Biography

Cathy Donald Sherbourne is a medical sociologist and health services researcher specializing in health outcome measurement for both adults and children with a focus on mental health issues. Dr. Sherbourne has been the primary sociologist working on health status measurement, satisfaction, and the analyses of life stress, social and role functioning, social support, and mental health status, for several of RAND's large-scale health policy evaluations, including the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (HIE), the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS), the AHRQ-funded Depression PORT, Health Care for Communities (HCC) and the HIV Costs and Service Utilization Study (HCSUS). She has had extensive experience in the development of self-report health and satisfaction measures for children and adults and participated in the main analyses of general health outcomes for the HIE, MOS, PORT, HCC and numerous other studies. Dr. Sherbourne was one of the developers of the 20 and 36-item short form health surveys (SF-20 and SF-36), which were constructed for use in surveying general health in clinical practice and research, health policy evaluations, and in general population surveys. She served as a member of an Institute of Medicine's committee to develop an agenda for health outcomes research for the elderly; recommendations were published in 1996. Dr. Sherbourne has experience in design and implementation of quality improvement interventions for depression and panic disorder, including development of intervention and data collection instruments, development of new statistical methodologies, and data analysis.