Howard H. Hiatt, a physician, scientist and academic who reshaped the field of public health, steering it away from the narrow study of infectious diseases toward big-picture issues of fiscal and societal accountability in medicine, died on March 2 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 98.

Harvard Public Health, a magazine published by the Harvard School of Public Health, where Dr. Hiatt was dean for 12 years, wrote in 2013 that Dr. Hiatt “made public health the conscience of medicine.”

A Harvard-trained physician who held leadership posts at some of the country’s most prestigious hospitals, Dr. Hiatt was an outspoke critic of the inequities in American health care. He accused American medicine of having a bias toward expensive, high-tech treatments while excluding millions of people from basic care.