Mark Hlatky is a Professor of Health Policy and a Professor of Medicine (Cardiovasular Medicine) at the Stanford University School of Medicine. His major interests are in outcomes research, evidence-based medicine, and cost-effectiveness analysis. He introduced data collection about economic and quality of life endpoints in several randomized trials, principally trials of therapies for cardiovascular disease.

Hlatky received his MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and, after residency at the University of Arizona, studied as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco. He trained in cardiology at Duke University Medical Center, and then joined the Duke faculty. He has been at the Stanford University School of Medicine since 1989.

Paul Heidenreich MD, MS is Professor and Vice-Chair for Clinical, Quality, and Analytics in the Department of Medicine. He also directs VA's Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) in Medication Management and the Echocardiography Laboratory at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. His research focuses on interventions to improve the quality of care for heart disease patients; the use of echocardiography to predict prognosis; the cost-effectiveness of new cardiovascular technologies; and outcomes research using existing clinical and administrative data. His administrative efforts focuses on measuring, improving, and disseminating the quality of care provided by faculty in the Department of Medicine.

Ciaran Phibbs is a health economist at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System's Health Economics Resource Center, and Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Neonatology), and a CHP/PCOR associate.  At the VA, he is also the Associate Director of the Geriatrics and Extended Care Data and Analysis Center and for the Women’s Health Evaluation Initiative.  His primary research interests are on how hospital competition interacts with costs, demand, and outcomes, and perinatal and neonatal care. His specific areas of focus of research projects has included: how hospital and patient characteristics affect demand for hospital services, defining hospital markets, hospital scale economies and capacity utilization, how NICU care effects neonatal mortality, the effects of nurse staffing on patient outcomes, evaluating the effectiveness of clinical interventions, and demand for VA services and veterans' choice between VA and non-VA services. Much of his work has depended on complex data linkages to address omitted data problems.  He also works on cost and cost-effectiveness analyses for clinical trials conducted by the VA Cooperative Studies Program.

Alex Macario is a professor of anesthesiology and, by courtesy, of Health Research and Policy. He completed his undergraduate, medical school and business school training at the University of Rochester. He trained in anesthesiology at Stanford University and was chief resident. He then completed a fellowship in heath services research.

Dr. Macario has gained international recognition for his pioneering studies on operating room management, and the economics of surgery and anesthesia. He is particularly interested in the hospitalization costs for surgical patients, economic assessment of new drugs and devices for use in surgical care, and information technology to help physician leaders with clinical and administrative decision support in the surgery suite.

He is director of a Fellowship in the Management of Perioperative Services, based in the Department of Anesthesia. This postgraduate fellowship program trains several physicians per year in management science and applications to the delivery of surgical and anesthesia care.

Ross Shachter's research interests are in the modeling of uncertain processes and decision making. His main focus has been the communication and analysis of the relationships among uncertain quantities in a graphical representation called an influence diagram (closely related to a belief network). Professor Shachter's work in medical decision analysis has included management of bladder cancer follow-up and analysis of AIDS Policy therapies. During a leave of absence at Duke University's Center for Health Policy, he was able to bring his interests together to develop an influence diagram-based approach for medical technology assessment. He has been on the Stanford faculty since receiving his PhD in Operations Research from UC Berkeley in 1982.

Thomas N. Robinson, MD, MPH is the Irving Schulman, MD Endowed Professor in Child Health, Professor of Pediatrics and of Medicine, in the Division of General Pediatrics and the Stanford Prevention Research Center at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Stanford University and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. Dr. Robinson focuses on "solution-oriented" research, developing and evaluating health promotion and disease prevention interventions for children, adolescents and their families to directly inform medical and public health practice and policy.

His research is largely experimental in design, conducting school-, family- and community-based randomized controlled trials to test the efficacy and/or effectiveness of theory-driven behavioral, social and environmental interventions to prevent and reduce obesity, improve nutrition, increase physical activity and decrease inactivity, reduce smoking, reduce children's television and media use, and demonstrate causal relationships between hypothesized risk factors and health outcomes. Robinson's research is grounded in social cognitive models of human behavior, uses rigorous methods, and is performed in generalizable settings with diverse populations, making the results of his research more relevant for clinical and public health practice and policy.

His research is published widely in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Robinson received both his B.S. and M.D. from Stanford University and his M.P.H. in Maternal and Child Health from the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his internship and residency in Pediatrics at Children's Hospital, Boston and Harvard Medical School, and then returned to Stanford for post-doctoral training as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. Robinson joined the faculty at Stanford in 1993, was appointed Assistant Professor in 1996, and promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2003. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar, was a member of the Institute of Medicine's Committees on Prevention of Obesity in Children and Adolescents and Progress in Preventing Childhood Obesity, and is Principal Investigator on numerous prevention studies funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Robinson also is Board Certified in Pediatrics, a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and practices General Pediatrics at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.