John Kralewski, Ph.D.

John Kralewski, Ph.D., University of Minnesota, began his academic career at the University of Colorado Medical School in the Department of Preventive and Community Medicine. During 1980, he returned to the University of Minnesota to establish a Center for Health Services Research and was the Director of the center and its next generation; the Division of Health Services Research and Policy in the School of Public Health for more than 25 years, until he stepped down to spend more time on research.

He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed articles dealing with this research stream and received two Article of the Year awards for his work with Drs. Bryan Dowd and Roger Feldman; one from the National Institute for Health Care Management (2000) and one from AcademyHealth (2001). As part of this research, he developed an instrument to measure the organizational culture of medical group practices and that instrument is now being used by both researchers and practice administrators to study and manage medical groups.

In HCFO-sponsored work, headed by Dr. Kralewski, he is studying 200 physician group practices providing and coordinating care for Medicare and private sector enrollees. This project explores both the efficiency of patient-level care and internal practice-level efficiency in producing units of services used for that care.  “We are focusing our analysis on the medical practice level,” said Kralewski. “Our goal is to provide benchmarks that policymakers, health plans, and practice administrators can use to move toward more cost-effective health care.”

Dr. Kralewski’s HCFO project—designed to identify the characteristics of medical group practices that provide high quality care at low costs—builds on his extensive research focused on these practice forms. His work is widely recognized as the leading research on the influence of organizational structures and cultures on the performance of physicians in medical group practices.

Dr. Kralewski has a B.S. in pharmacy, an M.H.A. in hospital administration, and a Ph.D. in health services research all from the University of Minnesota.

For more information about Dr. Kralewski and a list of publications, please visit www.sph.umn.edu/facstaff/ourfaculty/faculty.asp?x5=krale001