Catherine M. DesRoches

Catherine M. DesRoches, Dr.P.H., is the executive director of Open Notes, a national movement that invites patients, families, and clinicians to come together and improve communication through shared clinicians’ notes and fully transparent medical records, based at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Prior to joining Open Notes, she was a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, a project director and senior research associate at the Harvard University School of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management, and a research associate at the Commonwealth Fund. She received her M.S. from the University of Massachusetts School of Public Health and her Ph.D. from the Joseph P. Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Dr. DesRoches has played a key role in both national and international surveys of physicians and the general public examining the public’s response to bioterrorism, as well as insurance options for working adults, women’s health issues, health insurance and access to care, attitudes toward alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, and Americans’ health priorities. She has been a coauthor on numerous peer-reviewed articles, published in JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, and other health care–related journals. Dr. DesRoches’s research interests include attitudes toward disease, public perceptions of risk, and health care access and coverage issues.