JOSHUA LIAO

Joshua Liao, MS, MSc, is an internal medicine physician at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW). He is a Professor with Tenure in the Department of Internal Medicine and the O'Donnell School of Public Health. At UTSW, he also serves as a Core Director in the Clinical Translational Science Award. 

He completed medical school at Baylor College of medicine and trained in internal medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital where he was also a Clinical Fellow in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He obtained his policy and evaluation training from the University of Pennsylvania, where he remains an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics in the Wharton School. 

Dr. Liao has committed his career to improving health care payment and care delivery. He works on this mission in several ways, including local care redesign, scholarship and evaluation, and policy evaluation. Prior to UTSW, he founded a nationally recognized policy evaluation unit that became the formal evaluation partner for the Washington Health Care Authority, the largest purchaser of health care services in that state. In that work, Dr. Liao has conducted evaluations and analysis to inform decision-makers on health care issues including primary care delivery and telemedicine.

He has advised also Medicaid programs on policy issues and currently provides recommendations about payment models to the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services through service on the Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee. Dr. Liao also serves as an expert on funding and accountability issues as part of the National Academy of Medicine’s Commission on Investment Imperatives for a Healthy Nation. He has served on national committees or advisory groups for the American College of Physicians and the American Academy of Family Physicians.

His scholarship focuses on how systems of financing and delivering care work together to affect health outcomes and equity. He has published 300+ articles, including over 200 in peer-reviewed medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Affairs, the Annals of internal Medicine, and the British Medical Journal. Dr. Liao has given over 80 national and international presentations in a range of clinical, policy, and practice transformation forums. His ideas and insights have appeared in outlets such as the Washington Post, Forbes, STAT, the Boston Globe, NPR, Harvard Business Review, the Seattle Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He has been interviewed for a number of national publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and the Hill.

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