health outcomes in a more direct way and thinking through how we deal with that in the health care system is important.
You’ve worked at the intersection of medicine and public policy under two different US administrations. What did that experience teach you about what it really takes to improve people’s health at a population level?
In those different experiences, there were different efforts to improve population health and all of those different policies had merit in their own light. True population health improvement requires a multitude of thinking. It may include insurance coverage, access in terms of locations or enhanced primary care, but there is no one silver bullet. We need to think of these things as different ingredients in a pot that may improve outcomes, as opposed to a singular thing that will change everything.
Social media and AI are increasingly shaping what people believe about their health. Are health care professionals losing their traditional role as the trusted source of health information?
I think the professionals will always have that role because they’re coming into direct contact with patients and they understand more about that individual patient than the technological tools. Health care professionals will always be where trust resides and where patients’ real emphases on care are.
These ways of getting information help empower patients and help them have additional information, but clinicians will always be the primary drivers of healthcare, from nurses to therapists to doctors.
Looking back to when you were a medical student at Yale, what would surprise you, that younger version of Garth Graham, most about where medicine and your own career have taken you?
I would not have predicted in any way, shape, or form that any of the professional opportunities I’ve had would have happened. I probably would have been surprised at multiple versions of this journey. And I think probably the lesson learned is you take an individual step and you grow, and it’s hard to predict what happens next. The ecosystem changes, opportunities come up. Dynamics and technology changes. Things evolve. I think you have learn to evolve with the system or with the ecosystem or with the changes to take advantage of them and bring your own set of skills, thinking and life experiences to those changes as well.
The 2026 Wilder Penfield Lecture takes place at The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) on Oct. 14.