Department Overview
The Department of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and clinical treatment in Public Health and provides consultative support services in research methodology and clinical and research ethics.
Research Agenda
The Department faculty conducts research to improve the delivery of health care in this country and around the world and collaborates with colleagues to develop and evaluate programs for preventing and treating illness. Main areas of interest are patient quality/safety, assessment of medical practices/technologies, costs and allocation of resources, planning for public health crises, clinical and research ethics, preventive programs, and health care delivery options at the clinical and hospital level.
Education and Training Programs
Department members are integrally involved in a wide variety of educational initiatives in the medical school, the graduate school, at the fellowship level, and with CME. Important educational activities are also conducted at affiliate institutions and through collaborative local and global programs.
Clinical Services
The Department’s Division of Community and Public Health Programs operates hospital programs for opioid dependency and an employee assistance program.
Clinical faculty of the Division of Medical Ethics direct a clinical Ethics Consultation Service at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center to assist clinicians, patients, and their families in assessing and resolving ethical issues that arise from clinical practice. Other Department faculty provide clinical services as well, through their role as physicians in the clinics and floors at NYPH.
Consultative Services
The Department houses programs that directly serve clinical and laboratory investigators. The Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology provides statistical and epidemiological support by means of long-term plans with Departments in the Medical Center, through its Biostatistics and Research Methodology Core, and through the Medical College’s Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC). The Department’s Cornell Analytic/Consulting Service provides these services to outside healthcare organizations.
The Division of Medical Ethics provides consultative services to researchers as well as to patients and their family members. Its Research Ethics Consultation Service helps clinical researchers design and implement studies ethically. The clinical Ethics Consultation Service helps patients and families resolve ethical issues surrounding medical care decisions.
Department Organization
In order to pursue its broad agenda and to provide homes for its multi-disciplinary faculty, the Department has been organized into seven integrated divisions.
Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
The Division provides long and short term methodological consulting services and serves as an academic home for biostatistics and epidemiology at the medical college. The Division also develops epidemiologic studies and innovative statistical research methods, and trains students, faculty, and staff in statistical and epidemiological methodology and software.
Division of Community and Public Health Programs
The Division operates clinics for opioid dependency and provides other mental health services. Faculty members conduct research in integrated treatment for patients with both substance abuse problems and hepatitis C or mental health issues, as well as lab-based research in infectious disease vaccine development. They also organize community outreach efforts to improve public health in underserved areas of New York City.
Division of Health Policy
This Division studies the efficient and equitable allocation of scarce health care resources, focusing on health care technology assessment and comparative effectiveness, cost-effectiveness of medical treatments and public helath initiatives, disparities in treatment and preventive care, financing and reimbursement, and incentives for implementation of evidence-based practice.
Division of Medical Ethics
This joint division in the Departments of Medicine and Public Health conducts research in medical ethics and coordinates Weill Cornell's curricular activities in this area. Areas of scholarship include the integration of ethics into health services, research and policy advocacy to improve treatment of patients with brain injury, the ethics of clinical decision making, the care of the terminally ill, and the ethical dimensions of clinical and basic science research.
Division of Outcomes and Effectiveness Research
The Division's mission is to improve the quality and effectiveness of medical care. Its large-scale projects include the Weill Cornell Center for Education & Research on Therapeutics (CERT), focusing on medical and orthopedic devices; the Cornell Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness (IDDP), which conducts research in public health response logistics; the investigation and implementation of healthcare delivery system improvement initiatives; and comparative effectiveness research.
Division of Prevention and Health Behavior
This Division focuses on the increasingly important role of health promotion and the application of principles of prevention to lessen the occurrence and impact of chronic disease. It conducts studies to better understand psychological, gender, cultural, and socioeconomic aspects of health promotion and disease prevention, and it implements and assesses school-based substance abuse prevention programs.
Division of Quality and Medical Informatics
The mission of this joint Division in the Departments of Public Health and Pediatrics is to improve clinical quality and patient safety, particularly through the use of health information technology (health IT). The Division's areas of expertise include research methodology, clinical informatics, and quality improvement.Major projects include evaluation of health IT initiatives; study of effectiveness, comparative effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of health IT applications; and evaluation of healthcare delivery systems.
