PhD Training in Population Health & Quality Improvement

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This program seeks to produce highly skilled, health services researchers who have a strong interdisciplinary foundation in population health sciences, systems and quality engineering, and quantitative methods. Health of individuals and populations is the product of many determinants ranging from personal behaviors and genetic endowment, to environmental exposures, to health system characteristics, and socioeconomic and racial-ethnic/cultural factors. Students in this program will have training allowing them to place their research in a larger population focus as well as to be skilled in general analytic methods for health services research and quality improvement from a systems perspective. The proposed program will take advantage of the confluence of three interdisciplinary training opportunities: the University's rapidly growing PhD program in Population Health; a longstanding doctoral program in Industrial Engineering (IE) emphasizing Health Systems, Human Factors, and Quality Engineering; and a newly-funded Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program within Population Health. The applicant proposes a pre-doctoral training program combining population-based health services research and healthcare quality improvement/patient safety emphases with nine training positions distributed roughly two-third of the positions to students pursuing the PhD degree in Population Health Sciences, and one-third in IE affiliated with the Systems Engineering Initiative in Patient Safety within the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement. Students share core population health courses (determinants of health, epidemiology, health services research, quality in healthcare, and statistical methods) and an engineering course covering principles of sociotechnical systems, as well as training in ethical conduct of science, and are supported for travel to national scientific meetings. Twenty highly interdisciplinary faculty offer research opportunities understanding and assessing health and sources of health disparities in populations (especially vulnerable populations), to patient safety and quality improvement in the healthcare system, to development of new measurement and statistical methods to measure health outcomes and conducting healthcare technology assessment.