Sherrie H. Kaplan, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Sherrie Kaplan, Ph.D., M.P.H. is Assistant Vice Chancellor of Healthcare and Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), School of Medicine. She is also Executive Co-Director, Center for Health Policy Research at UCI. She came to UCI in 2003 from Tufts University School of Medicine and the Harvard School of Public Health.  Dr. Kaplan received her undergraduate, M.P.H., M.S.P.H. and Ph.D. from UCLA, the latter in a joint program between public health and measurement psychology. 

In her distinguished career as a leading social scientist in medicine, Dr. Kaplan has pioneered a number of areas of research.  She has done ground-breaking research demonstrating that patients can be taught to participate effectively in medical decisions with positive effects on patients’ health outcomes.  Her work on the application of psychometric techniques to the assessment of performance of varying levels of the healthcare system, from healthcare organizations to individual physicians, has made her a national expert on this current and controversial topic.  Well known for her work in the development of measures of the quality of technical and interpersonal care, health status and quality of life, particularly for vulnerable populations, she is now working in an innovative project among minority populations using community-based minority ‘coaches’ to train patients to participate effectively in chronic disease care, and is developing and modifying measures for assessing its impact on quality of care and quality of life.  Dr. Kaplan was also a member of the IOM committee that generated the recently released report, "Cancer Care for the Whole Patient:  Meeting Psychosocial Health Needs".