The Department of Health Care Policy hosted its 9th Annual Marshall J. Seidman Lecture on Health Policy on Thursday, October 15, at 4:30 p.m. in the Walter Amphitheater at the Tosteson Medical Education Center (260 Longwood Avenue). This year’s speaker was Dr. Alan M. Garber of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research at Stanford University. He discussed “The Real Promise of Comparative Effectiveness Research.” To read more about Dr. Garber’s background, please visit Stanford University’s website.  If you were unable to attend the talk, here is a link to Dr. Garber's presentation.

Past Seidman lecturers (with their titles and affiliations at that time) were:

Peter R. Orszag, MSc, PhD
Director, Congressional Budget Office
October 16, 2008
“New Ideas about Human Behavior in Economics and Medicine”
Click here for Dr. Orszag’s blog entry about the event.

Mark B. McClellan, MD, PhD
Visiting Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute; Former Administrator, CMS; Former Commissioner, FDA
April 9, 2007
“Improving Quality and Value for Medicare Beneficiaries”
Click here for media coverage.

Zach W. Hall, PhD (deceased)
President, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
March 22, 2006
“Stem Cell Research in California: The Intersection of Science, Politics and Culture”
Click here for media coverage.

William H. Frist, MD
US Senate Majority Leader
June 1, 2005
“Bioterrorism and the Rise of Infectious Disease: Combating the Greatest Global Threat of the 21st Century”
Click here for media coverage.

Lawrence H. Summers, PhD
President, Harvard University
April 27, 2004
Click here for lecture transcript of talk.

Gail R. Wilensky, PhD
John M. Olin Senior Fellow, Project HOPE
April 22, 2003
“1991 Revisited—Can We be Smarter the Second Time Around?”
Click here for media coverage.

Victor Fuchs, PhD
Henry J Kaiser, Jr. Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
April 29, 2002
“Non-Medical Determinants of Health”

Robert Reischauer, PhD
President, The Urban Institute
April 26, 2001
“Hard to Swallow: Expanding Medicare to Include Prescription Drug Coverage”
Click here for media coverage.

The Seidman Lecture is made possible by a gift from the late Marshall J. Seidman, a 1950 graduate of Harvard Law School. At his 50th college reunion, Seidman established the Marshall J. Seidman Teaching and Research Fund in the Department of Health Care Policy, designed to finance an annual visiting professor whose work related to the cost and quality of health care with particular emphasis on federal and state policy. He also presented the department with a second endowment to fund research in these areas. Students, faculty, and staff benefit from his generous donations through informative and empowering lectures from top health care professionals.