James J. Mongan, HSPH professor of health care policy and social medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, died May 3. He was 69.
Mongan was born in San Francisco and attended the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his MD at Stanford, interning at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco. After serving two years with the U.S. Public Health Service, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he married Jean Holmes.
While in Washington, Mongan worked for the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance formulating Medicare and Medicaid legislation for seven years before serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for health policy in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He later served in the Carter administration as associate director for health on the domestic policy staff and as assistant surgeon general.
In 1981, he and his family moved to Kansas City, Mo., where he headed the Truman Medical Center and concurrently served as dean of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine.
In 1996, Mongan moved to Boston where he served as president of Massachusetts General Hospital and later president and chief executive officer of Partners HealthCare.
He also served as chairman of Boston’s Chamber of Commerce and in that role was instrumental in negotiating the passage of Massachusetts’ universal health care law. Mongan also played a role in shaping national health care reform through his work with the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund, where he served as a board member and chair of its Commission on a High Performance Health System.
Mongan was a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He served on the boards of the American Hospital Association and the Kaiser Family Foundation, and was a member of both the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission established by Congress and the Institute of Medicine’s Commission on the Consequences of Uninsurance.
Mongan is survived by his wife, Jean; his daughter, Sarah; his son, John; and one grandchild.
