Notes on Contributors

Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, is an associate professor at the School of Information and the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. Adler-Milstein is a national expert on policy and management issues related to the use of IT in health care delivery. Her research assesses the progress of health IT adoption; the impact of such adoption on health care costs and quality; and the relationships between market, organizational, and team structure and health IT use. Adler-Milstein holds a PhD in health policy from Harvard University.

John M. Benson, MA, is managing director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program and a senior research scientist at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. He was coeditor of the reference book American Public Opinion and Health Care (CQ Press, 2011) and has coauthored 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He was formerly senior opinion analyst at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

Robert J. Blendon, ScD, MBA, is executive director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program, the Richard L. Menschel Professor of Health Policy and Political Analysis at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and a faculty member of the Harvard Kennedy School. Blendon also serves as senior associate dean for policy translation and leadership development at the Harvard TH Chan School. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, he was senior vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He earned his ScD in health policy from the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and his MBA from the University of Chicago.

David Blumenthal, MD, MPP, is president of The Commonwealth Fund. He is formerly the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief health information and innovation officer at Partners Healthcare System in Boston. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, with the charge to build an interoperable, private, and secure nationwide health information system and to support the widespread, meaningful use of health IT. Previously, Blumenthal was a practicing primary care physician, director of the Institute for Health Policy, and professor of medicine and health policy at Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners Healthcare System and Harvard Medical School. He is the author of more than 250 books and scholarly publications, including most recently Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (University of California Press, 2010). He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves on the editorial boards of the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation. He has also served on the staff of the US Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, is the founding chairman of AcademyHealth, and is a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

Reinhard Busse, Dr med, MPH, is the department head for health care management at Berlin University of Technology, Germany. He is also codirector and head of the Berlin hub of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, speaker of the steering board of the interuniversity Berlin School of Public Health, director of the Berlin Health Economics Research Centre, and editor-in-chief of the journal Health Policy. He is the current president of the German Health Economics Association (2016/2017). His research focuses on methods and contents of comparative health system analysis and health services research (with an emphasis on hospitals, human resources, cross-border care, health reforms in Germany, the role of the European Union, financing and payment mechanisms, and disease management), health economics, and health technology assessment.

Margaret Chan, MD, DSc, FFPHM, MScPH, from the People’s Republic of China, obtained her medical degree from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She joined the Hong Kong Department of Health in 1978, where her career in public health began. In 1994, Chan was appointed director of health of Hong Kong. In her 9-year tenure as director, she launched new services to prevent the spread of disease and promote better health and introduced new initiatives to improve communicable disease surveillance and response, enhance training for public health professionals, and establish better local and international collaboration. She effectively managed outbreaks of avian influenza and of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). In 2003, Chan joined the World Health Organization as director of the Department for Protection of the Human Environment and subsequently was appointed director of communicable diseases surveillance and response, representative of the director-general for pandemic influenza, and assistant director-general for communicable diseases. Chan was elected to the post of director-general on November 9, 2006. The Assembly appointed Chan for a second 5-year term at its 65th session in May 2012. Chan’s term will continue until June 30, 2017.

Alexander Geissler, Dr rer oec, Dipl-Ing., is a senior researcher in the Department of Health Care Management at the Berlin University of Technology, Germany. His research focuses on incentives and payment methods for hospitals and their impact on quality and efficiency of service delivery. He is part of the coordinating team of the EuroDRG consortium and occasional consultant for different (non)governmental and international organizations. He has published articles in scientific and professional journals as well as book chapters, on topics such as hospital payment methodologies and management, medical resource utilization, health care quality, and health systems characteristics. He is also engaged in teaching activities on economics, medicine, and public health. Geissler graduated in 2008 from Berlin University of Technology where he studied economics and engineering and received a doctoral degree in economics in 2013 from the same university.

Rachel Grob, PhD, MA, is director of national initiatives and an associate clinical professor at the Center for Patient Partnerships, and is a senior scientist in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. She is a sociologist whose career, both inside and outside academia, has been devoted to investigating patients’ experiences with health and health care, and to involving them in the discourse, policy processes, and institutional arrangements that impact that care. She is the author of multiple articles and the book Testing Baby: The Transformation of Newborn Screening, Parenting and Policymaking (Rutgers University Press, 2011), as well as coeditor of Patients as Policy Actors (Rutgers University Press, 2011). Grob is a member of national committees such as the Measure Application Partnership and the National Quality Forum’s Task Force on Patient- and Family-Centered Care. She holds degrees from Wesleyan University, Sarah Lawrence College (MA in health advocacy), and the City University of New York Graduate Center (PhD in sociology).

Caitlin L. McMurtry, is a PhD student in health policy at Harvard University. She holds an SM in health policy and management from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and a BA in sociology and anthropology from Carleton College. She has designed and analyzed polls on health and social policies for National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Boston Globe as a member of the Harvard Opinion Research Program. Prior to that, she conducted public health and health policy research in Kansas, at the state and local levels. McMurtry is interested in researching the politics of health policy, including the roles that public opinion and special interest groups play in shaping the health policy environment.

Eric Pfeifer is a research assistant at the School of Information and the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. Pfeifer has experience working in health policy and is pursuing his master’s degree in health informatics from the University of Michigan. He holds a BA in economics from Xavier University.

Christoph Pross, MSc, is a research fellow and PhD candidate in the Department for Health Care Management at the Berlin University of Technology, Germany. His research is focused on provider strategy and competition, value-based health care, outcome transparency, and economics and quality improvement in hospital care. He is currently on a leave of absence from the Boston Consulting Group, where he works on health care, in particular the provider and medtech sectors. Pross holds an MSc in management and strategy from the London School of Economics and a BA with a double major in economics and political science from Davidson College.

James C. Robinson, PhD, MPH, is Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Economics and director of the Berkeley Center for Health Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. Robinson’s research focuses on the biotechnology, medical device, insurance, and health care delivery sectors. He has published 3 books and more than 130 papers in peer-reviewed journals.His most recent book, Purchasing Medical Innovation: The Right Technology for the Right Patient at the Right Price (University of California Press, 2015), analyzes the roles of the FDA, health insurers, hospitals, and consumers in the assessment, purchasing, and use of high-cost implantable devices.

Justin M. Sayde, MS, is administrative and research manager of the Harvard Opinion Research Program and is assistant director in the Division of Policy Translation and Leadership Development at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Sayde assists colleagues with all aspects of the polling process—from questionnaire design to implementation, analysis, and dissemination. His research interests are at the intersection of psychology and health policy. He graduated with high honors from Lafayette College (Easton, PA) and earned his MS in experimental psychology from Villanova University in 2011.

Mark J. Schlesinger, PhD, is professor of health policy and a fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, and past editor of the Journal of Health Policy, Politics and Law. Schlesinger’s research explores the determinants of public opinion about health and social policy, the influence of bounded rationality on medical consumers, and the role of nonprofit organizations in American medicine. He has consulted to a half dozen federal agencies, several dozen state and local governments, and more than a score of nonprofit organizations concerned with health and social policy. His favored sports include uncompetitive volleyball and unlighted table tennis.

Benjamin D. Sommers, MD, PhD, is associate professor of health policy and economics at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and assistant professor of medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is a health economist and primary care physician whose main research interests are health policy for vulnerable populations, the uninsured, and the health care safety net. In 2011-2012, he served as a senior advisor in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the US Department of Health and Human Services. His current research projects focus on barriers to health care access among low-income adults, Medicaid policy, and national health reform.