Hardin Appointed to Alabama Quality Assurance Foundation Board
Dr. J. Michael Hardin, associate dean for research at the Culverhouse College of Commerce, has been appointed to the board of the Alabama Quality Assurance Foundation, a nonprofit, physician-sponsored organization designated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) as Alabama’s Medicare Quality Improvement Organization (QIO).
AQAF works to improve the quality of health care by promoting cooperation with physicians and providers, by monitoring and interpreting patterns of health care and sharing the resulting information.
The AQAF Board of Directors has 15 members; seven physicians, six non-physicians, and two consumers. Each director serves a three-year term, and can serve no more than two three-year terms.
“I am very honored to have been chosen to serve on the AQAF board,” Hardin said. “The issues facing Medicare and Medicaid deeply impact each of us and it is exciting to be associated with an organization that has such an excellent track record and reputation in health care quality improvement.
AQAF has received the 2007 Alabama Quality Award, the state’s honor for quality and performance excellence. AQAF was recognized with the Level 2 Award- Progress Toward Excellence in the small business category. This is AQAF’s second Alabama Quality Award.
The AQAF Performance Measurement System evolved out of several health care quality endeavors including health care quality improvement projects initiated by AQAF as the quality improvement organization for Alabama. Measures and indicators derived from these programs provide a data driven approach to monitoring the quality of health care and its outcomes. These measures are based on clinical practice guidelines, scientific literature, and/or clinical consensus and are clinically validated and tested for accuracy and reliability.
“Mike Hardin will be a valuable addition to the AQAF board,” said J. Barry Mason, dean of the Culverhouse College of Commerce. “His background and research interests will fit perfectly with the organization’s approach to ensuring quality health care to all citizens.”
Hardin’s areas of expertise include data mining and knowledge discovery, data visualization, data warehousing, machine learning, statistical classification models, data management and collection methodologies, research design, informatics, the applications of statistical methodologies in the study of aging, and biostatistics.
Hardin has authored or co-authored over 80 papers in various journals including the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the American Journal of Epidemiology, the American Statistician, the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, and Communications in Statistics. He is the author or co-author of over 150 abstracts presented at national meetings and has given over 75 invited lectures or talks. He is the author of several book chapters dealing with database design and decision support systems. Hardin often serves as a consultant to healthcare organizations in the areas of data mining, sampling, and program integrity. Additionally, he is an instructor and consultant for the SAS Institute in the areas of data mining and time series analysis.