Jack Needleman, PhD, FAAN, is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Health Policy and Management, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Associate Director of the UCLA Patient Safety Institute. He teaches courses in health policy analysis and American political institutions and health policy in the master’s programs and research design and research methods to doctoral and MS students, and has previously taught program and policy evaluation. He received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University.
Dr. Needleman’s research focuses on the impact of changing markets and public policy on quality and access to care, and health care provider and insurer responses to market and regulatory incentives. For the past decade, Dr. Needleman’s research has focused on studies of quality and staffing in hospitals and on the evaluation and design of performance improvement activities. Three of Dr. Needleman’s first authored publications on quality of care and nurse staffing are designated patient safety classics by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Quality measures he developed have been adopted by AHRQ, Medicare, Joint Commission, and National Quality Forum and his expertise developing, testing and refining quality measures has been tapped by these and other organizations. He was lead evaluator for the Robert Wood Johnson initiative Transforming Care at the Bedside and serves on the Steering Council for the NIH-funded Improvement Science Research Network.
Dr. Needleman’s research extends beyond nursing. He has directed projects on a wide range of topics, including studies of for-profit and nonprofit hospitals, the impact of community health centers on hospitalizations for ambulatory care sensitive conditions, and changes in access to inpatient care for psychiatric conditions and substance abuse. He has had a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award to study the future of public hospitals. He studied Canadian provisional systems for paying and regulating hospitals, physicians and supplemental health insurers, and regulating new technology. Prior to coming to UCLA in 2003, Dr. Needleman was on the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health and before that was Vice President and Co-Director of the Public Policy Practice at Lewin/ICF, a Washington health policy research and consulting firm. While at Lewin/ICF, he conducted studies and served as a consultant to numerous state and federal task forces examining health care costs and access to care, and evaluated or helped design payment systems for hospitals, physicians and nursing homes.
Dr. Needleman’s research on the impact of nurse staffing and nurses’ working conditions on patient outcomes in hospitals and the business case for increasing nurse staffing received the first AcademyHealth Health Services Research Impact Award. In 2007, he was inducted as an honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine.
Education:Â
PhD, Harvard University
