Margaret Gerteis
Senior Researcher

At Mathematica, Gerteis has led several studies exploring consumers’ and other stakeholders’ perspectives on health care quality reporting. For the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), she currently leads formative research to assess the response of physicians, medical directors, and other professionals to feedback reports on the quality and cost of their care for Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries. Since 2006, she has led research for CMS on the presentation of provider-specific quality measures to lay audiences on the Medicare website. In addition, Gerteis recently led a study for the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission on shared decision-making programs that provide patients with information on the benefits and risks of alternative medical treatments at the point at which they must make a decision.

Gerteis also has a long-standing interest in quality performance and improvement from an organizational and systems perspective. At Mathematica, she was co-principal investigator for a cross-site evaluation that assessed the strategic and system capacity of six Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grantees to develop sustained evidence-based approaches to their work in primary prevention of sexual violence. For the evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Consumer Voices for Coverage initiative, she serves as task leader for the assessment of 12 grantee sites’ advocacy capacity.

Before joining Mathematica in 2005, Gerteis was senior manager at BearingPoint, where she led extensive qualitative field research relating to Medicare’s communication and quality reporting initiatives. Earlier in her career, she served as director of communications at the Picker Institute and as deputy director of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication. For two years, she served on the Board of Examiners for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program, assessing the performance of health care organizations from a structured systems perspective. She has written numerous book chapters, reports, and publications for different audiences, and was lead editor of Through the Patient’s Eyes (Jossey Bass Publishers, 1993, 2002), which won the American Nursing Association’s 1993 Book-of-the-Year award. Gerteis holds a Ph.D. in history from Tufts University.