Ron Goetzel, Ph.D.

Director, Emory University Institute for Health and Productivity Studies (IHPS)

Vice President of Consulting and Appliced Research, Thomson Reuters.

The mission of the IHPS is to bridge the gap between academia, the business community, and the healthcare policy world – bringing academic resources into policy debates and day-to-day business decisions, and bringing health and productivity management issues into academia. Before moving to Emory, Dr. Goetzel was Director of the Cornell University IHPS. Dr. Goetzel is responsible for leading innovative research projects for healthcare purchaser, managed care, government, and pharmaceutical clients interested in conducting cutting-edge research focused on the relationship between health and well-being, medical costs, and work-related productivity. He is a nationally recognized and widely published expert in health and productivity management (HPM), return-on-investment (ROI), program evaluation, and outcomes research.

Over the past 20 years, Dr. Goetzel’s work has focused on several large-scale evaluations of health promotion, disease prevention, and disease management programs. He is Principal Investigator (PI) for Medicare’s Senior Risk Reduction Demonstration (SRRD) and New Opportunities for Healthy Aging in Medicare (NOHAM) initiatives. He also serves as PI for the Federal Employee Worksite Health and Wellness Initiative administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). He is PI for a project sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) focused on obesity prevention at the workplace. For the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Goetzel was PI for a New York City-based project supporting collaboration between the private and public sectors directed at employer health promotion programs. As PI for a study funded by the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACCD), Dr. Goetzel identified the characteristics of promising practices in workplace health and productivity management (HPM) programs. He is also working with the Department of Defense on two health promotion and resilience training demonstrations for the U.S. Army. Dr. Goetzel has been involved in evaluations of health promotion and disease prevention, disease management programs at Applied Materials, Boeing, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Citibank, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Procter & Gamble, Florida Power & Light, Duke University, General Electric Company, Ford, Motorola, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Pepsi Bottling Group, King County Washington, Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program (FEP), Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, and Highmark. His pharmaceutical industry research with Aventis, Bristol Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Schering-Plough, Pfizer, Astra Zeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Eli Lilly has focused on establishing the health and productivity cost burden of certain illnesses.

Dr. Goetzel is a Task Force Member of the Guide to Community Preventive Services housed at the CDC, and President and CEO of The Health Project, which annually awards organizations the prestigious C. Everett Koop prize for demonstrable health improvement and cost savings from health promotion and disease prevention programs.

Before joining Thomson Reuters (formerly Medstat) in 1995, Dr. Goetzel was Vice President of Assessment, Data Analysis, and Evaluation Services at Johnson & Johnson. Dr. Goetzel was one of the original members of the core development and marketing group at Corporate Health Strategies, currently a division of Ingenix. Earlier in his career, Dr. Goetzel was the Medical School Education Program Evaluator at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he was appointed to the Psychiatry faculty.

Dr. Goetzel earned his doctorate in Organizational and Administrative Studies and his M.A. in Applied Social Psychology from New York University (NYU), and his B.S. degree in Psychology from the City College of New York (CCNY). He is located in Washington, DC.