Dr. Jeff Alexander, the Richard Carl Jelinek Professor of Health Management and Policy in the University of Michigan School of Public Health and now professor emeritus, was honored with the 2014 AcademyHealth Distinguished Investigator Award.  The award recognizes investigators who have made significant and lasting contributions to the field of health services research through scholarship, teaching, advancement of science and methods, and leadership. 

Dr. Alexander’s research interests focus on organizational change in the health care sector, multi-institutional systems, governance, and organizational factors related to quality of care. His papers, “Patterns of Decision Making in Multi-Hospital Systems” and “Models of Governance in Multi-hospital Systems: Implications for Hospital and System-Level Decision Making” were the first to define and account for variation in decision making authority between headquarters and hospitals in multi-hospital systems.  Recent publications have appeared in Health Services Research, The Milbank Quarterly, Medical Care Research and Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Journal of Health and Social Behavior; and he has led or co-authored 248 peer-reviewed journal articles and 200 research presentations at various professional meetings and in academic institutions.