Editor profiles

David Feeny, PhD, is a Professor of Economics at McMaster University; he received his PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976. Dr. Feeny has more than 260 peer-reviewed publications on a wide variety of topics, including the methods for  the assessment of health-related quality of life, the methods for the assessment of healthcare technologies, the estimation of multi-attribute utility functions, and the economic evaluation of healthcare services. Specific projects have included childhood cancer; prenatal diagnosis; pediatric asthma; elective hip replacement; hip fracture; stroke; rehabilitation after myocardial infarction; long-term outcomes of very low birthweight and neonatal intensive care; end-stage renal disease; diabetes; anxiety; the provision of primary care by multi-disciplinary teams; the development of condition-specific measures of health-related quality of life in substance abuse; the health-related quality-of-life effects on being on the waiting list for elective surgery; and the effects of using measures of health-related quality of life in routine chronic-care management. Dr. Feeny is also engaged in research on methods for assessing population health status and the determinants of population health.

Dr. Feeny has served as an Associate Editor or on the editorial boards of Quality of Life Research, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Medical Decision Making, PharmacoEconomics, the International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, and Health Reports. Dr. Feeny served as the President of the International Society for Quality of Life Research (ISOQOL) and was the recipient of the 2010 President’s Award from ISOQOL.

Ron Hays, PhD, is a Professor in the UCLA Department of Medicine. He has served as a principal investigator for the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) project at RAND since 1995. In addition, he teaches courses on health outcome measures at the UCLA School of Public Health. Dr. Hays is also the leader of the analysis core for the UCLA/Drew Research Center for Minority Aging Research (RCMAR), a research and mentoring program intended to reduce health disparities for older African Americans and Latinos by training and mentorship of minority faculty.

Dr. Hays specializes in patient-reported measurement development and evaluation, including measures of patient behavior, experiences with health care, and health related quality of life. He has published 582 peer-reviewed papers and 38 book chapters and was acknowledged as one of the most highly cited and influential scientific minds yearly from 2015-2019 by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics.