Expert Advisors

CHRT's Expert Advisors are thought leaders in their respective fields who provide subject matter expertise and consultation to CHRT and its Research and Policy Committee in support of CHRT's research and data analysis.

John D. Birkmeyer, MD

George D. Zuidema Professor of Surgery
Chair, Surgical Outcomes Research
University of Michigan Medical School

John D. Birkmeyer, M.D., a graduate of Boston College and Harvard Medical School, completed his general surgery residency and a fellowship in outcomes research at Dartmouth College. He then joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1996, later serving as chief of the Section of General Surgery. He moved to the University of Michigan in 2004, where he is the George D. Zuidema Professor of Surgery and director of M-SCORE. Birkmeyer has broad interests in outcomes research, claims data analysis, and value-based purchasing strategies in surgery. With funding from the National Cancer Institute, his current research is exploring why some hospitals and surgeons have better outcomes than others, with the ultimate goal of improving care in all settings. Research funded by the National Institute on Aging is aimed at developing hospital-level measures of costs and quality with administrative data. He chairs the expert panel on evidence-based hospital referral for the Leapfrog Group, a large coalition of public and private health care purchasers. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.

Frederic Blow, PhD

Professor, Psychiatry
Research Associate Professor, Psychiatry
University of Michigan Medical School

Fred Blow is a national expert on substance abuse among older adults. He is the scientific director for an Older Adults and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Technical Assistant Center, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. He is also the lead consultant for a California statewide technical assistance and training project designed to advance alcohol/other drug prevention/early intervention efforts in health and social service systems working with older adults. He was the chair of the group that wrote the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) resource book on older adults and substance abuse.

Darrell A. Campbell, Jr., MD

Chief Medical Officer
Henry King Ransom Professor of Surgery
University of Michigan Health System

Darrell A. Campbell, Jr., M.D., is the chief medical officer at the University of Michigan Health System. He is also the Henry King Ransom Professor of Surgery in the Department of Surgery and has specialized in solid organ transplantation, particularly kidney, liver, and pancreas, for several years. As chief medical officer, Campbell is responsible for the overall quality of care delivered at the health system, and has a special interest in patient safety.

Campbell received his B.S. degree in zoology from Michigan State University in 1968, and graduated with distinction from George Washington University, receiving an M.D. degree in 1972. Subsequently, he received his general surgery training at the University of Michigan Medical School from 1972 through 1979.

In recent years, Campbell has become interested in the related subjects of patient safety and quality of care. He has worked with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan to develop a surgical quality improvement program in 52 Michigan hospitals, and has been active in the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program. In addition, Campbell has been selected to participate in the National Quality Forum’s National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Patient Safety project and has been appointed as a member and chairperson of the Technical Advisory Panel for this project focusing on healthcare-associated infections.

Ruth Carlos, MD

Assistant Chair of Clinical Research, Department of Radiology
Professor, Radiology
University of Michigan Medical School

Ruth Carlos, M.D., is a radiologist and former Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, trained in comparative effectiveness and health services research with a focus on cancer prevention and control. Her work during the past 10 years have encompassed cost-effectiveness analysis, patient preference measurement and meta-analysis and systematic reviews in diagnostic imaging. More recently, her research focuses on the novel use of existing health encounters, including imaging encounters, as teachable moments to improve global health behavior. She has evaluated the use of screening mammography and cervical cancer screening encounters as teachable moments to improve colon cancer screening in women. Her current work seeks to understand the effectiveness of maternally-directed interventions to improve vaccine uptake in their adolescent daughters as a significant and innovative extension of her previous work, specifically examining parental decision making on behalf of a child. The results of this project have the potential to serve as a model for improving adherence to adolescent preventive services. Carlos brings her specific expertise in evaluating cultural barriers to adolescent HPV vaccination in African-American mothers and developing and pilot testing tailored interventions directed at these cultural barriers.

Carlos is the assistant chair of clinical research in the department of radiology and has mentored numerous junior faculty members, residents and medical students in health services research with an emphasis on diagnostic imaging. She serves on several editorial boards and holds assistant editorships in health services research in radiology.

