Ann Barry Flood, PhD

Ann Barry Flood

Ann Barry Flood, Ph.D. is Professor of Health Policy and Sociology at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH. She is currently Co-Editor-in-Chief, Health Services Research, the Official Journal of the AcademyHealth. Dr. Flood's doctorate is in organizational sociology from Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

Dr. Flood's expertise is the study of factors that influence how well health care organizations and delivery systems perform, particularly in terms of producing better outcomes (adjusting for patient case-mix). Her research, based largely on hospital and clinic-based care, has focused on understanding how medical and nursing staff organizations and management in hospitals lead to better care. She has also examined how clinic administration and health insurers use financial incentives and managed care techniques to influence clinical decision-making, resource use and patients' involvement in their own care. Her current work includes designing and evaluating an intervention based in health insurance plans to improve use of preventive care among disadvantaged women (for prevention of breast, cervical and colon cancer) and men (for prevention of prostate cancer).

Dr. Flood is a member of Dartmouth’s NSF-funded Trustworthy Information Systems for Healthcare (TISH) project in which she is researching the impact of electronic health records on health care. Dr. Flood is involved in 3 additional projects to evaluate the roles of technology to improve health care: 1) developing strategies to improve rapid collection of evidence for evaluating surgical technologies; 2) designing and evaluating multi-level interventions in cancer care; and 3) designing comparative effectiveness models for evaluating technologies to be used in major public health disasters, where the needs include operating successfully under surge conditions, scarce resources, with newly formed teams, and in field conditions.