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Eugene C. Rich
Senior Fellow
Eugene Rich, M.D., director of the Center on Health Care Effectiveness, is a senior fellow in Mathematica’s Washington, DC office. He is an expert on the sources of practice variation in medical care with a particular focus on the influence of the policy, payment, and practice environment on health professionals’ decision making. He also has a longstanding interest in the role of evidence in point-of-care decision making, and in comparative effectiveness research and primary care policy.
Rich has authored more than 120 publications on these topics and has been a frequent consultant to federal agencies, foundations, and managed care organizations. In addition to his expertise in health services and health policy research, he has deep practical experience with clinical practice leadership, including roles as medical director, clinical program leader, and medicine department chair. He has augmented the understanding gained by these roles in academic health centers by substantive interactions with community-based physicians and hospital leaders, including leading clinical integration efforts for a large physician-hospital organization.
Since joining Mathematica in 2010, Rich has led a number of projects, including the evaluation for the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s investment in comparative effectiveness research and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s effort to test an approach to collecting national, policy-research-relevant data on physicians and their practices. He serves as the medical officer on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) contract supporting work on the physician value-based payment modifier; on other CMS contracts, he has helped develop cost and quality metrics to support performance-based payment and confidential physician feedback for practice improvement.
Past recognition includes the Academy Health Article of the Year Award in 2001 and a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowship, during which he worked with the House Committee on Ways and Means. Rich has also served as senior advisor to the Office of Science Policy at the National Institute of Health, scholar in residence at the Association for American Medical Colleges, and president of the Society of General Internal Medicine. He is currently a senior editor of the Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research. He holds a M.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.
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- Areas of Expertise
- Key Projects
- Professional Activities
- Publications
- Comparative effectiveness research policy
- Organization and financing of medical practice
- Physician payment reform and primary health care
- Research Evaluation and Impact Assessment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Comparative Effectiveness Research Portfolio
- Horizon Scanning System
- Center of Excellence in Research on Disability Services, Care Coordination, and Integration
- AcademyHealth, Board member, Coalition for Health Services Research
- Society of General Internal Medicine past president
- Project co-director for developing a policy research agenda for the patient-centered medical home
- "Putting Evidence to Work: An Expanded Research Agenda for Academic Medicine in the Era of Health Care Reform." Commentary. Academic Medicine (October 2010)
- "Comparative Effectiveness Research and Innovations: Policy Options to Foster Medical Advances." Policy Analysis, #3 (October 2010)
- "Where Americans Get Acute Care: Increasingly, It's Not at Their Doctor's Office." Health Affairs (September 2010)