Angie Fagerlin, PhD

Research Scientist
Ann Arbor VA Healthcare System

Associate Professor, Internal Medicine
University of Michigan Medical School

Co-Director, Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine
University of Michigan Medical School and the Ann Arbor VA Healthcare System

Angela Fagerlin is a research scientist at the Ann Arbor VA and an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine, a joint program sponsored by the University of Michigan Medical School and the Ann Arbor VA. Fagerlin’s research focuses on the development, implementation, and testing of patient decision aids. As part of this research, she has focused on how to best present complex risk/benefit information to patients.

Her research has also investigated how to improve shared decision making for patients diagnosed with cancer. Fagerlin has been a principal investigator on numerous grants that have tested risk communication methods and methods for improving patients’ role in decision making about their cancer treatment. This research has been primarily in the context of breast and prostate cancer. She has written extensively on the challenges of communicating information to patients, particularly patients with low literacy and numeracy skills.

A. Mark Fendrick, MD

Professor, Internal Medicine
University of Michigan School of Medicine

Professor, Health Management & Policy
University of Michigan School of Public Health

A. Mark Fendrick, M.D., is a professor of internal medicine in the University of Michigan School of Medicine and a professor of health management and policy in the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Fendrick received a bachelor's degree in economics and chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program. He currently co-directs the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan (www.vbidcenter.org), the leading advocate for development, implementation and evaluation of innovative health benefit plans.

Fendrick's research focuses on the clinical and economic assessment of medical interventions with special attention to how technological innovation influences clinical practice, benefit design and health care systems. He has authored more than 200 articles and book chapters and lectures frequently on the quality and cost implications of medical care to diverse audiences around the world. He remains clinically active in the practice of general internal medicine. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Managed Care and is an editorial board member for three additional peer-reviewed publications. His perspective and understanding of clinical and economic issues have fostered collaborations with numerous government agencies, health plans, professional societies and health care companies. He serves on the Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee. In 2009, he was named one of the "20 people who make healthcare better" by HealthLeaders Media for the creation and implementation of value-based insurance design.

Scott A. Flanders, MD

Associate Division Chief of General Medicine for Inpatient Programs, Department of Internal Medicine
Associate Director of Inpatient Programs for the Department of Internal Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine
Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine
University of Michigan

Scott A. Flanders, M.D., is currently a professor in the division of general internal medicine at the University of Michigan, where he serves as associate division chief of general medicine for inpatient programs and associate director of inpatient programs for the department of internal medicine. He is the director of the University of Michigan’s Hospitalist Program, which has grown to include more than 55 faculty members. Flanders regularly consults with both academic and community hospitals on issues related to hospitalist program development and curriculum development in the inpatient setting.

Flanders was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) and is a past-president of SHM. He was editor of the society’s publication, The Hospitalist, from 1997 through 2003. He also served as the associate editor of Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s WebM&M online journal of patient safety from its inception until 2004, and was deputy editor for the Journal of Hospital Medicine from 2005 through 2008.

In addition to these activities, Flanders has been active in quality improvement and patient safety at U-M. His research interests are related to hospitalists, hospital-acquired conditions, dissemination of patient safety practices, and the diagnosis and treatment of lower respiratory infections. He has served as a principal investigator (PI) of a grant from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation to support the creation of a multi-hospital consortium (the HELPS Consortium) to disseminate and implement best practices in patient safety and is also the PI of U-M’s innovative Specialist Hospitalist Allied Research Program (SHARP).

Flanders has helped develop and lead two statewide, hospitalist-focused quality collaboratives; the Hospital Medicine Safety (HMS) consortium, focused on preventing adverse events in hospitalized patients, and the Michigan Transition of Care Collaborative (MTC-2) which strives to improve the hospital discharge process. He has authored more than 45 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and has edited two textbooks and a book series in the field of hospital medicine. He speaks regularly at national conferences on hospitalists, patient safety, and community-acquired and nosocomial pneumonia.

