Notes on Contributors

Yukiko Asada is associate professor in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie University. She received a PhD in population health from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2003. She is a recipient of a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Award. Her research focuses on the intersection of population health, health services research, and ethics, and she has worked in areas of health inequality/inequity, access to health care, and need-based resource allocation. Her book Health Inequality: Morality and Measurement (University of Toronto Press 2007) signifies her interdisciplinary approach integrating ethics, methods, and policy.

Patrick W. Brady is a research fellow in hospital medicine and general pediatrics and a Quality Scholar in Health Care Transformation at the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. His broad research aims include using improvement science and clinical research to improve the quality and safety of care for hospitalized children. His specific research aim is to define predictors of clinical deterioration and to develop highly reliable interventions to identify and mitigate risk and eliminate preventable harm. Brady holds an MD.

Nancy Breen has served as a health economist in the Applied Research Program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) since 1991. Her research investigates how race, social class, gender, community factors, and health service diffusion, especially cancer screening, shape cancer outcomes. She collaborates on a multidisciplinary research team supported by NCI to improve understanding of health disparities measures and to disseminate a range of measures using the Health Disparities Calculator (HD * Calc). She has a broad interest in how economic indicators can be used to improve cancer control monitoring and how the range of socioeconomic status and access indicators is associated with cancer outcomes. Breen holds a PhD.

Damien Contandriopoulos is an associate professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Montreal, a researcher at the University of Montreal’s Institute for Public Health Research (IRSPUM) and co-director of IRSPUM’s research axis on politics and ethics. His main areas of research are policy analysis, knowledge exchange, and governance processes in health care. He holds a PhD.

Jean-Louis Denis is full professor at the École Nationale d’Administration Publique in Quebec, a member of the Institute for Public Health Research at the University of Montreal, and a visiting professor at EuroMed Management in Marseille. He pursues research on governance and processes of change in the health care organizations and systems. His current research looks at integration of care and services, the development of primary care, and the role of scientific evidence in the adoption and implementation of clinical and managerial innovations. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and chair of the advisory board of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Health Services and Policy Research. Denis holds a PhD.

Michele C. Dritz is a clinical fellow in adolescent medicine and a Quality Scholar in Health Care Transformation at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her academic pursuits have focused on integrating quality improvement methodology into the clinical setting to maximize patient outcomes and clinical effectiveness. This has included advanced training in quality improvement sciences and implementation of those methods into clinical projects, including asthma outpatient management. She has coauthored a review article on implementing evidence-based guidelines for adolescents with asthma using quality improvement strategies and a systematic review examining the effects of contextual factors on quality improvement success. Prior to her medical training, she received a master’s degree in biology from the University of California, San Diego, and a master’s degree in biological sciences from MCP Hahnemann University.

Daniel M. Fox, president emeritus of the Milbank Memorial Fund, is an author of books and articles on health policy and politics and an adviser to public officials, leaders of provider systems of health and long-term care, research organizations, publishers, and foundations. Fox has been publishing regularly for half a century. His most recent book is The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy, and American States (University of California Press 2010).

Craig M. Froehle is an associate professor of operations management in the College of Business at the University of Cincinnati and an associate professor at the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He received his PhD in business, with a focus on operations management, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Earlier degrees include an MBA and a BS (mechanical engineering), both from the University of Cincinnati. His research looks at improving the efficiency and quality of health care delivery systems, with specific focus on the intersection of patient flow, scheduling, capacity allocation, process design, and the role of technology.

Trisha Greenhalgh is a family practitioner in London and director of the Healthcare Innovation and Policy Unit within the Centre for Health Sciences at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry. She gained her first degree in social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1980 and qualified in medicine from the University of Oxford in 1983. Her research interests lie at the interface between sociology and medicine. She uses innovative interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on narrative, ethnographic, and participatory methods, to explore complex, policy-related issues in contemporary health care.

P. Johan Groop is a researcher at the Institute of Healthcare Engineering Management and Architecture of Aalto University School of Science and Technology in Finland. He is also currently pursuing a PhD in health care operations management in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Aalto. His research includes the application and development of industrial management methods in health care, with a focus on the theory of constraints (TOC). In the past Groop has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Prior to joining academia he worked with process improvement at the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa. He publishes on TOC and process management in health care. Groop holds an MSc.

Sam Harper is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health at McGill University. His current research interests are in population health and demography, global health, measuring and monitoring health inequalities, and public health ethics. He holds a PhD.

David K. Hooper is jointly appointed in the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension and the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. His aim is to improve clinical outcomes for pediatric kidney transplant recipients through research in personalized care and the design of reliable health care systems. His research training includes a master’s degree in clinical and translational research from the University of Cincinnati, in addition to advanced training in quality improvement methodology through the Quality Scholars Program in Health Care Transformation at Cincinnati Children’s. His career focus is to combine clinical outcomes research with quality improvement to reliably prevent cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of long-term disability and death in pediatric transplant recipients. Hooper holds an MD.

Robert Kaestner has a PhD in economics from the City University of New York. Currently, he is a professor in the Institute of Government and Public Affairs of the University of Illinois and a professor in the Department of Economics of the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Kaestner’s research focuses on health economics and health policy.

