Stephen J. Spann, MD, MBA
Stephen J. Spann, a family physician leader, educator and researcher, is the Founding Dean of the University of Houston College of Medicine. Dr. Spann has dedicated his career to improving health and health care around the world by training future health care professionals, contributing to the scientific knowledge base of primary care, leading medical school faculty, physician medical groups and hospital medical staffs, and striving to practice excellent, evidence-based family medicine.
Dr. Spann has been active in the development of the specialty of Family Medicine both in the United States and abroad. He has served as a member of the Commission on Public Health and Scientific Affairs, the Task Force on Clinical Policies, and as member and chair of the Commission on Clinical Policies and Research and the Task Force to Enhance Family Practice Research, of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). He served as a member of Task Force 1, and chaired Task Force 6 of the Future of Family Medicine Project, focusing on the development of the New Model of Family Medicine practice, now known as the Patient-Centered Medical Home, and the development of financial models to predict its success. He served as the lead consultant to the AAFP planning process to develop a national practice resource center to support the implementation of the New Model, resulting in the development of Transformed, a subsidiary of the AAFP. He has served as a consultant to medical schools, residency programs, ministries of health, and health care delivery systems in many countries, focusing on primary care training programs and clinical practice development and implementation.
Dr. Spann served as Chief Medical Officer of Tawam Hospital, a 460 bed tertiary care teaching facility in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, which is managed by Johns Hopkins Medicine International, and as senior advisor on primary care and academic affairs to SEHA, the Abu Dhabi Health Services Company, from December 2012 through May 2015. Previously, he served as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas from April 1997 to November 2012. He served as Senior Vice-President and Dean of Clinical Affairs of that institution from November 2008 through September 2012. He was previously Professor and Chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas (1990-1997), a member of the faculty and Vice-Chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine (1982-1990), and a member of the voluntary clinical teaching faculty of the Department of Family Medicine, Wake Forest Bowman Gray School of Medicine (1979-1982). Prior to entering full-time academic medicine, Dr. Spann spent four years practicing rural family medicine in Arkansas and North Carolina.
A graduate of Baylor University and Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Spann completed his residency training in Family Medicine at Duke University Medical Center, and received the M.B.A. degree from the University of Texas at Dallas. He and his wife Nancy have two married children and four grandchildren, who live in Texas.