David Hickam, MD, MPH, is a Program Director of the Clinical Effectiveness and Decision Science program at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). He is responsible for developing PCORI’s research program that evaluates comparisons among alternative clinical strategies in a broad range of clinical domains, and he also provides staff support to the PCORI Methodology Committee.

Hickam is a specialist in internal medicine and has 30 years of experience as a health services researcher. His past research has focused on strategies for improving health care outcomes among adults with chronic diseases. Hickam previously held the rank of professor in the Department of Medicine at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU). He also held a joint faculty appointment in OHSU’s Department of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology. He was a senior investigator in the Oregon Evidence-based Practice Center at OHSU and also served as co-director of the health services research and development program at the Portland VA Medical Center. He has expertise in a broad range of both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies.

In 2005, he became the founding director of the John M. Eisenberg Clinical Decisions and Communications Science Center, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The Eisenberg Center has developed innovative approaches for helping people use evidence-based information to participate in decision making about their health care.

Hickam received his BA from Stanford University, an MD from the University of California, San Francisco, and a MPH from the University of California, Berkeley.