Ann Barry Flood, PhD, emerita professor of radiology, of community and family medicine and of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI) at the Geisel School of Medicine, received the 2021 Keith G. Provan Distinguished Scholar Award during the Academy of Management’s (AOM) virtual annual meeting where she also summarized her life’s work in a plenary address.
Established in 2012, the award annually recognizes a member of the Health Care Management Division of the AOM whose record of scholarly research in healthcare management—either traditional or innovative—demonstrates exemplary conceptual and methodological rigor.
“I feel very honored to be chosen as this year’s Distinguished Scholar for the Health Care Management Division of the AOM,” Flood says. “As an organizational sociologist, it is especially gratifying to be recognized by this group of my closest research peers, and I am delighted to join the eminent group of past recipients claiming this title.”
Flood's area of expertise is in theoretical and policy implications of professional and organizational factors influencing healthcare outcomes. She has authored and co-authored numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers and presented at many national and international conferences. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Flood was the principal investigator of a study of financial incentives and managed care techniques on clinical decision making and resource use.
In her address, Flood talked about her early pioneering work with healthcare databases to see whether there was a relationship between organizational practices related surgical care when trying to improve quality of patient outcomes. She studied 600,000 patient records from 1,224 hospitals and found that the greater the volume of surgical cases of a given type that were performed, the better the outcomes were after adjusting for patient level health differences; and the effect was stronger when overall hospital volume was used rather than the volume of each individual surgeon. Her work suggested both that organizational practices related to surgical care do make a difference when trying to improve quality of patient outcomes, and some types of care at a given hospital may be better than other types at the same hospital.
“I am pleased for Dr. Flood to have her academic achievements recognized by this award from her professional peers,” said Geisel dean Duane A. Compton, PhD.
Prior to becoming an emeritus professor in 2018, Flood spent 27 years at TDI where she directed health policy and for 15 years served as chair of the PhD program.
