Joseph  Lipscomb

Joseph Lipscomb, PhD., is Professor of Health Policy and Management and Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar at the Rollins School of Public Health and also Associate Director for Population Sciences at Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute.  From 1999 until arriving at Emory in 2004, he was Chief of the Outcomes Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute.  At NCI, he co-chaired the Cancer Outcomes Measurement Working Group, chaired the trans-agency Quality of Cancer Care Committee, and was NCI lead for a collaborative Federal effort to establish a project at the National Quality Forum to develop consensus measures of cancer care quality.  He has published widely on various topics in health economics and outcomes research, including on patient-reported outcomes assessment, quality-of-care evaluation and improvement, and the theory and practice of cost-effectiveness analysis.  He was co-editor for the volume, Outcomes Assessment in Cancer: Measures, Methods, and Applications (Cambridge University Press, 2005); co-editor of a Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monograph (2004) on cancer outcomes research; co-editor for a special issue of Value in Health on, “Moving the QALY Forward: Building a Pragmatic Road” (2009); co-editor of a Medical Care supplement on, “Health Care Costing: Data, Methods, and Future Directions” (2009); and co-editor of Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monograph on “Combining Epidemiology and Economics for Measurement of Cancer Costs” now in preparation.  

Dr. Lipscomb is principal investigator on two research grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one examining optimal screening for those at elevated risk to breast and colorectal cancer and the other investigating the quality of cancer care for those diagnosed with breast or prostate cancer in Georgia. He is also principal investigator on a grant from the Association of Schools of Public Health and the CDC (funded by NCI and the Georgia Cancer Coalition) to augment the Georgia Comprehensive Cancer Registry with administrative and clinical data from multiple public and private sources to support quality-of-care assessment. He is a member of the Steering Committee for the Georgia Comprehensive Cancer Control Plan, which has entered its implementation phase.  He serves on national committees to improve cancer outcomes and quality at both the American College of Surgeons’ Commission on Cancer (CoC) and the American Cancer Society (ACS).  For the ACS, Dr. Lipscomb has chaired the Health Services Research Advisory Committee and is a member of the Mission Outcomes Committee and the Quality of Life Measurement Workgroup.  For the CoC, he has served as co-chair of the Participant User File (PUF) Task Force for the National Cancer Data Base, and as a member of the Quality Integration Committee, whose current charge is to conduct a national pilot test of the Rapid Quality Reporting System (RQRS) that seeks to institutionalize rapid case ascertainment in support of cancer quality improvement.    

He received his PhD in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1975, and a BA in mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 1970.  From 1975 until joining the National Cancer Institute, he was on the faculty at Duke University with primary appointments in the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Department of Community and Family Medicine.  At Duke, he received the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award in 1979 and was nominated for this prize on multiple other occasions.  From 1989-1992, he directed the VA Physician Requirements Study at the Institute of Medicine in Washington.  From 1993-96, he was a member of the U.S. Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine, whose influential recommendations continue to shape the debate about the application of CEA to medical technology evaluation.