Dr. Avorn is a graduate of Columbia College and Harvard Medical School; he completed his training in primary care internal medicine within the Harvard medical system. Dr. Avorn pioneered the concept of academic detailing in the 1980s, with the creation, deployment, and evaluation of the first such program. After testing it in a randomized trial in four state Medicaid programs, he went on to study the approach in nursing homes and demonstrated it significantly reduced overuse of antipsychotic drugs and improved the cognitive function of overmedicated patients. Both papers written on these trials were published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Avorn practiced internal medicine for over 30 years in ambulatory and in-hospital settings and helped to establish the program in geriatric medicine at Harvard. He is an expert in geriatric medication use, the study of adverse drug effects (particularly in patients with chronic disease), and medication cost-effectiveness analysis, and is the author of chapters on these subjects in the main textbooks in each field, as well being the author or co-author of over 400 papers in the medical literature. Dr. Avorn is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, one of the main Harvard teaching hospitals.

In 2004 he participated in the founding of the Alosa Health, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing doctors with non-commercial education about medications. He was a co-author of the Institute of Medicine report on the development of trustworthy clinical guidelines, and the author of Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs, published by Knopf and now in its 11th printing.