Notes on Contributors

Ronald T. Ackermann is an assistant professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine and an affiliated scientist of the Regenstrief Institute. His principle interest is in the prevention and control of type 2 diabetes mellitus in adults. Furthermore, Ackermann is interested in the study of novel approaches to health promotion and disease prevention that partner health care systems with community-based organizations. His research specifically seeks to develop systems-level approaches to disease prevention that are sustainable in typical primary care practice settings. Ackermann holds an MD from the University of Wisconsin.

Niels Agger-Gupta is a consultant and researcher specializing in program evaluation, organizational change, and cultural and linguistic competency in health care. Agger-Gupta was the principal editor of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (LA DHS)Cultural and Linguistic Competency Standards published in 2003 and is currently the program evaluator for a pilot cultural and linguistic competency training initiative at LA DHS, under the auspices of the DHS Office of Diversity Programs and funded by the California Endowment (TCE). He is the coauthor of Language Barriers in Healthcare Settings: An Annotated Bibliography of the Research Literature and The California Standards for Healthcare Interpreters, both published by TCE, and the author of Environmental Scan of Language Proficiency Testing for Physicians Providing Services in Non-English Languages (in press). As an independent consultant and evaluator, Agger-Gupta is affiliated with the Center for Innovation in the Nonprofit Sector of the Fielding Graduate University, the Office of Diversity Programs for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, and the adjunct faculty for the Knowledge Management Program of the School of Technology and Society at Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada. Agger-Gupta received a PhD in human and organizational systems from Fielding Graduate University.

Colleen L. Barry is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University School of Medicine. Barry received training grant support from the National Institute of Mental Health. Her research focuses on the regulation of heath insurance markets, the politics of health reform, and policy innovation to improve chronic care. Barry has examined the responses of health plans, consumers, politicians, and interest groups to regulation of mental health and substance abuse insurance coverage. Currently, she is studying economic and organizational strategies for improving depression care in the public and private sector. She received a PhD in health policy from Harvard University in June 2004.

Andrew Bindman is a professor of medicine, health policy, epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. He is also the chief in the Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital. Bindman’s research has focused on health care disparities for low income and minority populations and has developed innovative strategies for using health information systems to monitor the performance of health care systems. His research has contributed toward understanding the association between poor access to care and preventable hospitalizations for ambulatory care sensitive conditions. Bindman holds an MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

David Blumenthal was the founding chairman of AcademyHealth (formerly the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy), the national organization of health services researchers. He is director of the Harvard University Interfaculty Program for Health Systems Improvement. From 1995 to 2002, Blumenthal served as executive director for the Commonwealth Fund Task Force on Academic Health Centers. He has served as a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania Health System (Penn Medicine). His research interests include the future of academic health centers, quality management in health care, the determinants of physician behavior, access to health services, and the extent and consequences of academic-industrial relationships in the health sciences. Blumenthal holds both an MD and an MPP from Harvard University.

M. Audrey Burnam holds a PhD in social psychology from the University of Texas at Austin (1977) and is currently a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. Her research has focused on mental health and substance abuse treatment, including the epidemiology of behavioral health problems, access to services, and quality of care. Recent projects include an examination of state activities to improve services for persons with co-occurring mental and addictive disorders, the development of methods for assessing quality of routine care for adult depression, and an evaluation of strategies to improve treatment of teen depression in primary care settings.

Alice Hm Chen is assistant clinical professor of medicine for the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of California in San Francisco and medical director of the General Medicine Clinic for San Francisco General Hospital. Chen’s primary professional interest is in issues of health care access, particularly in how poverty, cultural differences, and policy intersect to create barriers to care. Her work has focused on improving access to quality health care for limited English-speaking health consumers through work with community-based, public health, governmental, and philanthropic initiatives. Chen received her MD from Stanford University and her MPH from Harvard University.

