Notes on Contributors

Jerry Avorn is director of the Program for the Analysis of Clinical Strategies at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Hospital, Boston. His fields of work as a physician and educator currently include pharmaco-epidemiology, geriatric medicine, and clinical decision making. Dr. Avorn recently coauthored a study on the use of psychoactive medication and the quality of care in rest homes in Massachusetts.

Donald M. Berwick is vice president for quality-of-care management at the Harvard Community Health Plan and associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Among his professional interests in medicine are decision making in clinical practice and technology assessment, as well as quality-of-care studies. This year Dr. Berwick published an analysis of continuous improvement as an ideal in health care.

Avedis Donabedian is Nathan Sinai Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Known as a leading medical exponent of quality-of-care assessment and monitoring, Dr. Donabedian also has a long-standing interest in broader issues of health care organization. One of his publications in progress examines institutional and professional responsibilities in quality assurance.

Nancy Neveloff Dubler is director of the division of legal and ethical issues in health care in the Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center/The Albert Einstein College of Medicine. An attorney, her professional fields of work include gerontology and medical ethics in addition to health law. Ms. Dubler has recently published articles on improving the hospital-discharge planning process and moral dimensions of home care.

James F. Fries is associate professor of medicine in the division of immunology of the Stanford University School of Medicine. Gerontology, information science, and rheumatology are the fields of work Dr. Fries explores as a physician and educator. Known throughout this decade as an exponent of the compression of morbidity thesis, Dr. Fries published an article earlier this year linking the thesis to phenomena of aging and natural death.

Thomas J. McLaughlin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His current interests focus on technology diffusion and health policy evaluation. Mr. McLaughlin is preparing at present a study of the diffusion of new anti-anginal technologies.

Albert G. Mulley, Jr. is chief of the general internal medicine unit at the Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Medical decision making, quality measurement and assurance, and assessment of preferences for health outcomes are his primary fields of work. Dr. Mulley is the coeditor of a forthcoming volume on the challenges of medical practice variation.

Anne A. Scitovsky is chief of the health economics division of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation/Research Institute and lecturer at the Institute for Health Policy Studies of the University of California at San Francisco. In addition to work on the HIV epidemic’s economic impacts, her professional interests include medical care use and costs of the elderly. Earlier this year Ms. Scitovsky published an article on an agenda for research on the costs of AIDS.

Victor W. Sidel is Distinguished University Professor of Social Medicine in the Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center/The Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is a specialist in the study of equitable access to health care. The economic, social, and health costs of the arms race and the prevention of use of weapons of mass destruction are among Dr. Sidel’s other professional concerns.

Stephen B. Soumerai is assistant professor in the Department of Social Medicine and Health Policy at Harvard Medical School. He currently works in the fields of cost containment and quality of care as well as physician practice patterns. Dr. Soumerai recently completed a study on intended and unexpected effects of a large-scale natural experiment involving withdrawal of payment for nonscientific drug therapy.

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Volume 67, Issue 2 (pages 345–346)
Published in 1989