Floyd J. Fowler Jr. | |
---|---|
Born | July 4, 1939 |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Researcher, academic and author |
Academic background | |
Education | BA, English M.A., Psychology Ph.D, Social Psychology |
Alma mater | Wesleyan University University of Michigan |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Massachusetts Boston |
Floyd J (Jack) Fowler Jr. (born July 4,1939) is an American researcher,academic and author. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Center for Survey Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston. [1] He is an early contributor to research on patient-reported outcomes after treatment for various conditions including benign prostate disease,benign uterine conditions and prostate cancer. He also led survey projects to understand the causes and consequences of variation in the way medical care is delivered. [2]
Fowler was the founding Director of the Center for Survey Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1971,where he served as director for 14 years. He was President of the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making from 2002-2009. [3] He is the author of more than 150 publications,including four textbooks. In 2013,he received the AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement. [4]
Fowler was born in Akron,Ohio on July 4,1939. He was raised in Ohio,went to high school at Western Reserve Academy,and graduated with a BA in English from Wesleyan University in 1960. He received M.A. in Psychology in 1962 and his Ph.D. in Social Psychology,both from the University of Michigan in 1966. [5] He later settled in Brookline,Massachusetts. While at Michigan,he spent four years at the Survey Research Center working with Charles Cannell on a series of studies of error in the National Health Interview Survey. [6]
In 1965,Fowler came to work with Morris Axelrod,who was creating a survey organization in Boston to carry out a survey of the Greater Boston Jewish community. In 1968,when that study was completed,the new survey organization moved to The Joint Center for Urban Studies of Harvard and MIT.
In 1971,the research organization moved again and became the Center for Survey Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston. [7] Fowler was appointed the first director of the new center. The center was funded entirely by grants and contracts to the Center staff and by collaborative projects with researchers from other New England universities. Fowler worked on a wide range of projects,including studies of community crime prevention,gambling law enforcement,race relations and housing. Most of his research was focused on survey methodology and health care. [1]
In 2002,he retired from the Center for Survey Research,though he continued to have a part-time relationship there,and became President of the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making,which he helped in founding in the late 1980s. While there,in addition to overseeing the Foundation's work in organizing clinical evidence as part of the creation of decision aids with its partner,Health Dialog,he also oversaw the creation of a program of research on how best to communicate health information to patients,how best to support patients making decisions,and how to integrate shared decision making and the use of decision aids into routine medical care. [8] He served as Foundation President until 2009,continuing as a scientific advisor afterwards until 2017. [5]
Fowler was interviewed as part of the AAPOR Heritage Interview Series that aims to preserve knowledge about the founding of the public opinion research profession and the development of new ideas that have had a lasting effect on the work done in his field. [9]
The problem of survey error was at the center of Fowler’s research work starting with his graduate work at Michigan. He continued to focus on that throughout his career. One example is his work on interviewer-related error. A major study of the role of interviewer training and supervision in error reduction led to a 1989 book,with Tom Mangione,Standardized Survey Interviewing. [10] Another major study with Charles Cannell explored the potential of coding the interaction between interviewers and respondents in pretest interviews as a way of evaluating survey questions. This technique was labeled behavior coding. [11] That work was also a major contributor to his next book on the role of question design in survey error,Improving Survey Questions in 1995. [12] The value of randomized experiments to evaluate alternative versions of questions was also the focus of several of Fowler’s studies. Among his most important contributions are two text books on survey methods. He is the author of Survey Research Methods,currently in its 5th edition since original publication in 1984 [13] and a co-author,with Robert Groves,Mick Couper,James Lepkowski,Eleanor Singer and Roger Tourangeau of Survey Methodology. [14]
Fowler's research has also focused on health studies. In graduate school at Michigan,he was a co-author on several reports about the sources of error in the Health Interview Survey. However,one of his most seminal health-related projects in the early 1970s involved working with John Wennberg. Wennberg had observed wide variations in the rates at which medical services were delivered in adjacent communities in Northern New England. Wennberg thought the differences were driven by differences in physician decision making,but critics thought all the differences had to be due to differences in the people living in the communities. Fowler and Wennberg did a survey study of residents of 6 communities that differed widely in the rates at which they received health care. The study showed that the patient characteristics could not account for the differences in care:the populations were all virtually the same with respect to health status,access to care and how well their medical needs were being met. Hence,the only conclusion was that health care providers were practicing medicine very differently from one community to another. [15]
