Frederick A. Anderson, Jr., PhD
Frederick A. Anderson, Jr., PhD, is Research Professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, located in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA. Beginning in 1973, along with Dr. H. Brownell Wheeler, Dr. Anderson was the developer of the electrical impedance plethysmograph, one of the first noninvasive techniques for the diagnosis of deep-vein thrombosis (DVT). From 1986 to 1991, he was the principal investigator of the Worcester DVT Study, a five-year, NIH-supported study of physician practices in the prevention and management of venous thromboembolism. The lessons of this study, that sharing data with physicians about their outcomes (including benchmarks to their peers and evidence-based practice guidelines) resulted in significant improvement in clinical practices, provided the foundation for the creation of the Center for Outcomes Research.
Currently, Dr. Anderson directs the Center for Outcomes Research (COR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS). COR has served as the scientific coordinating center for a number of national and international outcomes registries, both privately and federally funded. The types of COR's projects have varied from phase-IV post-marketing observational studies and randomized clinical intervention studies to quality of care initiative studies. COR's responsibilities have included overall study design, maintaining patient and physician confidentiality, the design of data collection instruments, development of project and data management information systems, and the dissemination of study results through scientific publications and confidential benchmark reports. As of today, COR's studies involve over 500,000 patients from 1,000 hospitals in 35 countries and have led to over 200 publications. CORs responsibilities include maintaining patient and physician confidentiality, data management, and publication development for several outcomes registries.
Dr. Anderson is an author on over 100 reports of original research published in peer-reviewed journals, as well as more than 20 book chapters.
