Jeffrey Silber

Senior Fellow

Jeffrey Silber, MD, PhD

  • Professor, Pediatrics, Perelman School of Medicine
  • Professor, Health Care Management, Wharton School
  • Nancy Abramson Wolfson Endowed Chair in Health Services Research, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
  • Director, Center for Outcomes Research, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Jeffrey Silber, MD, PhD 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.

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 been awarded the Article of the Year Award in Health Services Research from AcademyHealth, the leading professional organization of health services researchers in the U.S, three times (2003, 2011, and 2020). 

Related Content

Brief

Duty Hour Reform and the Outcomes of Patients Treated by New Surgeons

Evaluating a New Paradigm in Surgical Training

By:
  • Rachel R. Kelz, Bijan A. Niknam, Morgan M. Sellers, James E. Sharpe, Paul R. Rosenbaum, Alexander S. Hill, Hong Zhou, Lauren L. Hochman, Karl Y. Bilimoria, Kamal Itani, Patrick S. Romano, Jeffrey H. Silber

Brief

A National Comparison of Operative Outcomes of New and Experienced Surgeons

Case-mix, not physician experience, accounts for most differences in outcomes

By:
  • Rachel R. Kelz, Morgan M. Sellers, Bijan A. Niknam, James E. Sharpe, Paul R. Rosenbaum, Alexander S. Hill, Hong Zhou, Lauren L. Hochman, Karl Y. Bilimoria, Kamal Itani, Patrick S. Romano, and Jeffrey H. Silber