Next came a series of studies applying survey methods to the measurement of the effect of medical treatments on patients. The most influential of these was a study of patients in Maine who were surgically treated for Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (BPH),which causes problems with urination as men age. Fowler and his colleagues applied survey methods in new ways to assess the extent to which men benefitted from surgical treatment. [16] While they found many patients had their symptoms improved,their most important finding was that men differed greatly in the extent to which the same level of symptoms bothered them and how they felt about the side effects of surgery. How they felt about their symptoms was a key factor in how much 'good' they got from surgery. This work lay the foundation for their work on the importance of informing and involving patients in treatment decisions so that they could play a meaningful role in deciding what was best for them as individuals. Among the most enduring and widely used products of the work on BPH was the development of the American Urological Association Symptom Index. [17]
Fowler also applied the measurement approaches used in the study of BPH to the treatment of other medical conditions including benign uterine conditions,AIDS and prostate cancer. [18] [19] Among these studies a particularly important result was the finding from a national survey of Medicare patients who had had surgery for prostate cancer that complications,which include urinary incontinence and sexual dysfunction,were occurring at much higher rates than had previously been thought. [20]
Out of the work on patient preferences and treatment outcomes came a concern about how medical decisions are made. In his work with the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making,Fowler initiated three national surveys to take a look at how medical decisions were actually being made by representative samples of patients. The first such survey was conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan; [21] the second was done in collaboration with researchers at Dartmouth Medical School;and the third by researchers at the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making. The surveys,taken together,showed the gaps in how well patients understood issues relevant to decisions about their treatments and how little they were involved in making many of those decisions. [22] [23]
In the late 1960s,the Urban Observatory Program undertook a survey project to collect comparable data about citizen’s views of their city services and functioning of the governments in ten major American cities. Fowler was the leader of the survey effort for that project and wrote a book describing the results. [24]
In the late 1970s,there was an experimental effort in the City of Hartford to see if changing the physical environment of an urban neighborhood could help reduce crime and fear. Fowler led the evaluation of that project. The results showed that physical design and community cohesion could reduce crime and fear. [25]
Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), also called prostate enlargement, is a noncancerous increase in size of the prostate gland. Symptoms may include frequent urination, trouble starting to urinate, weak stream, inability to urinate, or loss of bladder control. Complications can include urinary tract infections, bladder stones, and chronic kidney problems.
Palliative care is an interdisciplinary medical caregiving approach aimed at optimizing quality of life and mitigating suffering among people with serious, complex, and often terminal illnesses. Within the published literature, many definitions of palliative care exist. The World Health Organization (WHO) describes palliative care as "an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial, and spiritual". In the past, palliative care was a disease specific approach, but today the WHO takes a broader patient-centered approach that suggests that the principles of palliative care should be applied as early as possible to any chronic and ultimately fatal illness. This shift was important because if a disease-oriented approach is followed, the needs and preferences of the patient are not fully met and aspects of care, such as pain, quality of life, and social support, as well as spiritual and emotional needs, fail to be addressed. Rather, a patient-centered model prioritizes relief of suffering and tailors care to increase the quality of life for terminally ill patients.
A bone tumor is an abnormal growth of tissue in bone, traditionally classified as noncancerous (benign) or cancerous (malignant). Cancerous bone tumors usually originate from a cancer in another part of the body such as from lung, breast, thyroid, kidney and prostate. There may be a lump, pain, or neurological signs from pressure. A bone tumor might present with a pathologic fracture. Other symptoms may include fatigue, fever, weight loss, anemia and nausea. Sometimes there are no symptoms and the tumour is found when investigating another problem.
Transurethral resection of the prostate is a urological operation. It is used to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). As the name indicates, it is performed by visualising the prostate through the urethra and removing tissue by electrocautery or sharp dissection. It has been the standard treatment for BPH for many years, but recently alternative, minimally invasive techniques have become available. This procedure is done with spinal or general anaesthetic. A triple lumen catheter is inserted through the urethra to irrigate and drain the bladder after the surgical procedure is complete. The outcome is considered excellent for 80–90% of BPH patients. The procedure carries minimal risk for erectile dysfunction, moderate risk for bleeding, and a large risk for retrograde ejaculation.
Doxazosin, sold under the brand names Cardura among others, is a medication used to treat symptoms of benign prostatic hyperplasia and hypertension. For high blood pressure, it is a less preferred option. It is taken by mouth.
Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of disease that will never cause symptoms or death during a patient's ordinarily expected lifetime and thus presents no practical threat regardless of being pathologic. Overdiagnosis is a side effect of screening for early forms of disease. Although screening saves lives in some cases, in others it may turn people into patients unnecessarily and may lead to treatments that do no good and perhaps do harm. Given the tremendous variability that is normal in biology, it is inherent that the more one screens, the more incidental findings will generally be found. For a large percentage of them, the most appropriate medical response is to recognize them as something that does not require intervention; but determining which action a particular finding warrants can be very difficult, whether because the differential diagnosis is uncertain or because the risk ratio is uncertain.
