News and Highlights
August 2012
Dr. Peter Bach to Be the 2012 Lubin Distinguished Visiting Professor (Sept. 12)
Peter Bach, MD, MAPP, Director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Professor of Public Health at Weill Cornell Medical College, will be the 11 th Annual Lorraine and Ralph Lubin Distinguished Visiting Professor. Dr. Bach will meet with medical students, faculty and members of the administration during the day. He will give a formal lecture, "Intrinsically Incompatible: Comparative Effectiveness Research and Cost Containment and Why They Won't Make Things Better," at the David Rogers Health Policy Colloquium on Wednesday, Sept. 12, at 1 p.m. in the Weill Greenberg Conference Room, 1305 York Avenue, Second Floor, Rooms A, B, & C. The public is welcome to attend his talk.
Dr. Bach is a leader in the field of healthcare policy research, particularly as relates to Medicare, racial disparities in cancer care quality, and lung cancer epidemiology. His research has focused on the quality of care received by black patients with cancer, as well as on a broader investigation into the role that physicians play in health care resource utilization. His work assessing the relation between smoking and lung cancer risk led to the creation of tools that can be used to design and analyze lung cancer screening and prevention studies, and this work subsequently led to his evaluation of a lung cancer screening approach that was gaining popularity (CT screening). His highly quoted resulting paper (JAMA 2007) is widely recognized as uniquely informative and an example of landmark scholarship. Dr. Bach’s research has also been published in other high impact journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, the Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and the Journal of Clinical Oncology. His work has been lauded for its breadth and impact on several fields.
Dr. Bach has also served as Senior Adviser to the Medicare Administrator, a role in which he was primarily responsible for CMS cancer and data policies, as well as for educating CMS staff on therapies in oncology He is involved with several organizations that aim to improve the healthcare system through program development and implementation, including the Institute of Medicine (IOM) National Cancer Policy Forum and the Committee on Performance Measurement of the National Committee on Quality Assurance.
The Lorraine and Ralph Lubin Distinguished Visiting Professorship in Public Health was established with a gift from Dr. Madelon Lubin Finkel , Professor of Clinical Public Health and Director of the Office of Global Health Education at Weill Cornell, in memory of her parents. The Lubins strongly believed in the value of education as a means to making a difference in the lives of others. Each recipient of the annual award has achieved the highest recognition in either the field of epidemiology or health care policy and is regarded as an excellent role model for students. As part of the daylong event, the awardee has the opportunity to meet with students taking the Public Health Clerkship as well as with interested first- and second-year students. The highlight of the day is the lecture presented at the Rogers Health Policy Colloquium.