Appendix B
Workshop Speaker Biosketches
David W. Baker, M.D., M.P.H., is the Michael A. Gertz Professor of Medicine, Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine, and Director of the REACH Practice-Based Research Network at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University in Chicago. Dr. Baker’s research activities have focused on health care delivery for underserved populations and improving quality of care for chronic medical conditions. He was one of the Principal Investigators for the Literacy in Health Care Study, the first major study examining how often patients are unable to accurately read pill bottles, appointment slips, and the other written materials they encounter when they come to see a doctor. He was also the Principal Investigator for a large study of literacy, health status, use of health care services, and mortality that included over 3000 Medicare managed care enrollees in 4 cities in the U.S. He was one of the developers of the Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults, and he has published extensively on the measurement of health literacy and the consequences of inadequate health literacy. His current work focuses on developing interventions to improve health communication and to improve patient self-management skills and health behaviors, including use of multimedia and health information technology. He also leads several projects examining the use of electronic health record systems for clinical decision support, quality improvement, and rapid dissemination of new medical advances.
Cynthia Baur, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor for Health Literacy, Office of the Associate Director for Communication, Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). From 2006–2010, she was the Director, Division of Health Communication and Marketing, National Center for Health Marketing, CDC. She is a cochair of the Healthy People 2020 Health Communication and Health Information Technology Workgroup and a cochair of the HHS workgroup on health literacy. She is the lead author of the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy and one of the developers of CDC’s online health literacy training for health professionals. Dr. Baur holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego.
Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D., was appointed Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) on February 5, 2003 and reappointed on October 9, 2009. Prior to her appointment, Dr. Clancy was Director of AHRQ’s Center for Outcomes and Effectiveness Research.
Dr. Clancy, a general internist and health services researcher, is a graduate of Boston College and the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Following clinical training in internal medicine, Dr. Clancy was a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining AHRQ in 1990, she was also an assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Medical College of Virginia.
Dr. Clancy holds an academic appointment at George Washington University School of Medicine (Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Medicine) and serves as Senior Associate Editor, Health Services Research. She serves on multiple editorial boards including the Annals of Internal Medicine, Annals of Family Medicine, American Journal of Medical Quality, and Medical Care Research and Review.
She is a member of the Institute of Medicine and was elected a Master of the American College of Physicians in 2004. In 2009, was awarded the 2009 William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research.
Her major research interests include improving health care quality and patient safety, and reducing disparities in care associated with patients’ race, ethnicity, gender, income, and education. As Director, she launched the first annual report to the Congress on health care disparities and health care quality.
Lisa Cooper, M.D., M.P.H., is Professor of Health Policy & Management, and Health Behavior & Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Cooper’s research program focuses on patient-centered strategies for improving outcomes and overcoming racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare. She has conducted several observational studies to explore and better define barriers (e.g., patient attitudes, beliefs, and preferences) to equitable care across racial and ethnic groups and mechanisms for disparities in health status and healthcare (e.g., patient-
physician communication, race discordance between patients and physicians, physicians’ implicit attitudes about race). Dr. Cooper was the principal investigator of two randomized trials funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of interventions to improve quality of care and outcomes for patients with hypertension and depression in primary care settings. She also has a Mid-Career Investigator Award for Patient-Oriented Research in Cardiovascular Health Disparities from the NHLBI and she is the principal investigator of a new NHLBI-funded Center for Population Health and Health Disparities. Dr. Cooper has been an elected IOM member since 2008.
Dr. Cooper’s research links patient and clinician attitudes and behaviors with health outcomes; her work continues to inform the training of physicians and the institutions in which they practice to deliver high quality, equitable care to increasingly diverse patient populations.
Terry C. Davis, Ph.D., is a Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport where she also heads the Behavioral Science unit at the Feist-Weiller Cancer Center. For the past 25 years, she has led an interdisciplinary team investigating the impact of patient literacy on health and healthcare. Seminal achievements include development of the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM) and creation of user- friendly patient education and provider training materials.
Dr. Davis has more than one hundred publications related to health literacy, health communication and preventive medicine. She has served on Health Literacy Advisory Boards for both the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians Foundation (ACP-F). Dr. Davis was an independent agent on the IOM Committee on Health Literacy and a developer of the AMA’s Train-the-Trainer Health Literacy Curriculum. Currently she is a member of the Healthy People 2010 Health Literacy/Health Communication Section and serves on the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee.
Dr. Davis is Principal Investigator on a 5 year NCI health literacy intervention to increase regular breast and CRC screening among patients in Federally Qualified Health Centers. She is also working with investigators at Northwestern, Emory and Harvard on AHRQ funded studies to improve patient understanding of prescription medication labels in English and Spanish. Along with a team from the University of North Carolina, University of California San Francisco and Northwestern she has been funded by the ACP-F to develop and test practical self-management guides and videos for patients with diabetes, COPD, and coronary artery disease. The ACP-F has distributed more than a million copies of these
guides and videos. She is also a coinvestigator on a CDC funded project to teach vaccine safety through the Academic Pediatric Association’s on line curriculum for residents and practicing physicians.
