Biography/Description of Research:

Profile: Edmund R. Becker, Ph.D. Dr. Becker research focuses on measuring and evaluating healthcare costs, outcomes, and prevention. Current projects include: • benchmarking and profiling physician and hospital performance; • assessing the prescription patterns of Florida Medicaid providers; and • analyzing the influence of unionization on hospital infection rates and patient satisfaction. He has been a member of the Accountability Review Council (ARC) for the School District of Philadelphia since 2002 assisting the school district in evaluating the impacts of the ‘No Child Left Behind’ educational legislation on the performance of the district’s schools and students. Prior to coming to Emory University in 1993, he was Senior Research Associate at Harvard School of Public Health and Project Director on the Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) project - a seven-year national study revising Medicare’s physician payment system. Following the implementation of the RBRVS by Medicare in 1992, he has been an advisor to major healthcare payers, academic medical centers, and physician organizations on strategies for evaluating, modifying, and implementing resource-based physician payment strategies. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 1986, Dr. Becker spent two years as an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Business and Administration at the University of Colorado at Denver. While on the faculty, he taught health administration courses in organization theory and management. His academic background follows two years work as a Research Associate in the Center for Health Policy Research at the American Medical Association in Chicago. At the AMA, Dr. Becker's focused on hospital-physician relations and the role of profit in medicine. Prior to the AMA, he was on the faculty at Vanderbilt University where he was a Research Associate in the Health Policy Center at Vanderbilt's Institute for Public Policy Studies. Dr. Becker's undergraduate training is in mathematics and sociology from Westminster College. He received his Masters in Sociology from Ohio University in 1973 and his Doctorate in Medical Sociology from Vanderbilt University in 1981. In 2005, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Ohio University and in 2009, the Alumni Citation Award from Westminster College. Dr. Becker has published over 150 articles on topics ranging from cost shifting and unionization in hospitals to the advantages of off-pump versus on-pump coronary artery bypass surgery.