Alan M. Zaslavsky, PhD

Harvard Medical School

Academic Titles

Professor, Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School

Research Program Affiliation

Member, Cancer Data Sciences

Member, Cancer Care Delivery Research

Research Abstract

My research topics in health care policy center on measurement of the quality of care provided by health plans through consumer assessments and clinical and administrative data. I am also interested in racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in quality of care. I am an investigator on a project in collaboration with the California Cancer Registry and regional registries that examines quality of care for colorectal cancer using registry data, patient surveys, and a physician follow-back survey. In this project we have developed new statistical methodology for correcting treatment data in Registry records for underreporting. I am currently an investigator in the NCI-funded CanCORS (Cancer Consortium for Outcomes Research and Surveillance) study, both as part of the Statistical Coordinating Center (based at DFCI) and through a research site that is a collaboration of Harvard Medical School and the Northern California cancer registries.

To these projects I bring my experience as a lead statistical investigator in the core development project of the Consumer Assessments of Health Plans Study (CAHPS), the CAHPS implementation for Medicare managed care, and an AHRQ-funded project on expansion of the HEDIS clinical quality measures. My statistical research interests include surveys, census methodology, small area estimation, official statistics, missing data, hierarchical modeling, and Bayesian methodology.