Rita K. Kuwahara, MD, MIH

Kuwahara is a primary care internal medicine physician and senior advisor for medicine and health policy at the Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations (AAPCHO) and serves on the Healio Primary Care Peer Perspective Board. She previously served as health policy advisor in the U.S. House of Representatives, a congressional fellow in the U.S. Senate, a CMS fellow at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation and completed her primary care health policy clinical fellowship at Georgetown University and the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Primary Care. She also previously served on the National Steering Committee for Prescription Drug Affordability at Doctors for America, the ACP’s National Council of Resident and Fellow Members and was vice chair of Doctors for America’s Access to Affordable Care Committee and the American Medical Women’s Association’s National Policy and Advocacy Committee. She was the 2020 National Copello Health Advocacy Fellow at Doctors for America, working on prescription drug affordability and vaccine access; the 2021 winner of the ACP’s national abstract competition for quality improvement and patient safety; and the winner of the 2020 ACP Connecticut Chapter resident physician abstract competition for quality improvement and original research for her work on establishing medication affordability as a new vital sign. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine; received her Master of International Health from the University of Copenhagen, with a focus on global noncommunicable diseases; completed her undergraduate degree at Wellesley College, where she majored in chemistry and peace and justice studies with a concentration in the inequities in the health care system in the U.S. and abroad; and has lived, studied and engaged in clinical and public health research in 11 countries. Kuwahara previously served as the national health policy intern at ACP; is a former federal policy fellow with the AAPCHO, representing community health centers across the country and working to expand access to adult hepatitis B screening and vaccination; and cared for patients at a federally qualified health center in Connecticut during her internal medicine residency training.