Luft, Harold S.

Harold S. Luft is a leading health services researcher. He is perhaps best known for his work on how health maintenance organizations (HMOs) achieve cost savings compared with fee-for-service medicine and his discovery of the volume-quality relationship in healthcare-the inverse relationship between the volume of hospital procedures performed and in-hospital patient mortality for certain surgeries and medical conditions.

Luft is the former Caldwell B. Esselstyn Professor of Health Policy and Health Economics and director of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). In 2008, he became the director of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute.

Born in 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, Luft received his bachelor's degree, master's degree, and doctorate from Harvard University, where he specialized in health sector economics and public finance. Prior to joining UCSF in 1978, he was an assistant professor in the Health Services Research Program at Stanford University.

Luft has undertaken research in a variety of areas, including the applications of cost-benefit analysis, the relationship between hospital volumes and patient outcomes, the regionalization of hospital services, HMOs, risk assessment and risk adjustment, quality and outcomes of care, and [Page 697]healthcare reform in various states and communities. He also has studied the role of large databases and informatics tools to improve healthcare.

Throughout his long career, Luft has authored or coauthored five books and almost 200 scientific journal articles. His most recent book, Total Cure: Rebuilding the American Healthcare System, proposes a fundamental restructuring of the nation's financing and delivery of healthcare. He also has served on many editorial boards, including the journal Inquiry, and was the coeditor-in-chief of Health Services Research from 1997 to 2006.

Luft has received many awards and recognitions for his outstanding contributions to the field. He was awarded the Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) in 2004; the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Association of Health Services Research in 1999; and the William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research, sponsored by the Association of University Programs in Health Administration (AUPHA) and the Baxter Allegiance Foundation, in 1998. He also was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation and a Graduate Prize Fellow at Harvard University.

Luft is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine (IOM). He was a member of and chaired the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (now the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality). He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). In addition, Luft has served on the board of AcademyHealth. And he also has been a consultant to a number of federal agencies, including the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) (now the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS]), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the U.S Commission on Civil Rights, and the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) (now the U.S. General Accountability Office).

Luft has also been pivotally involved in multidisciplinary postdoctoral training for more than 35 years. He served as the codirector or associate director for three training programs sponsored jointly by UCSF and the University of California, Berkeley.

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