Eric Schneider is a health services researcher in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health and a practicing general internist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Since 1994 Dr. Schneider's research and teaching has focused on quality measurement in health care, including clinical quality measure development, measure testing, and studies of the use of quality measures.
Dr. Schneider is a national expert on the uses of quality measures by different stakeholders. In 1996 and 1997, he published (in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA) the first articles to evaluate the impact of a statewide cardiac surgery quality reporting system that included public disclosure of hospital and physician-specific mortality rates. To conduct these evaluations he designed surveys of physicians and patients and analyzed the results. He recently reviewed current trends, impact, and policy implications of public disclosure of quality information about health care providers in a manuscript he co-authored with Trudy Lieberman, who is Director for the Center for Consumer Health Choices at the Consumer’s Union. He is principal investigator of a grant evaluating the use of the standardized quality measures included in HEDIS to assess racial and other socioeconomic disparities in health care delivery.
Dr. Schneider has extensive expertise and knowledge of government and private-sector efforts to develop quality measures. During 1996-1997, he worked on site at the National Committee for Quality Assurance with their research group and reviewed the activities of other major national quality measure developers including FACCT, JCAHO, and state-based agencies. He published an article in JAMA on NCQA’s vision of the future use of automated clinical information systems to enhance quality measurement and reporting. Since 1998, he has served on NCQA’s Measurement Advisory Panel for asthma.
Dr. Schneider is highly knowledgeable about the structure of clinical quality measures and the process for their development. Since 1997, he has worked closely with NCQA personnel on an AHRQ-funded project developing quality measures in collaboration with RAND, NCQA, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At Harvard, he has collaborated with the CAHPS development team to analyze the relationships between HEDIS and CAHPS data collected by health plans participating in the Medicare program. The results of this analysis are published in the Journal of Medical Care. He is collaborating with researchers at Harvard and RAND on a national feasibility study that is developing quality measures for cancer care and testing their use in over 2000 patients. At the Harvard School of Public Health, he teaches a course on quality improvement in health care and lectures frequently on the use of quality measures to monitor and improve health care quality.
