Gordon H. DeFriese
        Professor

Throughout most of my academic career, I have focused my work in health services research, with emphases on rural health and primary care, aging and geriatric care, and health promotion and disease prevention. For the past two decades, from the early 1980s until the present, I have devoted much of my time to the study of factors which motivate and enable community-dwelling older adults to learn and practice self-care skills, particularly when faced with functional limitations. For over a dozen years, I led an interdisciplinary team which created a new national database on older adults through in-person and telephone interviews with a sample of persons who were beyond age 65 in 1989. Our work explored the interconnections among a number of socio-psychological dimensions of aging as they may affect the motivation to maintain functional independence in these years. In addition to this work, I have been engaged in a number of studies of the problems associated with low levels of childhood immunization in the U.S., including the evaluation of the national All Kids Count registry system demonstrations funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Since the mid-1990s, I have focused most of my work in the area of state-level health policy as I have held the position of President and CEO of the North Carolina Institute of Medicine. A description of the work of the Institute is available on-line at www.nciom.org. This role has included special studies of long-term care, dental care for low-income persons, health insurance for low-income children, the health care safety-net, the nursing workforce, Latino health issues, and will soon expand to include work on child abuse, health literacy and the uninsured.

From 1973-2000, I served as Director of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, and from 1986-2000 as Co-Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Clinical Scholars Program at UNC-CH. For 15 of my years at the Sheps Center I directed a pre- and post-doctoral program in health services research funded by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. In addition, for 10 of those years I introduced and taught a doctoral-level course on The Epidemiology of Medical Care in the UNC-CH Department of Epidemiology. In 2002, the NC Institute of Medicine acquired the North Carolina Medical Journal and re-invented it as a statewide journal of health policy analysis and debate. I serve as Editor-in-Chief and Publisher. The Journal is available in its new format at www.ncmedicaljournal.com.

You may contact Dr. DeFriese by email: gordon_defriese@unc.edu; by phone at: (919) 966-7100; or by post at: CB #7590, Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill / Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7590.

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