Huw Davies is a professor of health care policy and management in the School of Management at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. His research interests are in public service delivery (especially health care), encompassing evidence-based policy and practice, performance measurement and management, accountability, governance, and trust. Davies is particularly interested in the role of organizational culture in the delivery of high-quality services. Davies received his MSc from the University of Sussex, his MA from the University of Cambridge, and his PhD from the University of Dundee.

Caroline Carney Doebbeling is an associate professor of internal medicine and psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine and a research scientist at the Regenstrief Institute. Her interests lie at the interface of medicine and psychiatry, specifically the epidemiology of comorbid medical and psychiatric conditions, and the delivery of medical services to those with psychiatric and medical comorbidity. Doebbeling has an MD and an MSc from the University of Iowa.

Stephen M. Downs is associate professor and director for Children’s Health Services at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Downs’s interests include decision analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis and their application to computer-based decision support systems and clinical guidelines. Downs holds an MD and an MS from Stanford University.

Mark Exworthy is reader in public management and policy for the School of Management at Royal Holloway at the University of London. His research has focused on health policy implementation, including policies to tackle health inequalities; decentralization; clinician-manager relations; and primary health care. His recent work has examined how governments and organizations design and implement policies to correct inequalities in health and health care. Exworthy received a PhD in medical geography from Queen Mary and Westfield College at the University of London.

Daniel M. Fox has been president of the Milbank Memorial Fund since 1990. He has served in state government (Massachusetts and New York), as an advisor to and staff member of three federal agencies, and as a faculty member and administrator at Harvard University and then at the Health Sciences Center of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and of the Council on Foreign Relations. Fox earned his AB, AM, and PhD at Harvard University and has been publishing books and articles on health and social policy and related subjects for more than four decades.

Howard H. Goldman is professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. His research interests include mental health services and policy research. Goldman holds an MD and an MPH from Harvard University and a PhD from Brandeis University.

Yaniv Hanoch has a PhD from the University of Haifa and is a postdoctoral trainee in the Department of Health Services at the UCLA School of Public Health. His research interests are in theory of emotions and bounded rationality, elderly decision making, and risk taking. He has previously published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, the Journal of Health Communication, Psychological Science, and Theory & Psychology.

Kevin D. Hennessey has a PhD and an MPP and is the science to service coordinator for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Hennessey provides leadership to SAMHSA’s Science to Service Initiative—a systematic interagency effort to promote greater use of effective, evidence-based mental health and substance abuse interventions within routine clinical and community-based settings, and to strengthen feedback from the field to influence and frame services research programs. He is a licensed psychologist in the state of Maryland and provides psychiatric triage services part-time at a county-based hospital.

Ann M. Holmes is an associate professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Her current research interests include economic analysis of health care for chronic and mental illness, methods of economic evaluation, and measurement of health outcomes for such evaluations. Holmes earned a PhD in economics from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Thomas S. Inui is president and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute as well as the Regenstrief Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean for Health Care Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Inui’s special emphases in teaching and research have included physician-patient communication, health promotion and disease prevention, the social context of medicine, and medical humanities. His recent research has focused on chronic disease management for adults and children. Inui holds an MD and an MSc in public health from Johns Hopkins University.

Elizabeth Jacobs is an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care at the John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County and Rush University Medical Center. After struggling to care for limited English-speaking patients during medical school and residency, Jacobs decided to pursue a research career investigating minority disparities in health care. She has done research documenting that provision of adequate interpreter services positively impacts the delivery of health care provided to patients with limited English proficiency and that the provision of these services is cost-beneficial. Her research interests also include access to, and cultural specificity of, medical care delivered to minority patients; health literacy; and the role that trust plays in health care for African American and Latino patients’ health care decisions. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the California Endowment, and the Office of Minority Health. In addition, she cares for patients at the Fantus General Medicine Clinic of Cook County, works with other investigators to design culturally specific research, and teaches residents and medical students about practicing culturally sensitive medicine. Jacobs received her MD from the University of California at San Francisco.

