Visiting Scholars

Amitabh Chandra, PhD, is on leave from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he is Assistant Professor of Public Policy. An Assistant Professor of Economics at Dartmouth from 2002-2005, he will be working with Jonathan Skinner, Douglas Staiger and Elliott Fisher on a number of projects, including measuring racial disparities in ambulatory care, and the determinants of productivity growth and cost-growth in American healthcare. Both at Dartmouth and Harvard, Dr. Chandra has been a member of the TDI's NIA project team and has co-authored a number of papers with TDI faculty members Skinner, Staiger, and former Dartmouth colleague Katherine Baicker.

His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Health Affairs. He is an editor of the journal Economics Letters. He has been a consultant to the National Academy of Science, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the RAND Corporation. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Teacher Award and is the first-prize recipient of the Upjohn Institute's International Dissertation Research Award.

Annette O'Connor, MScN, PhD, FCAHS, returns to TDI this year as a Visiting Scholar. Dr. O'Connor is a Senior Scientist in Clinical Epidemiology at the Ottawa Health Research Institute, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Health Care Consumer Decision Support, Professor, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa, and Professor, Epidemiology and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa.

A world leader in patient decision aids, Dr. O'Connor has been instrumental in the formation and leadership of the institute's Center for Informed Choice, which works to advance shared decision making and patient informed choice. Dr. O'Connor's body of work includes: a conceptual framework for managing decisional conflict; over 30 patient decision aids; a widely used evaluation measure of decisional conflict; the first systematic review of trials of patient decision aids, and several knowledge translation interventions for implementing patient decision support. She leads the International Cochrane Collaboration team that summarizes trials of patient decision aids, as well as co-leading a 14 country international consensus process on standards for developing and evaluating patient decision aids (IPDAS). She is a member of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and has been recognized for her work by awards such as the Society for Medical Decision Making John Eisenberg Award for Exemplary Leadership.

Milton C. Weinstein, PhD, is on Sabbatical leave from Harvard University, where he is the Henry J. Kaiser Professor of Health Policy and Management at the School of Public Health. During this academic year, he will be a Visiting Scholar at TDI and a Visiting Professor of Economics at the College. He plans to use the year to learn more about geographically-based approaches to outcome and cost comparisons, and to study the relationship between the seemingly conflicting findings from these analyses (which often show no relation between utilization and outcome, or even an inverse relation) and those of patient-based cost-effectiveness analyses. He also hopes to work with clinical faculty on decision analytic and cost-effectiveness studies in several clinical areas.

Dr. Weinstein is an author of four books: Decision Making in Health and Medicine: Integrating Evidence and Values; Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine, the report of the Panel of Cost Effectiveness in Health and Medicine; Clinical Decision Analysis; and Hypertension: A Policy Perspective. He has also published more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed medical, public health, and economics journals.