Dimick, Friese among U-M faculty members elected to National Academy of Medicine

They study everything from the brain to health care policy and cancer care, and all have demonstrated decades of expertise and achievement.

Today, IHPI members Justin Dimick and Christopher Friese, along with three other U-M faculty members — F. DuBois Bowman, Karin Muraszko and Henry Paulson — join a select group of fewer than 60 current and emeritus U-M faculty and living former faculty, in the National Academy of Medicine.

Justin Dimick

Justin Dimick, the Frederick A. Coller Distinguished Professor and Department of Surgery Chair, has been elected to the NAM for his leadership in elevating the science of health care policy evaluation, quality measurement and comparative effectiveness research within surgical populations.

With R01 funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National Institutes of Health, his research focuses on quality measurement, policy evaluation and large-scale, innovative quality improvement interventions. Dimick’s research has revealed widespread variation in how surgery patients fare after their operations, and the importance of surgeon, hospital and policy factors that impact that variation. His work won him the U-M medical school’s Clinical and Health Services Research Award, and election to the American Society of Clinical Investigation, American Surgical Association and Society of Clinical Surgery.

He served as the director of the Center for Healthcare Outcomes & Policy at U-M from 2014 to 2019, prior to his appointment as chair. This group includes more than 100 faculty and staff focused on improving the quality and efficiency of acute and specialty care. He also served on the inaugural leadership team of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, which unites more than 600 faculty members from across campus who are engaged in health systems and policy research.

Dimick has held several national leadership positions, including president of the Association for Academic Surgery, chair of the Health Services Organization and Delivery Study Section at NIH, associate editor at Annals of Surgery and surgical innovation editor at JAMA Surgery. He has served as an adviser on quality and health policy for several organizations, including the BlueCross BlueShield Association, American College of Surgeons-National Surgical Quality Improvement Program, Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and U.S. News and World Report’s “Best Hospital” rankings.

Dimick is a graduate of Cornell University and Johns Hopkins Medical School. He completed his surgical training at U-M and a health services research fellowship at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice.

Christopher Friese

Christopher Friese is the Elizabeth Tone Hosmer Professor at the U-M School of Nursing, where he focuses on measuring and improving the quality of cancer care delivery. He directs the Center for Improving Patient and Population Health and is a faculty investigator at the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. This year, he was appointed as associate director for cancer control and population sciences at U-M’s Rogel Cancer Center.

Friese has practiced as a staff nurse at leading cancer centers, including the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Rogel Cancer Center. He is a national expert in the analyses of claims data to study care quality and has executed large surveys of ambulatory oncology nurses. The author of more than 90 publications, his research findings were among the first to establish a significant relationship between favorable nurse practice environments and lower surgical mortality.

As the first nurse scientist to complete a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award from the National Institute of Nursing Research, Friese leads an interdisciplinary research program to study the quality of care delivered in understudied ambulatory oncology settings from the perspectives of patients and clinicians. He has led pivotal studies to develop valid and reliable measures of ambulatory nursing work environments.

Friese’s recent work examines patterns and correlates of hazardous drug exposure in oncology nurses. His research has been funded by the National Cancer Institute, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, National Institute of Nursing Research, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, American Cancer Society and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 2016, he was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow, where he worked on health policy initiatives in the office of Sen. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania. In 2018, he was appointed by the Comptroller General of the United States to a six-year team on the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute Board of Governors.

He received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Control and Outcomes at Harvard University/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He also is a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and received U-M’s Henry Russel Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty. In 2017, he was installed as the inaugural holder of the Hosmer endowed chair at U-M. He holds a secondary appointment in health management and policy at the U-M School of Public Health.

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