David W. Baker

Dr. Baker is an associate professor and chief of the division of General Internal Medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. His research has focused on access to health care, racial and ethnic disparities in care, health communication (including health literacy and language as barriers to care), and quality of care for chronic diseases. He served as principal investigator for the Literacy in Health Care Study, the first study of the prevalence of inadequate health literacy, and for the Prudential Health Literacy Study, the largest study ever conducted of the relationship between literacy, health status, and use of health care services. His current projects include examining the relationship between reading comprehension, cognitive function, and mortality among the elderly; methods to improve health communication through multimedia; and the relationship between race, ethnicity, and language and quality of care for patients hospitalized with myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia.