Steven A. Garfinkel, Ph.D.
Managing Director - Research
Steven A. Garfinkel, Ph.D., joined AIR as a Managing Research Scientist in 2001. He is principal investigator for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s project known as Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Study (CAHPS II) to design and evaluate consumer-reported measures of health plan and provider performance. He is involved in numerous other health projects for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others. Dr. Garfinkel’s areas of expertise are health policy and administration and health program evaluation, with a particular emphasis on the delivery and financing of health care services. He has spent his career conducting research on Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurance; health care organization; and health care outcomes.
Before joining AIR, Dr. Garfinkel spent 27 years at Research Triangle Institute (RTI), where he was director of the Center for Health Services, Economics, and Policy Research and worked extensively for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ). He was the principal investigator for several studies of the assessment of health care insurers and providers and the reporting of health care quality information.
Dr. Garfinkel is a member of the editorial board of Medical Care Research and Review and an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. and M.P.H. degrees from the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His B.A., in political science, was from Hunter College of the City University of New York.