Dr. Longjohn is a nationally recognized leader in public health and health systems innovation. Throughout most of the last 25 years he served in non-profit executive roles, leading organizations to successfully integrate community resources into equitable, effective, and sustained population health endeavors. His leadership has produced historic community health successes, and he was identified by the Obama Administration as one of the top 100 health innovators in the country.

Since running for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, Longjohn has focused on inspiring and supporting others to improve health care systems. At the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker MD School of Medicine (WMed), he currently co-directs a required course for 1 st and 2nd year medical students, which is focused on community engagement and health systems science. He leads the day-to-day implementation of WMed’s FRAME (Facing Racism As Medical Education) project. As a volunteer and thought-leader, Dr. Longjohn has been serving on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Healthcare (CTP), and the CTP Education Fund. Epiphany, Dr. Longjohn’s niche health consulting business, serves local-, state-, and national-level non-profit clients, and government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Administration for Community Living (ACL). Through Epiphany, he has teamed with Freedmen’s Health and the Partnership to Align Social Care to produce and disseminate billing and coding system innovations aimed at addressing Social Drivers of Health via Community Care Hubs. In 2021, he was appointed by Governor Whitmer to serve as a Commissioner on the Protect Michigan Commission, which was aimed at addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine hesitancy, and health inequities. Most recently, he was sworn in as a Commissioner on the City of Portage’s Planning Commission.

Dr. Longjohn is best known for his work as the National Health Officer and Vice President for Community Integrated Health at YMCA of the USA (Y-USA). During his time at the Y, Longjohn directed ~$100M in grants and contracts, and led a team of ~40 experts and technical advisors charged with development and scaling of evidence-based health interventions throughout the Y’s network of nearly 900 nonprofit associations and 10,000+ program sites. One of his historic achievements at the Y was the completion of a successful $12M Health Care Innovation Award from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. This 4-year project tested the YMCA’s Diabetes Prevention Program as a health care innovation serving nearly 4,000 Medicare enrollees in 17 cities and 8 states. The program became the first community-led prevention program in U.S. history to be certified as a cost-saving intervention for Medicare. As a result, 23 million people in the U.S. now have insurance coverage for diabetes prevention. Other programs and practices brought to national scale by Dr. Longjohn included evidence-based programs for cancer survivorship, arthritis self-management, falls prevention, blood pressure control, and childhood obesity. He also played a central role in establishing a partnership between the Y and first lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, which resulted in healthy eating and physical activity standards aimed at improving the health of 9 million children in the Y’s early childhood and out-of-school time programs.

Earlier in his career, Dr. Longjohn was a Fellow at the Altarum Institute, conducting health systems and health policy research in 9 states. In past consulting roles, he facilitated the establishment of a Chief Health Officer position within the Chicago Public School system, and coalitions like “Health Kids Healthy Michigan”. Longjohn has served on numerous Boards and National Advisory Committees, and as the national Co-Chair for the “Campaign for Action” to promote workforce development in nursing across the US. From 2001-2017,

Dr. Longjohn was on faculty at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in the Departments of Preventive Medicine and Pediatrics, where he served as the founding Executive Director of the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children (CLOCC) and the Assistant Medical Director of the HELP Network, which was one of the 1 st national efforts to reduce gun violence by organizing physicians to deploy public health approaches. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Kalamazoo College and his M.D. and MPH from Tulane University. Matt and his wife Valerie are parents to 2 adult children. Matt and Val are both 5th generation residents of Kalamazoo County, with deep roots in Portage, Vicksburg, and Kalamazoo.