Ross Koppel, PhD

Ross Koppel

Dr. Koppel's current appointments include: Faculty, University of Pennsylvania Sociology Department; Principal Investigator, Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania; Chair-Elect, AMIA Evaluation Working Group; Faculty, The Rand Corporation; Evaluator, Harvard Medical School project to restructure HIT architecture; and President, Social Research Corporation.

Professor Koppel’s work in medical informatics reflects his 40 year career as researcher and professor of sociology of work and organizations, statistics, ethnographic research, survey research, and medical sociology. He is the principal investigator of Penn’s study on hospital workplace culture and medication errors. In the past 4 years Dr. Koppel has published over 25 articles and book chapters on HIT in JAMA, Health Affairs, JAMIA, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Journal of Clinical Care, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Journal of Managed Care, AHRQ-M&M, and Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology plus two books (one on research methods (Sage Publications) and one in press). Koppel is also the author of several works on evaluation and use of statistical methods in medical settings.

His work generally combines sophisticated statistical analyses with survey research and skilled ethnographic research—focusing on use of HIT in situ. Prof. Koppel is currently Co-PI of an AHRQ-funded project to develop a guide to implementing HIT while mitigating unintended consequences. That guide is based on new models of interactions between technology and organizations, which Koppel co-authored with Michael Harrison. In addition to his work in medical informatics, Koppel has authored over 160 academic papers and articles, several monographs, and several books and book chapters. Many of those works addressed the interaction between technology and the workplace, training for use of technology, hospitals as workplaces, illness and society, and the cost of disease and caregiving to the U. S. economy.

Dr. Koppel is the recipient of the Distinguished Career Award in the Practice of Sociology from the American Sociological Association (ASA). He has also been honored with the William Foote Whyte Award from the ASA’s section on Public Sociology, the Robert E. Park Award from the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology, the Distinguished Career Award from the Society for Applied Sociology, and several other awards for his work in Sociological scholarship and practice. He has served as president of all of America’s associations of applied sociologists. Koppel also: is the incoming chair of AMIA’s Evaluation Working Group; sits on several academic journal editorial boards, serves on the Board of the European Sociology Association’s Section on Qualitative Methods; has twice served on the White House Conference on Future of Small Business & Entrepreneurship; was president of the section on Temporal Ecology of the Research Committee on Social Ecology of the International Sociological Association; and has served as an evaluator for the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.