David Ansell MD

David Ansell is a Chicago based physician and healthcare leader He has been an internal medicine physician since training at Cook County Hospital in the late 1970s where he spent seventeen years holding a number of positions including Chief of General Medicine/Primary Care. After leaving County, he spent ten years as Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, the largest safety-net health system in Illinois, located in the North Lawndale neighborhood, a historically redlined neighborhood in Chicago. It was at Mount Sinai, where he helped found the Sinai Urban Health Institute, where he first appreciated the deep connection between neighborhood conditions, structural racism and poverty on health outcomes. He was appointed as the inaugural Chief Medical Officer at Rush University Medical Center in 2005. In 2015, he was named the chief health equity officer, leading health equity initiatives aimed at eliminating neighborhood life expectancy gaps in Chicago and across the US.