Harkness Project Title: Managing Risk Among Older Adults with Medical and Home Care Needs
Biography at time of Harkness Fellowship: Walter Wodchis, Ph.D., a 2011-12 Canadian Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice, is a health economist and associate professor, Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, since 2009. He is also adjunct scientist, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, since 2002. From 1998-99, he worked as a health care consultant for Price Waterhouse. He is currently the primary investigator on the Health System Performance Research Network (funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health) which examines the interactions of providers in managing the same patient across the system. He also led the Technical Expert Panel that defined the indicators for the Ontario Health Care System Scorecard. He has authored or co-authored over 40 peer-reviewed publications, including Journal of American Medical Association and Health Affairs. He has received a number of awards, including: New Investigator Outstanding Paper from the International Society for Quality of Life Research, 2007; New Investigator Award, Canadian Institutes for Health Research from 2005-10; and Dissertation Fellowship Award, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2001. He received his M.A. in gerontology from the University of Waterloo in 1997 and his Ph.D. in health services organization and policy from the University of Michigan in 2002.
Project: Wodchis’s project aimed to evaluate the comparative ability of a set of risk screening tools to identify individuals most likely to benefit from integrated care and care transition interventions. Questions from the selected risk screening tools were coded using administrative databases in Ontario – including data on both health care utilization and functional and psychosocial status – and statistical analyses were used to evaluate their ability to predict emergency department, acute care, and long term care admissions.
Career Activity since Fellowship:
- Inaugural Research Chair in Implementation and Evaluation Science, Trillium Health Partners’ Institute for Better Health
Current Positions: (updated 10/2017)
- Inaugural Research Chair in Implementation and Evaluation Science, Trillium Health Partners’ Institute for Better Health
- Professor, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto
- Adjunct Scientist, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences
Email: [email protected]
Selected Publications
Wodchis W, Austin P, Henry D. “A 3-year study of high-cost users of health care,” CMAJ, 2016.
Stukel TA, Fisher ES, Alter DA, Guttmann A, Ko DT, Fung K, Wodchis W, Baxter NN, Earle CC, Lee DS. “Association of Hospital Spending Intensity with Mortality and Readmission Rates in Ontario Hospitals.” Journal of the American Medical Association. March 2012.