Heather C. Kaplan is an assistant professor with appointments in the Division of Neonatology and the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She practices as a neonatologist and conducts research focusing on understanding variations in evidence-based care practices across hospitals and examining strategies for increasing the implementation of evidence into practice. Current investigations are aimed at building the evidence base for quality improvement (QI). The systematic review in this issue of The Milbank Quarterly is the first step in a series of studies that aims to develop a practical, comprehensive theoretical framework that explains the impact of context on QI success and to begin some preliminary testing of the association between contextual factors and successful improvement based on this framework. Kaplan holds an MD and an MSCE.

Nicholas B. King is an assistant professor in the Biomedical Ethics Unit and an associate member in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health at McGill University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. He holds a doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University and was previously a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan. His current research interests include the role of normative judgment in research on health inequalities and the aggregation of complex health information.

Marc Lemire is an assistant researcher in the Health Administration Department and a regular researcher at the Institute for Public Health Research (IRSPUM) at the University of Montreal. He pursues research on the social, organizational, and communication dimensions of innovations in health care organizations and systems. His current research looks at the transfer and use of performance information for governance and improvement initiatives at the organizational level. He is also associated with the National Public Health Institute of Quebec as part of an assessment of the national program of public health. Lemire holds a PhD.

Paul Lillrank has been a professor of quality and service management in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Aalto University in Finland since 1994. He received a PhD in social and political sciences at Helsinki University in 1988 after six years of postgraduate studies in Japan, where he specialized in quality management. He has been a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and an affiliated professor at the European Institute of Japanese Studies at the Stockholm School of Economics. His current research interests are health care operations management and quality management in professional organizations. He is cofounder of the Institute of Healthcare Engineering, Management and Architecture at Aalto University and the Nordic Healthcare Group, a consultancy.

W. Matthew Linam is an assistant professor in the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Section at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. In addition to medical training, he has a master’s degree in science from the University of Cincinnati. He also received advanced training in quality improvement methodology through the Quality Scholars Program in Health Care Transformation at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He works closely with infection control at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. His primary focus is preventing health care–associated infections by applying quality improvement science and reliability principles to care processes. Much of his current research involves improving the hand hygiene practices of health care workers.

John Lynch is professor of epidemiology and population health at the Sansom Institute for Health Research at the University of South Australia and professor of population health at University of Bristol (UK). His research interests include early life determinants of health, life-course processes regulating health behaviors, population health monitoring, evidence-based public health, and improving the public health research–policy nexus. In 2009 he was awarded a presitigous Australia Fellowship by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. Lynch holds a PhD and an MPH.

Tomi J. Malmström is a researcher at the Institute of Healthcare Engineering, Management and Architecture of Aalto University School of Science and Technology. He is currently pursuing a PhD in health care operations management in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Aalto. Malmström has been a visiting researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research is focused on emergency department patient processes. He is also the project coordinator of a European Union 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, a project on managed outcomes. He holds an MSc.

Peter Margolis is a professor of pediatrics, co-director of the Center for Health Care Quality and director of research at the James M. Anderson Center for Health System Excellence at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. His work encompasses the application and study of quality improvement methods in a broad range of areas, including primary and sub-specialty care, public health settings, and communities, to improve the health outcomes of children, families, and communities. Margolis obtained his MD from New York University and his pediatric training at the University of Colorado, where he also served as chief resident in pediatrics. He subsequently spent three years in the National Health Service Corps. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he also earned his PhD in epidemiology. In 1994, Margolis was named a Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Faculty Scholar at UNC where he also served on the faculty between 1991 and 2005. In 2006, Margolis joined Cincinnati Children’s to create a new center focused on health care quality. His center designed and tested an “office systems” model for prevention in primary care that has been replicated extensively in numerous states.

Stephen C. Meersman is a senior scientific consultant at John Snow Research and Training Institute, Inc. ( JSI), in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a sociologist specializing in quantitative research methods and data analysis with a focus on health disparities. Meersman received his doctorate from the University of Maryland, College Park, with concentrations in social psychology and demography. After receiving his doctorate, he received advanced postdoctoral research experience at Brown University’s Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research in the Department of Community Health. Before joining JSI, Meersman worked in the Surveillance Research Program of the National Cancer Institute.

Marsha E. Reichman is a senior advisor on biospecimens and bioinformatics in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). She holds a PhD in cell and molecular biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in mathematical statistics from the University of Maryland, and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and biology from Barnard College. Her activities focus on uses of electronic data, distributed databases, and biomarkers in surveillance. Her current research includes trends in head and neck cancers, disparities in cancer surveillance data, cancer biomarkers, and measures of cancer survival. She has been the NCI lead on design, development, and deployment of SEER * DMS, a unified, distributed data management system used by the majority of SEER central cancer registries, and she has also led the SEER Residual Tissue Repository Program.

Jeffrey H. Silber is director of the Center for Outcomes Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; professor of pediatrics, anesthesiology, and critical care at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine; and professor of health care management at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. He has developed numerous metrics for evaluating hospital quality of care, including the outcome measure Failure-to-Rescue. Silber has published extensively on severity adjustment using Medicare and administrative claims, and on the use of multivariate matching in health services research. He received his MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Émile Tremblay works in the Department of Public Health at the Agency for Health and Social Services in Montérégie Quebec. He is responsible for promoting and implementing Health Impact Assessments (HIA). A combination of procedures, methods, and tools, HIA is an innovative way to improve knowledge transfer between the health and non-health sectors (i.e., municipal and regional administrative levels). Based on collaboration between those sectors, HIA aims to maximize knowledge use in an interorganizational context and promote health by influencing policymakers and their decisions. Tremblay holds an MSc.