Emily Friedman

Emily Friedman is an independent writer, speaker, teacher, and health policy and ethics analyst based in Chicago. She is contributing editor of Hospitals & Health Networks and a contributing writer for the Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Progress, and other periodicals. Friedman also writes a regular column for Hospitals & Health Networks Weekly. She is most noted for her work in health policy (including health care reform initiatives), health care trends, health care quality improvement activities, health insurance and managed care, the social ethics of health care, ethics issues for health care leaders, health care for the underserved, health care history, population demographics and their implications for health care, and the relationship of the public with the health care system.

Friedman has written more than 750 articles and editorials in the past 32 years. She is the editor of Making Choices: Ethics Issues for Health Care Professionals, Choices and Conflict: Explorations in Health Care Ethics, and An Unfinished Revolution: Women and Health Care in America. She authored The Aloha Way: Health Care Structure and Finance in Hawaii and The Right Thing: Ten Years of Ethics Columns from the Healthcare Forum Journal. She writes on health care for the World Book Encyclopedia Yearbook and the Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Friedman is currently writing a history of health care in Minnesota and recently published major articles on lessons from health care in Cambodia, current US health care reform efforts, and food and drug safety in the United States.

A prolific public speaker, she addresses audiences ranging from state legislators to allied health professionals to nursing and medical groups to community groups to hospital and health system leaders and health care associations. She has also lectured at many universities, including Harvard, Princeton, University of California Berkeley, University of California San Diego, Ohio State, Yale, and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. In 1987-88 she was a Rockefeller Fellow in Ethics at Dartmouth College.

Friedman serves as Adjunct Assistant Professor of Bioethics in the Department of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health, which has repeatedly named her one of its highest-rated teachers. In addition, she is a consultant on information dissemination to the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, US Department of Health and Human Services. She has made many radio and television appearances, including on ABC News’ Nightline.

She has won several awards and honors, including being recognized as an Honorary Life Member of the American Hospital Association, an Honorary Life Member of the American Medical Association, a Fellow of Academy Health (formerly the Association for Health Services Research), and an Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the American Academy of Medical Administrators. Friedman also received the Corning Award of the Society for Health Care Strategy and Market Development. The Emily Friedman Award for improvements in community health is presented annually by Community Health Partners, Charleston, South Carolina.

In addition, she has won many writing awards. In 2003, her column, "Making Choices," in Health Forum Journal, won a National Award of Excellence from the American Society of Business Publication Editors (the largest competition in US business publishing) and the Gold Award from the American Society of Healthcare Publication Editors (the highest award that the Association grants).

In 2002, 2004, and again in 2006, the readers of Modern Healthcare named her as one of the “100 Most Powerful People in the Health Care Field.” In April 2005, the editors of that same publication named her one of the “Top 25 Women in Healthcare.”