Joseph Lipscomb

Joseph Lipscomb, PhD, is a Professor of Health Policy and Management at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.  He is a health economist whose research program focuses on the quality, cost, and cost-effectiveness of interventions to prevent, detect, and treat major threats to population health, with special attention to cancer. 

From 1999 until arriving at Emory in 2004, he was the inaugural Chief of the Outcomes Research Branch in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute.  At NCI, he co-chaired the Cancer Outcomes Measurement Working Group, chaired the trans-federal agency Quality of Cancer Care Committee, and was NCI lead for a collaborative public-private effort with the National Quality Forum to establish consensus measure of cancer care quality.  

He has published widely on a variety of topics in health economics and outcomes research, with more than 180 peer-reviewed articles, as well as policy-focused editorials and commentaries. He was co-editor of the volume, Outcomes Assessment in Cancer: Measures, Methods, and Applications (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and subsequently has co-edited special issues of several leading journals (including Medical Care, Value in Health, and Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monographs) on topics related to cancer outcomes research.  At Emory, he has been principal investigator on multiple grants supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including a Georgia-based project funded by the NCI to enhance data infrastructure for cancer care analyses. 
Dr. Lipscomb was a member of the original U.S. Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine (1993-96), established by the U.S. Surgeon General to create standards for the conduct of CEA within the Federal sector and beyond.  He has served on the Quality Integration Committee of the American College of Surgeons Commission on Cancer; as co-chair of the Cancer Care Delivery Committee for the NCI-supported clinical trials group NRG Oncology; and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Committee on a National Strategy for Cancer Control in the United States.  He has also served as Associate Director for Population Sciences at Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute and is currently a member of the Internal Scientific Advisory Board of Winship’s Center for Cancer Health Equity Research (CCHER).  In recent years he has been appointed to several American Cancer Society committees, including as chair of the Health Services Research Advisory Committee.  

Before joining the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Lipscomb 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.  He received a BA degree in mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 1970 and his PhD in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1975.