Gary L. Freed , MD, MPH

Percy and Mary Murphy Professor of Pediatrics
University of Michigan School of Medicine

Professor, Health Management and Policy
University of Michigan School of Public Health

Gary L. Freed, M.D., M.P.H., is the Percy and Mary Murphy Professor of Pediatrics in the Univeristy of Michigan School of Medicine and professor of health management and policy in the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

He is director of the division of general pediatrics and director of the Children’s Health Evaluation and Research (CHEAR) Unit at the U-M Medical School. Freed has more than 20 years of experience in children’s health services research and has been the principal investigator of numerous federal, state and foundation-funded grants. He has published more than180 peer-reviewed articles on child health policy and health economics, immunizations, physician behavior, the medical workforce and interspecialty variation in the provision of preventive services to children.

Freed received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin, his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and his master of public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). Freed was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar as well as a Preventive Medicine Fellow at UNC-CH.

He is a past president of the Society for Pediatric Research, the largest research society in the field of child health. Freed is the 2009 recipient of the Douglas K. Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award for Perinatal and Pediatric Health Care Research from the Society of Pediatric Research. He also serves on several national and international committees regarding child health. In 2009, Freed was appointed to both the Committee on Pediatric Health and Health Care Quality Measures at the Institute of Medicine and the Council on Management Information Services of the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions.

He is a past chair of the Department of Health and Human Services National Vaccine Advisory Committee. He is a frequent consultant to state and federal agencies as well as the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the World Health Organization. He is a member of the American Board of Pediatrics and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Susan Dorr Goold, MD, MHSA, MA

Professor, Internal Medicine
Professor, Health Management and Policy
University of Michigan

Susan Dorr Goold, M.D., M.H.S.A., M.A., professor of internal medicine and health management and policy at the University of Michigan, has been trained in internal medicine, health services research, health policy, and philosophy. Goold studies the allocation of scarce health care resources, especially the perspectives of patients and citizens. Results from projects using the CHAT (Choosing Healthplans All Together) allocation exercise have been published and presented in national and international venues. CHAT received the 2003 Paul Ellwood Award and Goold's research received the 2002 Mark S. Ehrenreich Prize for Research in Healthcare Ethics. CHAT has been used by educators, community‑based organizations, employer groups, and others in more than 20 U.S. states and several countries engage the public in deliberations on health spending priorities. Other research and teaching addresses many areas of justice in health and health care, physician stewardship and other areas of medical ethics. She serves on several editorial boards and on the American Medical Association Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, and has held leadership positions in the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and the International Society on Healthcare Priority Setting.

Lee Green, MD, MPH

Associate Chair for Information Management, Department of Family Medicine
Professor, Information Management, Department of Family Medicine
University of Michigan Medical School

Lee Green, M.D., M.P.H., is professor and associate chair for information management in the department of family medicine at the University of Michigan. He is an active family physician with a full scope of practice, and director of the Great Lakes Research Into Practice Network (GRIN), a statewide practice-based research network of more than 200 primary care practices focusing on clinical ("T-2" and "T-3") translational research. He is also associate coordinator of the Decision Consortium, an interdisciplinary seminar on decision making issues at U-M, involving faculty and graduate students from psychology, business, medicine, nursing, engineering, law, philosophy, information science, public health, and others. His own primary interest is in the cognitive aspects of physician practice change, and their implications for improving the quality of primary care practice. He has a long record of involvement in leadership of clinical practice guidelines development, implementation, and performance measurement nationally and locally. His work currently focuses on applying cognitive science to facilitating change in physician organizations, to implementation of health information technology, and to improved management of chronic disease.

Green's research interests include: medical decision-making, translation of research into practice, implementation and measurement of evidence-based guidelines, hypertension, venous thromboembolism and information systems implementations.

Hitinder S. Gurm , MD

Assistant Professor, Internal Medicine
University of Michigan Medical School

Director, Inpatient Services for the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
Director, Carotid Interventions in Cardiovascular Medicine
University of Michigan Health System

Hitinder S. Gurm, M.D., is an assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Health System, as well as director of inpatient services for the division of cardiovascular medicine and director of carotid interventions in cardiovascular medicine. He is also the project director of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Cardiovascular Consortium Percutaneous Coronary Intervention Registry (BMC2-PCI). BMC2-PCI is a multi-center, quality improvement registry funded by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, designed to improve quality of care and outcomes for patients who undergo percutaneous coronary interventions in the state of Michigan.

