Paul Cleary

Paul Cleary's picture
Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Public Health (Health Policy)
Education: 
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1980
M.S., University of Wisconsin, 1973
Areas of Interest: 
Economic Sociology and Organizations; Health, Medicine, and Biosocial Interactions; Health Care Quality; Access, and Evaluation; Health Services Research
Address: 
60 College Street, Room 300A
Phone number: 
203-785-3434
Email: 
paul.cleary@yale.edu

Paul D. Cleary, Ph.D. is the Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Public Health, in the Department of Health Policy and Management, Yale School of Public Health. He has a secondary appointment in the Department of Sociology.

Dr. Cleary received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin. His earliest work focused on studies of health behavior. He conducted theoretical and empirical research on smoking as well as patients’ perceptions and responses to physical symptoms and factors affecting use of medical care. He also studied the recognition and management of conditions such as mental illness, alcohol abuse and functional impairment in primary care settings.

For more than 20 years, Dr. Cleary has been actively involved in research focused on persons infected with HIV. Since early in his career, he has investigated the ways in which infection affects people’s lives and the factors affecting the quality of medical care for infected persons. He led a key component of the HIV Costs and Services Utilization Study (HSCUS), in which his team investigated the physician and clinic characteristics that predict the quality of care that patients receive. He also conducted a major national evaluation of a quality improvement program in HIV clinics funded by the Ryan White Care Act.

He has studied how organizational characteristics affect the costs and quality of care for persons with AIDS; evaluated a national continuous quality improvement initiative in clinics providing care to HIV infected individuals; and studied the long-term impact of patient-centered hospital care. He is Principal Investigator of one of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) projects funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to develop information gathering surveys for consumers regarding their health plans and services. He also is Principal Investigator and Director of the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA). He has published more than 300 journal articles and book chapters describing his research.

Dr. Cleary has been a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) since 1994 and served as Chair of two IOM Committees: the Committee on the Ryan White CARE Act: Data for Resource Allocation, Planning and Evaluation in 2002-2003, and the Committee on HIV Screening and Access to Care from 2010 to 2011. He has also been a member of the Connecticut Academy for Science and Engineering since 2007. In 1996, he was selected as a distinguished fellow of the Association for Health Services Research, and in 2002, received the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy. In 2010, Dr. Cleary was awarded the Picker Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Patient-Centered Care by the Picker Institute.

Dr. Cleary is currently the editorial director of the Milbank Memorial Fund and for nine years was editor of the Milbank Quarterly. He is chair of the National Advisory Committee for The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research Program. He has served as associate editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, consulting editor of the Journal of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and an editorial board member of The Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine and the Advanced Handbook of Methods in Evidence Based Health Care. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Health Services Research and the Journal of Health Services Research and Policy.

International Activity

  • Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS
    (1997)
    The Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) facilitates HIV prevention research both in the United States and abroad.

Honors & Recognition

  • Elected Member, Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences
  • 2010 Picker Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Patient-Centered Care
    Picker Institute 
  • Distinguished Fellow, Association for Health Services Research
  • 2002 Distinguished Investigator Award, Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy
  • 1997 A. Clifford Barger Award for Excellence in Mentoring, Harvard Medical School
  • Elected Member, Connecticut Academy for Science and Engineering

Professional Service

  • Editorial Director, Milbank Memorial Fund
  • Chair, Chair National Advisory Committee, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research Program
  • Editorial Board, Health Services Research
  • Editorial Board, Journal of Health Services Research and Policy
  • Editorial Board, Health Expectations
  • Board of Directors, Honorable Tina L. Brozman Foundation

Research Summary

Professor Cleary’s research includes developing better methods for using patient reports about their care and health status to evaluate the quality of medical care and studying the relationships between clinician and organizational characteristics and the quality of medical care. His recent research includes a study of how organizational characteristics affect the costs and quality of care for persons with AIDS, a national evaluation of a continuous quality improvement initiative in clinics providing care to HIV infected individuals, and a study of the long term impact of patient-centered hospital care. He is Principal Investigator of one of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) grants funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to develop surveys for collecting information from consumers regarding their health plans and services. He also is leading a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation project to facilitate and stimulate research on Public Health Systems.

Extensive Research Description

His recent research includes a study of how organizational characteristics affect the costs and quality of care for persons with AIDS, a national evaluation of a continuous quality improvement initiative in clinics providing care to HIV infected individuals, and a study of the long term impact of patient-centered hospital care. He is Principal Investigator of one of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) grants funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to develop surveys for collecting information from consumers regarding their health plans and services. He also is leading a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation project to facilitate and stimulate research on Public Health Systems.Professor Cleary’s research includes developing better methods for using patient reports about their care and health status to evaluate the quality of medical care and studying the relationships between clinician and organizational characteristics and the quality of medical care.

Selected Publications

  • Elliott MN, Lehrman WG, Goldstein EH, Giordano LA, Beckett MK, Cohea CW, Cleary PD. National Changes in Patient Hospital Experiences during the First Two Years of HCAHPS. Health Aff, 2010
  • Meterko M, Wright S, Lin H, Lowy E, Cleary PD. Mortality among patients with acute myocardial infarction: the influences of patient-centered care and evidence-based medicine. Health Serv Res, 2010, 45(95): 1188-1204.
  • Campbell, E.G., Gruen, R.L., Mountford, J., Miller, L.G., Cleary, P.D., and Blumenthal, D. A National Survey of Physician-Industry Relationships. New England Journal of Medicine 356: 1742-1750, 2007.
  • Wilson, I.B., Landon, B.L., Hirschhorn, L.R., McInnes, K., Ding, L., Marsden, P.V., and Cleary, P.D. Quality of HIV Care Provided by Nurse Practitioners, Physician Assistants, and Physicians. Annals of Internal Medicine 143(10): 729-736, 2005.
  • Landon, B.E., Zaslavsky, A.M., Bernard, S.L., Cioffi, M.J., and Cleary, P.D. Comparison of Performance of Traditional Medicare vs Medicare Managed Care. Journal of the American Medical Association 291(14): 1744-1752, 2004.
  • Cleary, P.D. A Hospitalization from Hell: A Patient’s Perspective on Quality. Annals of Internal Medicine 138(1): 33-39, 2003.
  • Cleary, P.D. and Edgman-Levitan, S. Health Care Quality: Incorporating Consumer Perspectives. Journal of the American Medical Association 278(19): 1608-1612, 1997.