Leah S. Karliner has an MD and is an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research interests focus on improving quality of care for limited English proficiency patients. She has published work on the use of and satisfaction with medical interpreters as well as the comprehension of abnormal mammograms, and continues to study language barriers during hospitalization and at the time of cancer diagnoses. In addition, Karliner is a co-investigator in a programmatic initiative to support organizational change and cultural competence in safety net institutions.

Barry Katz has a PhD from the University of Michigan and is the director of the Division of Biostatistics in the Department of Medicine at Indiana University. Katz has over twenty years of experience in all types of medical research, including randomized controlled trials, epidemiological studies, animal models, and health services research. This research has primarily involved sexually transmitted diseases, arthritis, and oral health. These studies have resulted in over 160 peer-reviewed publications in biomedical and biostatistical literature. Recent work has included a multicenter trial of the disease-modifying effects of doxycycline in osteoarthritis, behavioral research related to adolescent women and sexually transmitted infections, and evaluation of new technologies for the early detection of dental caries.

Jingjin Li is assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Biostatistics at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Her interest is in the development and application of statistical methods in health service research. Li received her PhD from Case Western Reserve University.

Douglas McCarthy, president of Issues Research, Inc., researches and writes on a range of topics, including health care coverage and quality, technology assessment, corporate philanthropy, and performance reporting. He is coauthor of a series of books on the quality of health care, published by the Commonwealth Fund. McCarthy is also a contributing editor for a series of case studies on quality improvement that appears in the Commonwealth Fund’s online newsletter, Quality Matters. Formerly, he was a research director in UnitedHealth Group’s Center for Health Care Policy and Evaluation, where he implemented quality evaluation tools in health plans. He began his career conducting operations research to support improvements in municipal public safety services. McCarthy serves on the advisory board for his local community health center. He holds an MBA in health care management from the University of Connecticut.

Michael D. Murray holds both a PharmD and an MPH and is the Mescal S. Ferguson Distinguished Professor and Chair in Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include pharmaceutical outcomes research, use of medications for chronic illness, and medical adherence.

Sunita Mutha is an associate professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine and program director at the Center for the Health Professions at the University of California, San Francisco. Her recent work focuses on organizational strategies for addressing cultural and language barriers to equitable health care. Mutha currently directs a project funded by the California Endowment that aims to enhance cultural and linguistic competence in California safety net institutions through the use of quality improvement tools and approaches. She holds an MD from Albany Medical College.

Victoria M. Prescott is general counsel and business development specialist at the Regenstrief Institute. Prescott holds a JD.

Thomas Rice is a professor of health services at the UCLA School of Public Health. His research interests include competition and regulation in health care, Medicare, private health insurance, and physician payment. The second edition of his book, The Economics of Health Reconsidered, was published in 2003. He is former editor of the journal Medical Care Research and Review. Rice holds a PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.

M. Susan Ridgely is senior policy analyst at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California. She holds an MSW in community organization and a JD, both from the University of Maryland. Her research interests include the organization and financing of care for people with mental health and substance abuse disorders. Ridgely specializes in the design and implementation of qualitative studies, the management of qualitative data collection in large multisite evaluations, and the dissemination of findings on the implementation of innovations in real-world settings.

Marc B. Rosenman is a research scientist at the Regenstrief Institute and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s Health Services Research at the Indiana University Medical School. Rosenman’s interests include chronic disease management programs, the use of electronic databases, and clinical epidemiology. He has an MD from Washington University.

A. Eugene Washington is the executive vice chancellor and professor of gynecology, epidemiology, and health policy at the University of California, San Francisco. His broad research areas of interest include quality of health care, medical technology assessment, and clinical practice guidelines development, with a particular focus on women’s health and racial/ethnic disparities in health outcomes. Washington received an MPH from the University of California at Berkeley, an MD from the University of California at San Francisco, and an MSc from Harvard University.

Alan Zillich is assistant professor of pharmacy practice at the Purdue University College of Pharmacy. He is interested in improving medication use and medication prescribing. Zillich holds a PharmD from Purdue University.