Each year the College of Medicine Alumni Association recognizes outstanding alumni though the Distinguished Alumni Awards. The award recognizes MD graduates of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine for achievements in the areas of basic research, education, clinical care, health service administration, and public and/or civic duties.
This year's winners, Arthur Evans, III, MD, Sheldon Greenfield, MD, Clarice Reid, MD, were recognized at the 2014 Reunion, held April 10-13.
As a primary care physician and scholar, Sheldon Greenfield, MD, has focused his career on improving patient outcomes for all patients, not just those in his practice. Greenfield is an internationally recognized leader in quality of care and health services research, serving as a national advocate for evidence-based clinical guidelines and patient engagement.
Over the years, Greenfield and his colleagues have pioneered new fields in American health care, including the use of nurse practitioners, outcomes research, patient participation in medical decisions and heterogeneity of treatment effects.
Currently the Donald Bren Professor of Medicine and executive co-director of the Health Policy Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine, he was recently appointed to the California Medi-Cal Performance Advisory Committeeand still practices general internal medicine weekly at UC Irvines Gottschalk Clinic.
Further, he is a prolific researcher, with 171 journal articles to his name, over 30 books and book chapters and ongoing investigations into decision-making in localized prostate cancer and heterogeneity of treatment effects. Papers that he has authored have been cited more than 25,000 times. He also serves as senior co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research.
Greenfield attended the UC College of Medicine from 1960-64 with a full-tuition scholarship award from the Joseph Collins Scholarship Fund. After graduation, he completed an internal medicine residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston (serving as chief resident from 1971-72) and a training fellowship in infectious disease at Beth Israel and Bostons Childrens Hospital Medical Center.
After his clinical training, Greenfield expanded his focus to include the study of public health. From 1972 to 1984, he served on as assistant and associate professor of medicine and public health at the University of California, Los Angeles. Internationally, he was a member of the first public health delegation to Cuba in 1974 and a World Health Organization Fellow in 1971, traveling to England and Sweden to study health care delivery.
In 1988, he returned to Boston as professor of medicine and chief of the division of health services research at Tufts University School of Medicine, where he led the universitys Primary Care Outcomes Research Institute from 1993 to 2003.
During that time, he received the Pew Health Professions Award for lifetime achievement in primary care research and was named a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Greenfield has been an active IOM member, chairing the IOM report "Cancer Patient to Cancer Survivor: Lost in Transition, the committee "Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust, and co-chairing the committee "National Priorities for Comparative Effectiveness Research.
Since his appointment at UC Irvine in 2005, he has devoted even more hours to improving care for a chronic disease affecting millions of Americans, chairing the National Diabetes Quality Improvement Alliance and the National Quality Forum Advisory Panel for Diabetes and Chronic Kidney Disease.
