David Meltzer

Meltzer is also an affiliated faculty at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics. 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. Meltzer has performed randomized trials comparing the use of doctors who specialize in inpatient care (“hospitalists”). He is currently leading a Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Innovation Challenge award to study 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.