Prostatic congestion is a medical condition of the prostate gland that happens when the prostate becomes swollen by excess fluid and can be caused by prostatosis. The condition often results in a person with prostatic congestion feeling the urge to urinate frequently. Prostatic congestion has been associated with prostate disease, which can progress due to age. Oftentimes, the prostate will grow in size which can lead to further problems, such as prostatitis, enlarged prostate, or prostate cancer.
End-of-life care (EOLC) refers to health care provided in the time leading up to a person's death. End-of-life care can be provided in the hours, days, or months before a person dies and encompasses care and support for a person's mental and emotional needs, physical comfort, spiritual needs, and practical tasks.
The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is "an independent panel of experts in primary care and prevention that systematically reviews the evidence of effectiveness and develops recommendations for clinical preventive services". The task force, a volunteer panel of primary care clinicians with methodology experience including epidemiology, biostatistics, health services research, decision sciences, and health economics, is funded, staffed, and appointed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
John E. "Jack" Wennberg is the pioneer and leading researcher of unwarranted variation in the healthcare industry. In four decades of work, Wennberg has documented the geographic variation in the healthcare that patients receive in the United States. In 1988, he founded the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School to address that unwarranted variation in healthcare.
Unwarranted variation in health care service delivery refers to medical practice pattern variation that cannot be explained by illness, medical need, or the dictates of evidence-based medicine. It is one of the causes of low value care often ignored by health systems.
Lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) refer to a group of clinical symptoms involving the bladder, urinary sphincter, urethra and, in men, the prostate. The term is more commonly applied to men—over 40% of older men are affected—but lower urinary tract symptoms also affect women. The condition is also termed prostatism in men, but LUTS is preferred.
Chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS), previously known as chronic nonbacterial prostatitis, is long-term pelvic pain and lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) without evidence of a bacterial infection. It affects about 2–6% of men. Together with IC/BPS, it makes up urologic chronic pelvic pain syndrome (UCPPS).
Outcomes research is a branch of public health research which studies the end results of the structure and processes of the health care system on the health and well-being of patients and populations. According to one medical outcomes and guidelines source book - 1996, Outcomes research includes health services research that focuses on identifying variations in medical procedures and associated health outcomes. Though listed as a synonym for the National Library of Medicine MeSH term "Outcome Assessment ", outcomes research may refer to both health services research and healthcare outcomes assessment, which aims at Health technology assessment, decision making, and policy analysis through systematic evaluation of quality of care, access, and effectiveness.
Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is the direct comparison of existing health care interventions to determine which work best for which patients and which pose the greatest benefits and harms. The core question of comparative effectiveness research is which treatment works best, for whom, and under what circumstances. Engaging various stakeholders in this process, while difficult, makes research more applicable through providing information that improves patient decision making.
Shared decision-making in medicine (SDM) is a process in which both the patient and physician contribute to the medical decision-making process and agree on treatment decisions. Health care providers explain treatments and alternatives to patients and help them choose the treatment option that best aligns with their preferences as well as their unique cultural and personal beliefs.
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also called myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) or ME/CFS, is a debilitating long-term medical condition. People with ME/CFS experience lengthy flare-ups of the illness following relatively minor physical or mental activity. This is known as post-exertional malaise (PEM) and is the hallmark symptom of the illness. Other core symptoms are a greatly reduced ability to do tasks that were previously routine, severe fatigue, and sleep disturbances. The baseline fatigue in ME/CFS does not improve much with rest. Orthostatic intolerance, memory and concentration problems, and chronic pain are common. About a quarter of people with ME/CFS are severely affected and unable to leave their bed or home.
The Skid Row Cancer Study was a study conducted by urologist Perry Hudson on the homeless men of the Bowery, in Lower Manhattan. In the 1950s and 1960s, Hudson went to skid row, to convince men to volunteer for his study. More than 1,200 men were promised a clean bed, three free square meals a day and free medical care if they were found to have prostate cancer. Hudson's early experience with seeing patients dying at a tuberculosis hospital he was working at led him to develop an interest in prostate cancer. His discovery about the lack of information regarding treatment for the disease and medical training for rectal exams needed to diagnose the disease drove him to pursue research in prostate cancer.
If medical treatment is not effective, surgery may need to be performed for benign prostatic hyperplasia.
Prostate steam treatment (Rezum), also called water vapor thermal therapy (WVTT), is a minimally invasive surgical procedure for men with lower urinary tract symptoms resulting from prostate enlargement. It uses injections of steam to remove obstructive prostate tissue from the inside of the organ without injuring the prostatic part of the urinary tube.