Faculty Director

David O. Meltzer, MD, PhD

Fanny L. Pritzker Professor, Department of Medicine
Associated Faculty Member, Harris School of Public Policy and Department of Economics
Chief, Section of Hospital Medicine
Director, Center for Health and the Social Sciences (CHeSS)
Director, UChicago Urban Health Lab
Chair, Committee on Clinical and Translational Science


In 2012, Meltzer received a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) award and launched the Comprehensive Care Physician (CCP) Program, in which his team studies the effects of improved continuity in the doctor-patient relationship between the inpatient and outpatient setting on the costs and outcomes of care for frequently hospitalized Medicare patients. Meltzer’s research explores problems in health economics and public policy with a focus on the theoretical foundations of medical cost-effectiveness analysis and the cost and quality of hospital care. Since 1997 he has developed the inpatient general medicine services at the University of Chicago as a Learning Health Care System to produce knowledge on how to improve the care of hospitalized patients, mobilizing the clinical care process to generate and learn from diverse data from electronic health records, claims data, patient interviews, and bio-specimens on over 100,000 patients.

Meltzer completed his MD and PhD in economics at The University of Chicago and his residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His awards include the Garfield Award from Research America, the AHRQ Eisenberg Excellence in Mentoring Award, and the AAMC Learning Healthcare System Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Representative Projects, Programs, and Collaborations

Training, Education, and Mentorship

Meltzer mentors numerous junior faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and predoctoral students from departments across campus that are interested in careers at the intersection of medicine, economics, and public policy. He leads or co-leads a number of training programs on campus, including the Hospitalist Scholars Program in the Section of Hospital Medicine and the MD-PhD Program in Medicine, the Social Sciences, and Humanities. View more training opportunities here.

Contact

To schedule a meeting with Dr. David Meltzer, please email Brenda Taylor at btaylor99@bsd.uchicago.edu. For inquiries about specific programs and centers, please contact:

Representative Publications

Meltzer DO. “Accounting for future costs in medical cost-effectiveness analysis.”J Health Econ. 16(1):33-64, 1997. PMID: 10167344

Meltzer D. “Hospitalists and the Doctor–Patient Relationship.” Journal of Legal Studies. 30(2):589–606 Part 2, 2002. PMID: 12647747

Meltzer D, Manning W, Morrison J, Shah M, Jin L, Guth T, Levinson W. “Effects of Physician Experience on Costs and Outcomes on an Academic General Medicine Service: Results of a Trial of Hospitalists.” Annals of Internal Medicine. 137:866–874, 2002. PMID: 12458986

Meltzer DO, Chung JW. “US Trends in Hospitalization and Generalist Physician Workforce and the Emergence of Hospitalists.”Journal of General Internal Medicine. 25(5):453-459, 2010. PMC2855010

Meltzer DO, Ruhnke G. “Redesigning Care for Patients At Increased Hospitalization Risk: The Comprehensive Care Physician Model.” Health Affairs. 33(5):770-77, 2014. PMID: 24799573

Sanders GD, Neumann PJ, Basu A, Brock DW, Feeny D, Krahn M, Kuntz KM, Meltzer DO, Owens DK, Prosser LA, Salomon JA, Schulpher J, Trikalinos TA, Russell LB, Siegel JE, Ganiats TG. Recommendations for Conduct, Methodological Practices, and Reporting of Cost-effectiveness AnalysesSecond Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine. JAMA. 2016;316(10):1093–1103. PMID: 27623463

Click here for a more comprehensive list of David Meltzer’s published work.