Research Emphases

1. Trust, Trustworthiness, and Professional Life

A major strand of my research focuses on trust in health care. My work includes a synthetic review of 50 years of trust research in health care, which analyzed 725 papers across multiple trust relationships and identified major conceptual and methodological challenges in the field. In related projects, I examine how trust is shaped by organizational behavior, leadership, acknowledgment, and the hidden curriculum of medical training, with particular attention to professionalism and ethical formation in real-world settings.

2. Organizations as Makers of Health Policy

I also study how health care organizations do not merely respond to policy, but actively make it. This includes work on lobbying, delegated governance, hospitals as policy actors, public hospitals, and organizational commitments that shape access to care in practice. Across these projects, I am interested in how institutions exercise power over the practical availability of health services and how organizational decisions become a consequential source of policy for patients and communities.

3. Financing and Delivering the Conditions for Health

A third emphasis in my work concerns how health care organizations engage social care, public goods, and community investment. This includes longstanding work on social determinants of health, community-based organizations, and financing models for cross-sector investment, including the Collaborative Approach to Public Good Investments (CAPGI). Across this area, I study both the promise and the tensions of health care’s growing role in addressing the social and economic conditions that shape health.

4. Ethics of Health Care Organizations

Much of my work examines health care organizations as moral actors. I study the ethical responsibilities of hospitals and health systems, including questions about public interest, organizational wrongdoing, complicity, monopoly power, and institutional obligations beyond the bedside. This work is motivated by the view that many of the most important ethical questions in health care arise not only in clinical encounters, but also in organizational decisions about access, governance, revenue, and mission.