Biosketches
Elliott S. Fisher, M.D., M.P.H., is professor of medicine and community and family medicine and also director of health policy research at the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, NH. A former Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, Dr. Fisher is also a general internist at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, VT, where he co-directs the VA Outcomes Group, a research and training program for physicians. His research interests lie in three areas. First, he has worked to clarify the limitations of administrative databases and develop methods to overcome them. Second, he has developed approaches to resource allocation based on the principles of benchmarking, first as a means of addressing inequities in the levels of hospital resources across communities in Oregon and more recently as applied to the U.S. physician supply. In recent years, he has focused on the health implications of the uneven distribution of health care resources. His current research, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, examines the potential adverse consequences of increasing capacity in health care. He is a co-chair of the Performance Measures Subcommittee of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Redesigning Health Insurance Payment and Performance Improvement Programs.
George J. Isham, M.D., M.S., is medical director and chief health officer for HealthPartners, a large health care organization in Minnesota representing nearly 800,000 members. Dr. Isham is responsible for quality, utilization management, health promotion and disease management, research, and health professionals education at HealthPartners. He is active
in strategic planning and policy issues. Before his present position, he was medical director of MedCenters Health Plan in Minneapolis. In the late 1980s, he was executive director of University Health Care, an organization affiliated with the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His practice experience as a primary care physician included eight years at the Freeport Clinic in Freeport, IL, and three-and-a-half years as clinical assistant professor in medicine at the University of Wisconsin. He was chair of the Institute of Medicine committee that produced the report Priority Areas for National Action: Transforming Health Care Quality. He is currently a member of the IOM’s Board on Population Health and the Performance Measures Subcommittee of the IOM’s Committee on Redesigning Health Insurance Payment and Performance Improvement Programs. Dr. Isham received his medical degree from the University of Illinois and served his internship and residency in internal medicine at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in Madison. He also has a master of science degree in preventive medicine/administrative medicine from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Lucian L. Leape, M.D., adjunct professor of health policy at Harvard University’s Department of Health Policy and Management, is a health policy analyst whose research has focused on patient safety and quality of care. Prior to joining Harvard in 1988, he was professor of surgery and chief of pediatric surgery at Tufts University School of Medicine and the New England Medical Center. Dr. Leape is internationally recognized as a leader of the patient safety movement, starting with the 1994 publication in JAMA of his seminal article, “Error in Medicine.” His subsequent research demonstrated the success of the application of systems theory to the prevention of adverse drug events. In addition, he has directed research into overuse and underuse of cardiovascular procedures. He has published over 100 papers on patient safety and quality of care. He has been an outspoken advocate of the nonpunitive systems approach to the prevention of medical errors, has testified many times before Congress, and has served on numerous public and private organizational boards and committees. Dr. Leape was one of the founders of the National Patient Safety Foundation, the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Error, and the Harvard Kennedy School Executive Session on Medical Errors. He is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Medical School. He trained in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and in pediatric surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. He was a member of the IOM’s Committee on the Quality of Health Care in America, which published To Err Is Human in 1999 and Crossing the Quality Chasm in 2001.
