 | Paul Cleary |
Paul Cleary, an expert on ways to improve the quality of patient care, has been named dean of public health and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the School of Medicine, President Richard C. Levin and Medical School Dean Dr. Robert Alpern have announced.
Cleary has been professor of medical sociology in the Departments of Health Care Policy and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School since 1993.
In a letter to the Yale community announcing Cleary's appointment, Levin and Alpern wrote, "We are extremely fortunate to have Paul Cleary join the School of Medicine and are excited by his vision and commitment to furthering the department's excellence in public health research, teaching and practice."
Cleary received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin. His earliest work focused on studies of health behavior. He did theoretical and empirical work on smoking and conducted numerous studies of how people perceive and respond to physical symptoms and of factors affecting their use of medical care. He also studied the recognition and management of a variety of conditions such as mental illness, alcohol abuse and functional impairment in primary care settings.
Since the 1980s, Cleary has been actively involved in research focused on people infected with HIV. His first study in this area was a randomized trial of an education and support program for blood donors discovered to be infected with HIV. Since that early study, he has continued to investigate the ways in which infection affects people's lives and the factors affecting the quality of medical care for infected persons. Cleary led a key component of the HIV Costs and Services Utilization Study, in which his team investigated the physician and clinic characteristics that predict the quality of care that patients receive. Recently he conducted a major national evaluation of a quality improvement program in HIV clinics funded by the Ryan White Care Act.
Another major focus of Cleary's work has been on developing better methods of eliciting information from patients about their care and studying the determinants of variations in care quality. He was a founding member of the Picker Institute, which was a major force promoting the idea that routinely monitoring patient experiences is a critical component of quality assessment.
Cleary is currently principal investigator of one of three Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) study teams. CAHPS surveys are the most widely used surveys in the country for assessing ambulatory care experiences and are now also available for hospitalized patients, patients with behavioral health problems, patients receiving in-center hemodialysis and nursing home residents.
A member of the Institute of Medicine since 1994, he was selected as a distinguished fellow of the Association for Health Services Research in 1996 and in 2002 received the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy. He currently is editorial director of the Milbank Memorial Fund and for nine years was editor of the Milbank Quarterly. He is chair of the National Advisory Committee for The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research Program.
He has served as associate editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, consulting editor of the Journal of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and has been on the editorial boards of The Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine and the Advanced Handbook of Methods in Evidence Based Health Care. He is currently on the editorial boards of Health Services Research and the Journal of Health Services Research and Policy.
Throughout his career, Cleary has placed great emphasis on working with students and colleagues to develop their interest and skills in health and health services research. In 1997 Harvard Medical School awarded him the A. Clifford Barger Award for Excellence in Mentoring.
Cleary and his wife, Cynthia F. Barnett, have two children, Janet and Barnett.
The new dean will participate in the "Healthcare 2006" conference this week at the Yale School of Management.
In their letter to the Yale community, Levin and Alpern noted: "We would also like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude and appreciation for the significant and noteworthy contributions of Mike Merson, dean and department chair for 10 years, and Brian Leaderer, acting dean and chair for the past 13 months. The department has prospered greatly under their leadership.
"We would also like to thank the members of the search committee, who, under the leadership of Mary Tinetti, were successful in recruiting such an outstanding candidate as Cleary."
T H I S
Patient care expert Paul Cleary
named dean of public health 
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