Paul Barr, PhD, MSc

Paul Barr is a health services researcher whose work focuses on increasing patient and family engagement in primary care through better communication and shared decision making. He co-led the development of CollaboRATE, a patient-reported measure of shared decision making (SDM) and a decision support tool for people with depression. Dr. Barr's work on CollaboRATE has had significant impact in the field of shared decision making, with this short survey now used in over 60 projects internationally, and is currently being considered as U.S. metric for shared decision making.

In 2015, Dr. Barr received one of the only four Patient and Family Engagement Early-Career Investigator Awards from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to support his work as principal investigator on the ORALS project. The Open Recording Automated Logging System (ORALS) is a platform to allow for routine audio recordings of conversations between clinicians and patients. ORALS uses natural language processing (NLP) to 'tag' elements of the clinic visit that matter most to patients and their family members, such as, treatment recommendations.

Dr. Barr received advanced training in qualitative and quantitative methods at Queen's University Belfast, Ireland, where he earned his PhD and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he earned an MSc PH.