Hitinder is a graduate of Christian Medical College in India. He subsequently trained in the United Kingdom and was elected to the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians. He joined the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 1996 and did a residency in internal medicine followed by a year as chief resident. He completed his fellowship in cardiology and interventional cardiology at the same institution. He joined the cardiology division of the University of Michigan in the summer of 2005. His clinical interests include cardio-vascular interventions with special interest in Primary PCI and carotid interventions. His research interests include carotid interventions, pharmacotherapy of PCI, quality improvement and outcomes assessment focused on acute coronary syndromes and PCI, and development of novel devices for endovascular interventions. He has published more than 100 original articles and book chapters and has been named as an inventor on four patent applications.

Rodney A. Hayward, MD

Director, Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program
University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor VA Healthcare System

Professor, Internal Medicine
Professor, Health Management and Policy
University of Michigan School of Public Health

Director, VA Center for Practice Management and Outcomes Research
Ann Arbor VA HSR&D

Rodney A. Hayward, M.D., is the director of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor VA Healthcare System, where he is also the co-director of the VA Ann Arbor HSR&D Center of Excellence and a professor of public health and internal medicine. He received his training in epidemiology, biostatistics and health economics as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at UCLA and at the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica. His current and past work includes studies examining: measurement of quality, costs and health status; environmental and educational factors affecting physician practice patterns; and, statistical and epidemiological nuances in the interpretation of clinical trials and in the development of clinical practice guidelines. An overarching theme of his work focuses on encouraging improvements in healthcare quality and efficiency through more sophisticated performance measures and market incentives.

William H. Herman, MD, MPH

Stefan S. Fajans/GlaxoSmithKline Professor of Diabetes
Professor, Internal Medicine
Professor, Epidemiology
University of Michigan Medical School

Director, Michigan Diabetes Research and Training Center

William H. Herman, M.D., M.P.H., is the Stefan S. Fajans/GlaxoSmithKline Professor of Diabetes, professor of internal medicine and epidemiology, and director of the Michigan Diabetes Research and Training Center. He completed his undergraduate degree at Yale College in 1975 and received his medical degree from Boston University in 1979. He gained a Masters of Public Health in epidemiology from the University of Michigan in 1993.

Herman’s interests include clinical diabetes and diabetes epidemiology, especially in the areas of surveillance, screening, treatment, and cost-effective analysis. He has authored more than 230 original research papers, reviews and textbook chapters a,nd is a member of the research groups for the Diabetes Control Complications Trial (DCCT), Epidemiology of Diabetes Interventions and Complications (EDIC), Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study (DPPOS), and Translating Research In Action for Diabetes (TRIAD). In 2006, Herman received the American Diabetes Association’s Kelly West Award for outstanding achievement in diabetes epidemiology.

Peter D. Jacobson, JD, MPH

Director, Center for Law, Ethics, and Health
Professor of Health Law and Policy
University of Michigan School of Public Health

Peter D. Jacobson, J.D., M.P.H., is a professor of health law and policy, and director of the Center for Law, Ethics, and Health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. He teaches courses on health law, public health law, and health care regulations. Before coming to the University of Michigan, Jacobson was a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

Jacobson is president of the Public Health Law Association, and a member of the Board of Directors, Public Health Foundation Enterprises, Inc. He is associate editor for Health Law and Public Health at the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

In 1995, he received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to examine the role of the courts in shaping health care policy. The project culminated in the publication of the book Strangers in the Night: Law and Medicine in the Managed Care Era (Oxford University Press, 2002). Jacobson subsequently co-authored a law school casebook with Lawrence O. Gostin titled Law and the Health System (Foundation Press, 2005), and is also a co-author of False Hope vs. Evidence-Based Medicine: The Story of a Failed Treatment for Breast Cancer (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Jacobson’s current research interests focus on the relationship between law and health care delivery (especially regulatory policy), law and public health systems, public health ethics, and health care safety net services. Jacobson’s recent studies examined: the impact of state and federal law on public health preparedness; organizational and operational efficiencies in Michigan’s health care safety net providers; and public health entrepreneurship.

