Robert Coulam, PhD, JD

Research Professor, Department of Health Care Administration; Director, Center for Health Policy Research

A puzzle master in public health policy

Robert Coulam rarely sees simple policy problems. "These problems may be simple on the surface, but once you take them apart and try to understand how the pieces fit together, they become complicated. That's when the fun begins."

Coulam knows all too well about complicated problems. He has a passion for solving them. Educated as a policy analyst and lawyer, Coulam has been an academic and researcher for nearly 30 years. His area of expertise includes Medicare and Medicaid policy issues. (Not exactly "simple" stuff.) He has a knack for understanding how public organizations work and fail to work.

"My recent health services research has focused on problems of reform in public health care programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program," says Coulam. "I have extensive experience managing projects that harness complex data and sophisticated methods to evaluate policy and operational problems. The methods used in these studies include high-end econometrics on administrative and survey data and qualitative analyses of messy or fragmented data in under-documented areas." Or simply put, he pieces together a complicated puzzle of information with oftentimes less than half the puzzle pieces.

A three-time graduate of Harvard, Coulam worked as deputy budget director for Massachusetts's Department of Public Welfare and as a principal associate at Abt Associates Inc., one of the largest for-profit government and business research and consulting firms in the world. He's been teaching at the college level on and off since 1980. At Simmons, Coulam teaches health policy and health law, and leads the development of a collaborative health services research program at the School of Health Sciences.

"Our students at SHS need to understand how health services organizations and systems work. Whether they realize it or not, large and small choices in the world of health policy affect how students get their jobs done. I want to help them understand why seemingly arbitrary aspects of public health policy happen, how policies come to look the way they do, and how public policy directly affects their work. Through this learning, they become more critical thinkers and can learn to think creatively about the changes that are needed to produce quality health care."