Brian Elbel, PhD, MPH

Brian Elbel, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Medicine at NYU School of Medicine, and Assistant Professor of Health Policy at the Wagner School for Public Service, has been awarded a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study how vulnerable populations respond to hospital quality measures. 

With fellow Division of General Internal Medicine colleague, Maria Raven, MD, MPH, MSc, Dr. Elbel will receive $150,000 over two years for the research project, "Hospital Quality Data: Understanding Decision Making in Vulnerable Populations."

The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has recently made available to the public hospital quality data on all HHC facilities—becoming the first hospital system to do so.  The new project will examine how a lower-income, racially and ethnically diverse set of Bellevue Hospital patients currently views hospital quality and how they currently go about choosing which hospital to utilize.  Then, an experimental design will be utilized in an attempt to overcome the barriers to these populations’ use of such quality measures.

“Given their health and social state, vulnerable populations are most in need of high quality health care; however, we know very little about how these individuals respond to measures of hospital quality.  Our project will provide this much needed evidence,” Dr. Elbel said.