Christy Harris Lemak, PhD

Associate Professor, Department of Health Management and Policy
University of Michigan

Christy Harris Lemak is an associate professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan, where she also serves as steering committee chair of the Griffith Leadership Center and co-chair of the Residential Masters Program Committee. At U-M, Lemak teaches health care management, strategic planning and marketing, and leadership development to graduate health management and policy students. Her research and practice work mirrors these subjects, with an emphasis on how leadership and organizational structure can lead to high performance in health care.

Specifically, she currently is the principal investigator on funded projects to examine: (1) a complex performance incentive program for physician organizations in Michigan and (2) relationships among organizational culture, management practice, and surgical outcomes in a 34-hospital surgical collaborative. Lemak has extensively studied how Medicaid policy demonstrations impact hospitals and the relationships among organizations, including regional collaboratives and hospital-physician networks. She is currently examining new ways of measuring hospital and system performance and has interviewed the leadership teams of several Baldrige-winning health care organizations to identify their knowledge management practices.

Her research has been published in various journals, including Health Services Research, Medical Care Research and Review, and the Journal of Health Services for the Poor and Underserved. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the Association of University Programs in Health Administration (AUPHA), the Graduate Editorial Board of Health Administration Press, and is past chair of the Academy of Management Health Care Management Division. She was recently named as expert advisor to the Center for Healthcare Research and Transformation.

Before coming to U-M, Lemak was associate chair and Michael O. and Barbara Bice Professor of Health Services Research, Management and Policy at the University of Florida. She also worked previously at The Sachs Group and was a management fellow at Mercy Health Services (now Trinity Health). Lemak holds a Ph.D. in health services organization and policy from U-M (1998), M.H.A. and M.B.A. degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia (1988), and a B.S. in health planning and administration from the University of Illinois (1986).

Harvey L. Leo, MD

Michelle L. Macy, MD, MS

Clinical Lecturer, Departments of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics
Child Health Evaluation and Research (CHEAR) Unit

Michelle L. Macy, M.D., M.S., is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Michigan Medical School. She completed her pediatric residency and combined fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine and pediatric health services research also at U-M, earning a master’s degree in health and health care research. She joined the faculty of the U-M departments of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics in 2009. Macy is a faculty investigator in the Child Health Evaluation and Research (CHEAR) Unit within U-M’s Division of General Pediatrics, where she is conducting research to improve acute care delivery for children who require short-stay hospitalization for the treatment of common conditions such as asthma and dehydration. Through analysis of hospital administrative data and administrative claims data, Macy has explored the application of observation status to pediatric short-stay admissions at the local, state, and national level. With funding from the Center for Healthcare Research & Transformation, Macy is evaluating the use of pediatric observation protocols in the emergency department setting as a treatment alternative to traditional inpatient care for pediatric short-stays.

Jean Malouin , MD, MPH

Associate Chair for Clinical Programs in Family Medicine
Associate Medical Director for Ambulatory Care Services
University of Michigan Medical School

Jean Malouin, M.D., has been a faculty member in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan since 1994. She currently holds the positions of associate chair for clinical programs in family medicine and associate medical director for ambulatory care services. She maintains her clinical practice at Briarwood Family Medicine in Ann Arbor, where she served as medical director from 1996-2008. She has a leadership role in development of the University of Michigan’s “Michigan Medical Home” model and has a special interest in the PCMH components of care management and care coordination. Over the past year, Malouin co-led a community Learning Collaborative to enhance PCMH capabilities for 19 practice teams across three health care organizations using Lean techniques. She was recently appointed as co-project lead for developing and implementing a state-wide Michigan multi-payer PMCH pilot project involving almost 500 PCMH-designated practices. Malouin received her medical degree from U-M in 1991, where she also completed a Master of Public Health degree in health management and policy in 2000.