Bio: Jack Tu, a 2003-04 Canadian Associate of the Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellowships in Health Care Policy, currently holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Health Services Research at the University of Toronto. He is a senior scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences and a Professor of Medicine, Public Health Sciences, Health Policy, Management, & Evaluation at the University of Toronto, as well as a staff physician in the division of general internal medicine at Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Science Centre. His research interests include quality of acute myocardial infarction care, quality of carotid endarterectomy care, risk assessment in cardiac surgery, effectiveness of congestive heart failure guidelines in Ontario and international comparisons of health care systems. He initiated and now oversees the Canadian Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Team, a national initiative to measure and improve the quality of cardiac care in Canada, involving 30 investigators from across Canada. Tu serves on numerous health care committees and supervises students completing their master or doctorate theses. He has lectured to research associates at conferences in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 1998, he was granted a Medical Research Council of Canada Scholar award. He earned his M.D. from the University of Western Ontario, M.S. in clinical epidemiology from the University of Toronto, and Ph.D. in health policy from Harvard University.
Project: International Variations in Rates of Carotid Endarterectomy
Description: Tu conducted an international comparison on temporal changes in the rates of carotid surgery--a procedure demonstrated in the 1990s to be effective in reducing risk of stroke--in eight jurisdictions (Ontario, Quebec from Canada; the U.S.; Oxford, England; Perth, Australia; Norway; Finland; Sweden; and Israel). He used administrative databases from each region to calculate population-based rates.