Joe McCannon
Formerly Director for Sustainable Operations (engagement), CEQ @ White House, Senior Advisor at Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Executive Fellow, Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance
Joe McCannon is supporting the Alliance's work to advance leadership of large-scale change with a focus on introducing new approaches to collective action and distributed leadership. His career has focused on spreading effective practice and catalyzing social change in the government, nonprofit and private sectors.
Joe's most recent government service occurred during the Biden Administration at the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in the Executive Office of the President. He also served at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS/AHRQ) as part of the team developing HHS policy on climate health and equity. He previously served as an Obama Administration appointee as Senior Advisor to the Administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and was part of the founding leadership team at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), directing its Learning and Diffusion Group.
Joe was also Vice President at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), where he led the 100,000 Lives Campaign, and he was the co-founder and CEO of the Billions Institute, an organization which has supported hundreds of governments, foundations and nonprofits in scaling effective innovations.
Joe has taught graduate-level courses on large-scale change and quality improvement at the UPenn School of Social Policy and Practice and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He has served on committees of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and spent 2019-2020 as Executive in Residence at the Rustandy Center at UChicago-Booth. His writing has appeared in several publications including JAMA, Health Affairs, Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post and the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and he served on the Journal for Healthcare Quality editorial board. Joe is a graduate of Harvard University and was a Reuters Fellow at Stanford University. He also co-founded the group giving platform Shared Nation.