Throughout its fifty year history, the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies has been a leader in inter-disciplinary training for the next generation of health policy researchers and practitioners.

The goals of the IHPS training program are:

  1. To train diverse stakeholders to conduct outstanding health policy research;
  2. To foster effective policy communication across the diverse professions, “languages,” and disciplines of health policy;
  3. To translate research into action using methods and findings that are well-grounded, providing policymakers with the right information to make key decisions.

We believe the scope of health policy is wide. It ranges from the development of new systems for financing, delivering and measuring high-quality healthcare; to evaluation of political, programmatic, and organizational initiatives to improve population health; to basic social and behavioral science research on health determinants. IHPS has long emphasized the importance of thoughtfully and self-reflectively engaging perspectives, tools, and theories from multiple academic and professional fields in pursuit of the effective and responsible translation of research into policy and practice. This perspective serves the Institute well as health and health care increasingly touch on new policy domains: legal regulation in the Affordable Care Act, science policy in evidence-based medicine, and engineering and decision-science approaches to patient-centered care.

Current training initiatives include the Philip R. Lee Fellowship, which provides training opportunities for outstanding UCSF students and select post-doctoral scholars; health policy seminars that allow the UCSF community and the public to hear from leading health policy scholars and practitioners; and a close relationship with the UC Hastings School of Law and the UCSF-UC Hastings Consortium on Science, Law, and Health Policy. Finally, IHPS faculty teach a variety of health policy-relevant courses across campus.