Skip to Content

Zirui Song, MD, PhD

Associate Professor of Health Care Policy and Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital

Zirui Song, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor of Health Care Policy and Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where he also attends on the inpatient medicine teaching service. Dr. Song’s research focuses on the health and economic impact of financial incentives and policies related to the health care system. This includes provider payment reform, Medicare Advantage financing, workplace wellness programs, and private equity acquisitions of hospitals and physicians.

Dr. Song directs the Health Policy track in the MGH Internal Medicine Residency Program and is the faculty Director of Research in the HMS Center for Primary Care. He teaches the Health Policy courses for Harvard Medical and Dental students and Mass General Brigham residents. He has also taught HMS Executive Education courses for employers and health care leaders. He advises medical trainees, Ph.D. students, and postdoctoral fellows in their research.

Dr. Song worked on Medicare payment policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and was a Visiting Fellow in the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission. He also worked at The Brookings Institution and served on Massachusetts Medical Society committees. He is an Associate Editor of JAMA Health Forum.

Dr. Song is a recipient of the AcademyHealth Article-of-the-Year award, NIHCM Foundation Health Care Research Award, and Society of General Internal Medicine Outstanding Junior Investigator of the Year Award. He has also received several teaching awards from Harvard. For clinical work, he received the Morton N. Swartz, M.D. Humanism in Medicine Award at MGH.

Dr. Song trained in internal medicine at MGH. He received his M.D. from HMS, magna cum laude, and Ph.D. in Health Policy (Economics) from Harvard University, where he was a fellow in Aging and Health Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his B.A. in Public Health Studies with honors from Johns Hopkins University.