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Contact: Jennifer Forbes
UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
732-235-6356 or jenn.forbes@umdnj.edu
Expert on Comparative and Cost-Effective Health Care to Speak at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
New Brunswick, N.J. – The recent passage of federal health care legislation focused attention on comparative effectiveness research, the use of scientific methods to evaluate and compare medical treatments, as a means of improving care and cutting health costs. Its impact on physicians and their patients’ ability to make informed choices about medical treatment is still widely debated. The philosophy and potential benefits of comparative effectiveness are the focus of this year’s Mates David and Hinna Stahl Memorial Lecture on Bioethics, featuring speaker James Stahl, MD, CM, MPH, a highly-regarded expert on patient-centered comparative effectiveness and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and senior scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Institute for Technology Assessment, Boston, MA,
The Stahl Memorial Lecture, held annually for 13 years, is a free community seminar at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. The seminar will be at 4 p.m., Monday, April 12, 2009, at the Clinical Academic Building, room 1302, 125 Paterson Street, New Brunswick. For more information, directions and to RSVP for the seminar, call 732-235-5810 or visit http://rwjms.umdnj.edu.
According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, comparative research “draws on many sources of data, including traditional controlled clinical trials as well as patient registries, observational studies and medical records. The intent is to compare similar treatments, such as drugs, or very different approaches such as surgery versus drug therapy, and weigh the benefits and risks of each approach. A frequent issue is which types of patients would benefit most from a particular treatment.” The importance of understanding what the best treatment is for patients within a framework of specific circumstances was underscored last year when Congress appropriated $1.1 billion in funding as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Dr. Stahl will discuss the ethical issues surrounding how physicians and their patients’ health care decisions may be impacted by comparing the safety and cost of different medical treatments within the overall population.
Dr. Stahl is a board certified internist and practicing clinician. His work focuses on operations research, decision analysis, outcomes research, and industrial design.
Dr. Stahl earned his medical degree at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and completed a joint internal medicine residency between North Shore University Hospital – Cornell University Medical College (Now Weill Medical College of Cornell) in New York and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He then completed a National Library of Medicine fellowship in Clinical Decision Making, Informatics and Telemedicine at New England Medical Center (NEMC)–Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA. In addition to his training at NEMC he worked on the clinical decision analysis consult service, developed and helped implement several internal hospital guidelines and decision support tools and helped develop and grow the international telemedicine program. He then attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he worked in the area of liver allocation policy and completed his master’s in public health degree at the Graduate School of Public Health and received the award for best health policy thesis.
His research interests include discrete-event simulation (modeling), operations research, decision analysis, meta-analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, utility assessment, game theory, market design, ethics in the context of limited medical resources and applying industrial design to problem solving in health care.
His primary areas of research are health care system redesign and organ allocation policy and the role of new organ replacement technologies.
The endowed lecture is named in honor of Mates David and Hinna Stahl, parents of Theodore J. Stahl, MD, clinical professor of radiology and medicine and grandparents to speaker James Stahl, MD, CM, MPH. This is the thirteenth lecture in the annual series. Parking is available at the Paterson Street deck, adjacent to the Clinical Academic Building.
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About UMDNJ-ROBERT WOOD JOHNSON MEDICAL SCHOOL
As one of the nation’s leading comprehensive medical schools, UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School is dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in education, research, health care delivery, and the promotion of community health. In cooperation with Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, the medical school’s principal affiliate, they comprise New Jersey’s premier academic medical center. In addition, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School has 34 other hospital affiliates and ambulatory care sites throughout the region.
As one of the eight schools of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey with 2,800 full-time and volunteer faculty, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School encompasses 22 basic science and clinical departments, hosts centers and institutes including The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, the Child Health Institute of New Jersey, the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, and the Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey. The medical school maintains educational programs at the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels for more than 1,500 students on its campuses in New Brunswick, Piscataway, and Camden, and provides continuing education courses for health care professionals and community education programs. To learn more about UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, log on to rwjms.umdnj.edu. Find our fan page on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @UMDNJ_RWJMS.
