Kima Joy Taylor, MD, MPH

Dr. Kima Joy Taylor, MD, MPH is the founder of Anka Consulting LLC, a health care consulting company and an Urban Institute non-resident fellow. Her areas of expertise include identifying policy, programming and financing levers to improve health and racial equity, integrate behavioral health, primary care, and social services, and support the system change necessary to embrace cost-effective holistic equitable health care solutions. Dr. Taylor collaborates with Urban Institute researchers on a number of topics, including analyses of racial inequities in policies and services for people who use drugs, management of substance exposed newborns, behavioral health concerns among adolescents and young adults, and expanding and diversifying the health care workforce.

Prior to Anka, she served as National Drug Addiction Treatment and Harm Reduction Program Director at the Open Society Foundations, overseeing  grantmaking to redefine and expand access to a full continuum of community, not justice based,  culturally effective substance use services for all and to replace current discriminatory justice system responses to substance use. Prior to OSF, Taylor served as the Deputy Commissioner for the Baltimore City Health Department, as the health and social policy legislative assistant for Senator Sarbanes, and as a practicing pediatrician in a DC Federally Qualified Health Center.  A board-certified pediatrician, Taylor is a graduate of Brown University, Brown University School of Medicine, and the Georgetown University residency program in pediatrics.  In 2002, Taylor was awarded a Commonwealth Foundation fellowship in minority health policy at Harvard University.