Sadly, Joanne Roberts (b 1951, MD, University of Minnesota 1985; MHA, University of Washington 2015) died 19 June 2024 from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome.
Richard Smith, who first introduced me to Joanne has published her obituary. A short version appears in the BMJ, this is a link to the complete ⁠obituary⁠.
Joanne Roberts had a remarkable career;  an internist, a palliative care doctor, senior hospital administrator, editor at the BMJ, editor of BMJ USA.  It’s been a successful academic and medical career, but it’s been a life with a difference. 
Three careers, two genders, and one terminal diagnosis is how Dr. Joanne Roberts sums up her life. She is retired as a physician executive from Providence, a large West Coast health system.  Joanne, born amid racial tensions in the south, has used her personal struggles to build a rich career as a journalist, where she learned the power of asking questions; a practicing palliative care physician, where she learned the power of presence, silence, and vulnerability; and a healthcare executive, where she focused her work in finding and building great leaders among young doctors.
 
Joanne was born in Nashville and through a circuitous route graduated from the University of Nebraska, then worked eight years as a newspaper reporter before entering the University of Minnesota Medical School. After residency, she began a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars fellowship, leaving early to study with and then join the staff of the BMJ, serving as a part-time North American editor while directing the general internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins University. She then turned to practicing palliative medicine in the Pacific Northwest, and because she has a long history of studying healthcare systems, became a hospital chief medical officer for Providence, a 51-hospital Western US health system, then completing her career as Providence’s systemwide chief value officer. She has two adult daughters, Alex, a nurse in Alaska, and Zoë, an environmental engineer in Los Angeles. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

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