Born in Columbia, Missouri, in 1944, McGinnis moved to California in 1949 when his father was sent by his employer, a manufacturer of power line equipment, to help open a west coast office in San Francisco.
Active in student government from an early age, he continued those interests as a pre-med undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, serving as the president of his graduating class.
This was one of several task forces established to manage support for postwar reconstruction of the basic infrastructure, economic, and human service capabilities in the war-torn region.
Under McGinnis’ leadership, the Task Force developed the first bilateral agreement outside of the Dayton Accords, forging consensus on primary care reconstruction priorities by the health ministries of both the Republica Srpska and Bosnia & Herzegovina.
Building on a growing evidence base linking lifestyle, environment, and behavior to health, the McGinnis and Foege article pointed out that the conditions holding leading positions on mortality tables—e.g.
heart disease, cancer, stroke, injury, diabetes—were in fact caused substantially by factors such as tobacco, diet and activity patterns, alcohol, toxic agents, and other potentially controllable sources.
Drawing from the work on actual causes, as well as a developing evidence base on the influence of stress, class distinctions, socio-economic status, and genetics, he organized his assessment around the perspective that health is fundamentally shaped by determinants that fall within five domains: genetic predispositions, social circumstances, physical environments, behavioral choices, and medical care.
This strategy reflected McGinnis' experience in India with the successful eradication of smallpox, which used quantified targets to drive focus and the deployment of resources.
At RWJF, his charge was to build the Foundation's contribution to the development of national leadership and capacity for a stronger focus on population health.
The RWJF Young Epidemiology Scholars Program was a competitive regional and national program to engage high school students in innovative project work in epidemiology—the basic science of public health, modeled on the prizes established by the Westinghouse and Intel corporations to encourage student interest and initiative in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology.
He founded and stewards the IOM's initiative to accelerate the evolution of a continuously learning health system, described in the Roundtable’s Charter as one “in which science, informatics, incentives, and culture are aligned for continuous improvement and innovation, with best practices seamlessly embedded in the delivery process and new knowledge captured as an integral by-product of the delivery experience.” Motivated by rapid changes in the complexity and costs of care, shortfalls in its performance, and newly emerging digitally-based tools to address these challenges, the initiative focuses both on improving awareness of the possible and on stimulating activities to capture it.
The work to improve understanding is being undertaken through the Roundtable's Learning Health System Series of publications exploring in detail the prospects and strategies in areas ranging from research and the clinical data utility to shared decision-making and care culture.