Joel Weissman, PhD

Joel S. Weissman, PhD, is the deputy director and chief scientific officer of the Center for Surgery and Public Health and professor of surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Weissman received his PhD in health policy from the Pew Fellows Program at the Heller School, Brandeis. His research interests focus on vulnerable populations, quality of care, comparative effectiveness policy, academic-industry relationships in biomedical research, and health care reform. He has led numerous funded research projects in which he has studied the relation of patient safety to hospital crowding, the reporting and disclosure of medical errors to patients, access to clinical trials by uninsured participants, e-prescribing in Massachusetts, alternative scoring methods for pay-for-performance, and the evaluation of the Consumer’s Union Best Buy Drugs program. He published early work on access to care by the uninsured in his book, Falling Through the Safety Net: Insurance Status and Access to Care, with a forward by Hillary Rodham Clinton. 

From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Weissman served as senior health policy advisor to the secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services, where he led the planning effort for a multi-million dollar statewide all-payer medical home pilot, among other strategic initiatives. Dr. Weissman is co-director of a course on health services research methods at the Harvard School of Public Health (portions of which have been taught in Singapore, Puerto Rico, and Mexico), is faculty for the public health section of resident physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital, and serves as a tutor in the health policy course for HMS students.