Humana welcomes our new Chief Health Equity Officer, Dr. Olayiwola

J. Nwando (Onyejekwe) Olayiwola, MD, MPH, FAAFP Chief Health Equity Officer and Senior Vice President, Humana, Inc. Adjunct Professor, The Ohio State University College of Medicine Department of Family and Community Medicine & The Ohio State University College of Public Health

Dr. Nwando Olayiwola is the inaugural Chief Health Equity Officer and Senior Vice President of Humana, Inc., a role she commenced in April 2021. In this role, she is responsible for setting a health equity agenda and strategy to promote health equity across all Humana lines of business, including its care delivery assets. She is also responsible for defining enterprise-wide measures for equity, designing a health equity lens for improvement, setting goals and coordinating efforts to achieve true health equity for millions of patients and members across the nation.

At Humana, Dr. Olayiwola is leading the development and implementation of the health equity strategic plan and coordinating the integration of health equity into multiple business components. At Humana, she currently serves as a member of the Artificial Intelligence Governance Committee & Fair AI Workgroup, the Environmental, Social and Governance Committee, the Thriving Thursday Women of Color Leaders Forum, the Multicultural Member Experience Workgroup and the Extended Bold Goal/Population Health Team. She also chairs the Humana Health Equity Advisory Board. Her 2021 Health Affairs article provides a framework for approaching health equity in the nation’s largest health plans.

Prior to this, she served as the Chair & Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, where she was also the Founding Director of the Center for Primary Care Innovation and Transformation and Chief of Family Health Services in one of the nation’s largest academic family medicine departments.

She also serves as a Board-certified practicing family physician Heart of Ohio Community Health Center, serving a largely medically underserved patient population.

She was appointed as the co-Chair of the OSU Medical Center’s Anti-Racism Action Plan Oversight Committee, which she began leading in June, 2020 until she transitioned to Humana.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been a national leader and voice for telehealth expansion, primary care operations and redesign, improving the digital divide, and championing anti-racism and health equity efforts.

Her OSU team’s efforts to expand telehealth during the pandemic and her novel description of a new “frontweb” of care was published in JMIR-Public Health in August 2020.

She was also the lead author on a seminal August 2020 article in Health Affairs on making anti-racism a core value in academic medicine, as well as an August 2020 article in The Lancet on what organizations can do to combat racism.

She is also a 2020-21 Fellow of the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Program for women leaders in academic medicine.

At OSU, Dr. Olayiwola also co-led the Primary Care Advisory Council and Primary Care COVID-19 Response Team.

She was a member of the OSU Wexner Medical Center’s Health Equity Steering Committee and Telehealth Strategy Committee.

In October 2020, Dr. Olayiwola was named to Columbus CEO’s Future 50 Class of 2021, which recognizes 50 leaders in the region who embody core values of achievement, altruism, boldness, creativity and inclusivity.

In October 2020, Dr. Olayiwola was given the prestigious award, Family Physicians who are Changing our World, by the Family Medicine Education Consortium.

In October 2020, she delivered her first Tedx Talk, Do No Harm: Combating Racism and Place-ism in Medicine, where she spoke about the adverse consequences of racism and place-ism in medicine, as well as the role of education and technology in mitigating them to achieve health equity.

Because of her national and international leadership in health equity, Dr. Olayiwola was selected as the inaugural Chief Health Equity Officer and Senior Vice President for Humana, Inc. one of the nation’s largest Fortune 500 companies committed to health and wellness.

She currently also serves as an Adjunct Professor in the OSU College of Medicine and College of Public Health, as a faculty advisor on anti-oppression, health disparities and health equity research, programs and policy for multiple colleagues and trainees.