Raynard Kington, M.D., Ph.D., is the Principal Deputy Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Kington has held this position since February 9, 2003. He served as Acting NIH Director from October 31, 2008 until the appointment of Dr. Francis S. Collins on August 17, 2009. During his tenure as Acting NIH Director, he led the agency through the development of NIH’s plan for the use of the $10.4 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act resources designed to accelerate biomedical science and the economy. In July, 2009, NIH published the final “NIH Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research” under his directorship. With the appointment of the current director, Dr. Francis S. Collins (August 17, 2009), Kington resumed his role as Principal Deputy Director. Prior to his present appointment, Dr. Kington was Director of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (2000-2003). In addition to this role, from January, 2002 to November, 2002, he served as Acting Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Before coming to NIH, Dr. Kington was Director of the Division of Health Examination Statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As Division Director, he also served as Director of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), one of the nation’s largest studies to assess the health of the American people. Prior to coming to NCHS, he was a Senior Scientist in the Health Program at the RAND Corporation. While at RAND, Dr. Kington was a Co-Director of the Drew/RAND Center on Health and Aging, a National Institute on Aging Exploratory Minority Aging Center.
Dr. Kington attended the University of Michigan, where he received his B.S. with distinction and his M.D. He subsequently completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Michael Reese Medical Center in Chicago. He was then appointed a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. While at the University of Pennsylvania, he completed his M.B.A. with distinction and his Ph.D. with a concentration in Health Policy and Economics at the Wharton School and was awarded a Fontaine Fellowship. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Public Health and Preventive Medicine. In 2006, Dr. Kington was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Kington’s research has focused on the role of social factors, especially socioeconomic status, as determinants of health. His research has included studies of the health and socioeconomic status of black immigrants, demographic correlates of the willingness to participate in genetic
research, the relationship between wealth and health status, the health status of U.S. Hispanic populations, and the determinants of health care services utilization.
Michael Paasche-Orlow, M.D., M.A., M.P.H., Associate Professor of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine, is a nationally recognized expert in health literacy. Dr. Paasche-Orlow’s work has focused on patient-centered interventions that utilize health information technologies that are accessible for people with limited literacy and is currently a coinvestigator for seven funded studies. Dr. Paasche-Orlow is the Associate Director of the Boston University School of Medicine, General Internal Medicine Fellowship Program and is currently mentoring 6 fellows and junior faculty members. He conducted his own postdoctoral research in clinical epidemiology, health services research, and bioethics in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Prior to that, he completed his residency training in the Primary Care track of the NYU-Bellevue Internal Medicine training program and medical school at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine.
Debra Roter, Dr.P.H., is Professor of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and holds appointments of Professor in the Schools of Medicine and Nursing and with the Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Dr. Roter’s primary research focus is in the study of patient-health care provider communication. She is the author of the Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS), a method of process analysis applied to medical exchange widely used by researchers and educators nationally and internationally. Her studies include basic social psychology research regarding social and psychological determinants and consequences of interpersonal influence within medical encounters, patient and provider interventions to improve health care quality, and communication and educational applications to enhance patient and provider communication skills.
Dr. Roter has authored over 200 articles and book chapters and three books related to the subject of patient-health care provider communication. She is recognized by the Web of Science as among highly cited authors in the social sciences.
Dr. Roter is currently Principal Investigator of an NICHD funded study to assess oral literacy burden of medical communication and to develop an ameliorative patient activation intervention for pregnant women with poor literacy skills.
Rima Rudd, Sc.D., is the Senior Lecturer on Society, Human Development, and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her work centers on
health communication and on the design and evaluation of public health community based programs. She has been teaching courses on innovative strategies in health education, program planning and evaluation, psychosocial and behavioral theory, and health literacy since 1988.
Dr. Rudd is focusing her research inquiries on literacy related disparities and literacy related barriers to health programs, services, and care, working closely with the adult education, public health, oral health, and medical sectors.
Dr. Rudd wrote several reports that help shape the agenda in health literacy research and practice. They include the health literacy chapter of the Health and Human Services report Communicating Health: Priorities and Strategies for Progress (2003), the Educational Testing Services report, Literacy and Health in America (2004), and two in-depth literature reviews (Review of Adult Learning and Literacy volume 1 in 2000 and volume 7 in 2007). She served on the Institute of Medicine Committee on Health Literacy, the National Research Council Committee on Measuring Adult Literacy, the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research Workgroup on Oral Health Literacy, on the Joint Commission Advisory Committee on Health Literacy and Patient Safety and contributed to the ensuing reports and white papers.
