Donna O. Farley

Biography

Donna O. Farley is a senior health policy analyst at the RAND Corporation and codirector of the RAND-University of Pittsburgh Health Institute. She has broad health policy research experience coupled with more than 15 years in executive health care management. Farley heads RAND's Patient Safety Evaluation Center, which evaluated the national patient safety initiative run by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. She leads a longitudinal evaluation of quality improvement initiatives for teamwork practices in hospital labor and delivery units in five civilian and military hospitals. She codirects RAND's team in the Consumer Assessment of Health Systems and Providers (CAHPS) project and heads the quality improvement component of the project. She served as principal investigator of an evaluation of the tobacco settlement funds program run by the state of Arkansas, leading the first four years of this project. Farley previously codirected a five-year project that tested use of continuous quality improvement techniques to implement clinical practice guidelines in Army health facilities. She served as principal investigator for two Medicare projects: a study of special Medicare payment policies for rural health care providers and an evaluation of Senior Prime, a Medicare managed care plan offered on a trial basis by the U.S. Department of Defense. Farley received her Ph.D. in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School.