Dr. Silber holds the Nancy Abramson Wolfson Endowed Chair in Health Services Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and is a Professor of Pediatrics and Anesthesiology & Critical Care at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Professor of Health Care Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Silber is an internationally known authority on outcomes measurement and severity adjustment for both adult and pediatric applications. He created the adult quality of care measure Failure-to-Rescue (FTR) in 1990 that has been adopted as three specific quality measures by the National Quality Forum (NQF). He has also developed two length of stay outcome measures: Prolonged Length of Stay and Conditional Length of Stay, now applied to both pediatric and adult populations. With Paul Rosenbaum he developed the Omega measure that evaluates outcome measures by estimating the relative contribution of patient to hospital characteristics associated with a specific outcome, and the method of Template Matching to compare hospital cost and quality. He has published extensively on all aspects of the theory of outcomes measure and model development and validation, as well as the applications of outcomes measures to pressing public health issues. Much of his recent work focuses on the use of multivariate matching when comparing outcomes, specifically with respect to problems in both pediatric and adult medicine and surgery, disparities, and cancer. Dr. Silber has twice been awarded the Article of the Year Award in Health Services Research from AcademyHealth, the leading professional organization concerning Health Services Research in the U.S.
Dr. Silber helped to establish and has served as the Director of the Center for Outcomes Research since its inception in 1997. The center is a multidisciplinary health services research hub for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania investigators and external academic and institutional collaborators which aims to improve health outcomes through the development, testing and application of innovative, practical metrics which serve as tools to transform the quality and efficiency of health care.
Dr. Silber teaches two courses at the University of Pennsylvania: HCMG212 – Health Care Quality and Outcomes: Measurement and Management at the Wharton School and EPI580 – Outcomes Research at the Perelman School of Medicine.