Health Policy Trials Unit

David Campbell, MD, PhD
Co-director

Dr. Campbell is a clinician-scientist specializing in diabetes and endocrinology. His varied research expertise is centered around reducing the barriers and challenges faced by individuals who experience diverse social disadvantages, such as food insecurity, lack of pharmaceutical insurance, and homelessness. He conducts research that uses mixed methods, interventional approaches, community and stakeholder engagement, and knowledge translation to inform health and social policies.

Amity Quinn, PhD
Co-director

Dr. Quinn is a health economist specializing in policy evaluation and working collaboratively with health system partners. Her research focuses primarily on policies that are designed to improve health care access and value for people with complex health and social needs, including physician payment models and insurance benefit design. She has expertise in data analytics and advanced statistical modelling using population-level administrative data and policy analysis.

Terry Saunders-Smith
Trials Coordinator

Terry Saunders-Smith is the manager for the Health Policy Trails Unit and has 14 years’ experience coordinating both industry and investigator-driven projects. She has worked on health policy trials for the last 7 years along side Dr. Campbell. She has training in patient-oriented research and pragmatic clinical trials as well as a certificate in Professional Management from the University of Calgary.

Reed Beall, PhD

Dr Beall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine, and is an affiliated faculty with the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and the Law (PORTAL) in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics within the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard Medical School. He is a population health and health policy researcher who investigates the social determinants of (in)equitable prescription drug access and innovation, including the patent system and drug pricing. Specifically, he is working to establish a “Rx Equity Observatory” that is dedicated to (i) focusing more research and development activity on health issues affecting those bearing societies’ largest disease burdens and to (ii) understanding how to most effectively rollout new health technologies to society in a way that does not further exacerbate health inequities, but rather alleviates them. While my work is situated within the health sector, I am keen to contribute to building health innovations that engage other sectors and domains. More recently, I have been working with a team of colleagues to trial social prescribing initiatives, including a subsidized healthy food prescription program, to augment traditional pharmacologic therapies patients who are experiencing food insecurity and who are also at risk for diabetes.

Braden Manns, MD, MSc

Braden Manns is the Svare Professor in Health Economics and a Nephrologist at the University of Calgary in the Departments of Medicine and Community Health Sciences. Dr. Manns current research interests include examining the implications of patient-borne costs on care and outcomes in chronic disease, examining the cost effectiveness of strategies and health care policies for managing patients with chronic disease, and assessing the implications of different ways to pay physicians, among other projects. He has experience in pharmaceutical priority setting, having served on provincial and national committees for drug evaluation, including a term as Chair of Canadian Expert Drug Advisory Committee from 2006-2008.

Dr. Fiona Clement, PhD

Dr. Fiona Clement is a Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary with extensive expertise in Health Economics and Policy. With over 150 publications, 54 government reports, 6000 citations, and an H-index of 44, she is a national leader in evidence-informed policy development. She is an international leader in the emerging field of Health Technology Reassessment that addresses optimal application of health technologies in healthcare.

Kerry McBrien, MD, MPH

Dr. Kerry McBrien is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Family Medicine and Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary. She is a clinician scientist with an active practice in family medicine.  Her research focuses in health services research and health economics, with a specific interest in models of care that can improve the quality and efficiency of chronic disease management in primary care. 

Eldon Spackman, PhD

Eldon is a health economist with an interest in methods for sustainable health care. He is particularly interested in assessing the value and opportunity costs of health care technologies and interventions. Eldon holds a BA and MA in Economics from the University of Calgary and a PhD from the Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research and Policy Program at the University of Washington. He joined the U of C from the Centre of Health Economics at the University of York in the UK.  He is an expert in Health Technology Assessment and has undertaken evaluations for England, Scotland, British Columbia and Alberta. His current research, funded by the CIHR, uses provincial data to explore the life expectancy, quality-of-life and costs of patients with cancer in Alberta. This work will inform an opportunity cost threshold for cancer care in Alberta and provide methods to estimate a cost-effectiveness threshold for decision making across diseases.

Tom Stelfox, MD, PhD

Dr. Tom Stelfox is a Professor of Critical Care Medicine and Scientific Director of the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary. He received his M.D. from the University of Alberta, Internal Medicine Residency at the University of Toronto, Ph.D. in Health Care Policy at Harvard University and Critical Care Fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He focuses on the application of research methods to improve the quality of health care delivery. The findings from his work have impacted health policy and patient care.

Tyler Williamson, PhD

Tyler Williamson is the Director of the Centre for Health Informatics and an Associate Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Community Health Sciences. Dr. Williamson is member of the O’Brien Institute of Public Health, the Alberta Children’s Hospital research Institute, and the Libin Cardiovascular Institute. His research interests include health data integration (combining electronic medical record and health administrative data), chronic disease surveillance and research using electronic medical record data, and non-canonical link functions for binomial generalized linear models.