Dr. Rudd currently serves on the National Health Literacy Advisory Board for the American Dental Association and is the Senior Health Literacy Advisor for the Missouri Foundation. She is a visiting professor in the Faculty of Health and Social Care, London Southbank University and is appointed the visiting Health Literacy Scholar at the Horowitz Center on Health Literacy at the University of Maryland, School of Public Health. She is a coprincipal investigator on several ongoing health literacy research projects. Rima Rudd is considered a leader in this growing field of research and practice.
Dean Schillinger, M.D., is Professor of Medicine in Residence at the University of California, San Francisco, and Acting Chief of the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). He is also a practicing primary care physician at SFGH, an urban public hospital, where he sees patients, teaches in the primary care residency program, and conducts research. He is the Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, a new research center committed to transforming clinical and public health practice by improving health communication for socially vulnerable people, and is a member of a UCSF-wide translational research committee to expand the scope and quality of implementation and dissemination sciences.
Dr. Schillinger also serves as Chief of the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program for the California Department of Public Health, where
he has been expanding the program’s work in health communications, social and environmental determinants of diabetes, and health disparities. In his prior administrative roles, he has directed the Medi-Cal managed care clinic at SFGH, the ambulatory care clinics at SFGH, and has been the Director of Clinical Operations for the Department of Medicine.
Author of over 100 scientific manuscripts, Dr. Schillinger carries out research related to healthcare for vulnerable populations, and focuses on literacy, health communication, and chronic disease prevention and management. He has carried out a number of studies exploring the impact of limited health literacy on the care of patients with diabetes and heart disease. He has been honored with the 2003 Institute for Healthcare Advancement Research Award; the 2008 Research Award in Safety and Quality from the National Patient Safety Foundation; the 2009 Engel Award in Health Communication Research; and the California Association of Public Hospital Quality Leaders Award for this work. He has been the recipient of grants from NIH, The California Endowment, The Commonwealth Fund, AHRQ, and the California Health Care Foundation to develop and evaluate care management programs tailored to the literacy and language needs of patients with chronic disease, and was a cofounder for the National Association of Public Health and Hospital Institute’s Diabetes Quality Improvement Consortium.
Dr. Schillinger contributed to the 2004 Institute of Medicine Report on Health Literacy, is a section editor for the textbooks Understanding Health Literacy (AMA press) and Caring for Vulnerable and Underserved Populations (Lange series, 2007), and is a member of the American College of Physician’s Health Communication Advisory Board, and serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Patient Education and Counseling. He completed an Open Society Institute Advocacy Fellowship working with California Literacy, Inc., a nonprofit educational organization that helps people gain literacy skills, to advance the California Health Literacy Initiative. With respect to chronic disease control on the global level, he recently returned from a semester as Visiting Scholar at the University of Chile’s School of Public Health to help develop chronic disease prevention and treatment initiatives, has served as a consultant to the National Health Group in Singapore on its chronic disease and health promotion initiatives.
Joshua Seidman, Ph.D., at ONC, guides development of tools and resources that help providers become meaningful users of HIT, and helps to evolve meaningful use practice and policy. During nearly two decades in health care, Seidman has focused on quality measurement and improvement; the intersection of e-health and health services research; and structuring consumer e-health interventions to support improved health behaviors and
informed decision making. Previously, Seidman founded the Center for Information Therapy, which advanced the practice and science of delivering tailored information to consumers to help them make better health decisions and lead healthier lives. At the IxCenter, Seidman focused on stimulating innovation, diffusing best practices, and evangelizing for a patient centered orientation to implementation of HIT applications. Dr. Seidman has a PhD in health services research and an MHS in health policy and management from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and a BA in political science from Brown University.
Michael S. Wolf, Ph.D., M.P.H., is an associate professor of medicine, associate division chief of research, and director of the Center for Communication in Healthcare at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Dr. Wolf is a behavioral scientist and health services researcher with primary interests in adult literacy and learning, cognitive factors, and the management of chronic disease. He was one of the first recipients of the Pfizer Health Literacy Initiative Scholar Award and has received numerous national awards for his work in the field of health literacy and medication safety.
Dr. Wolf has written 84 peer-reviewed publications, many of which address the problem of limited health literacy. He currently serves on advisory committees for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, U.S. Pharmacopeia, the American Dental Association, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. He has repeatedly provided consultation to the Institute of Medicine, American College of Physicians Foundation, American Medical Association, American Pharmacists Association, and Centers for Disease Control on health literacy matters.
He is the principal investigator on grants from the National Institute on Aging, National Cancer Institute, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Target Corporation, Foundation for Informed Decision Making, and the Missouri Foundation for Health. Dr. Wolf also led an Institute of Medicine white paper on health literacy and medication safety, and he is the principal investigator of a trial to test enhanced drug labeling and the use of visual aids to improve patient processing and understanding of medication instructions.
