Christopher S. Saigal

Biography

Christopher S. Saigal is a natural scientist at the RAND Corporation and an associate professor in the Department of Urology at the UCLA School of Medicine. His research has focused on quality of care, shared decisionmaking, practice patterns, and costs of care. He is the principal investigator within RAND Health for the Urologic Diseases in America project, a 12-million dollar National Institutes of Health–funded effort to document the burden of illness, patterns of care, and technology trends related to urologic diseases in the United States. Saigal also leads a National Cancer Institute–funded study examining new methods of patient preference elicitation in an effort to improve medical decision analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis. He is active in health policy; after serving as the American Urological Association (AUA) Gallagher Health Policy Scholar, he was asked to represent the AUA at the Ambulatory Quality Alliance and Surgical Quality Alliance and to be the AUA representative to the American College of Surgeons' Surgeon-Specific Registry project. His clinical practice focuses on urologic oncology. He received his M.P.H. from the UCLA School of Public Health and his M.D. from the UCLA School of Medicine.