We are applying for support to continue the Harvard Health Policy Training Program and seek monies over a five-year period for eight predoctoral students. This program is embedded in Harvard's Interfaculty PhD Program in Health Policy, which aims to train investigators in health policy and health services research, consistent with the mission of AHRQ. Our students have written dissertations on topics related to many of AHRQ's strategic research goals, including quality and patient safety, prevention and care management, health care access and equity, and evaluating organizational and payment interventions. The PhD Program is a collaboration among six Harvard faculties and is administered by a 55-member faculty committee that is appointed by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; the Committee is chaired by David Cutler, the Program Director for this grant application. The participating faculty for the purposes of this grant are the 14 members of the Executive Committee, a subset of the 55-member Committee. The philosophy of the PhD Program is that students will work as part of an interdisciplinary research team and therefore need a discipline that they bring to the team, as well as an understanding of the disciplines of other team members or potential readers of their work. To implement this philosophy, students choose one of six disciplines (decision sciences, economics, ethics, evaluative science and statistics, management, political analysis) in which they take about half of their coursework; additionally, they take some coursework in three other disciplines. Due to intensive monitoring and advising, most of our students finish their degree in six years or less. Of the 283 students who have ever begun the PhD Program, 200 have graduated and 64 are currently enrolled. We have had our current training grant since 1994 and over that time have appointed 108 students as AHRQ trainees. We have attracted a high-quality applicant pool and have many more qualified persons who could be trainees; we have always filled our training grant slots. Our trainees have taken jobs in academia, research institutions, and government, and they generally have received multiple job offers. Several have won awards for their predoctoral research and also for their research and teaching after the degree. Six students from our program have received the AcademyHealth Outstanding Dissertation Award and one has received Honorable Mention, and the four most recent recipients of the Alice S. Hersch New Investigator Award from AcademyHealth are alumni of the PhD Program.
Informing health policy requires a broad array of skills and knowledge. The Harvard Health Policy Training Program seeks to train investigators in health policy and health services research with the goal of improving the affordability, efficiency, equity, financing, and quality of health care. The program has successfully trained social scientists who have expanded the evidence base for the field.
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