Howard Bauchner, MD was appointed the 16th Editor in Chief of JAMA and The JAMA Network in 2011. Prior to coming to JAMA, Howard was a Professor of Pediatrics and Public Health at Boston University School of Medicine and Editor in Chief of Archives of Disease in Childhood (2003-2011). At BUSM he was Vice-Chair of Research for the Department of Pediatrics and Chief, Division of General Pediatrics. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, United Kingdom.
At JAMA Howard has focused on publishing important and novel research articles and special communications, improving and expanding clinical content, using electronic/digital approaches to enhance communication, and ensuring a commitment to innovation. Since his arrival in 2011 followers on social medical (twitter and Facebook) have increased from 13,000 to approximately 900,000 and the electronic table of contents is now distributed to close to 800,000 individuals each week. In print, via eTOC, and social media JAMA now reaches over 1.5M physicians each week worldwide. Views (PDF and HTML) have increased from 10M in 2011 to 34M in 2019 (50% from outside the U.S.), with an additional 17M views of the abstracts only. Podcast downloads have increased from 300,000 in 2014 to 3.3M in 2019. The print journal was redesigned for the first time in over 20 years and website has been updated twice. All 9 of the specialty journals were renamed (Archives of Pediatrics became JAMA Pediatrics), 3 new journals have been launched – JAMA Oncology (2015), JAMA Cardiology (2016), and JAMA Network Open (2018); and a new electronic distillation of our health policy content – JAMA Health Forum – was launched in 2020.