Dr. Robert Saunders

Dr. Robert Saunders is the Senior Research Director of Health Care Transformation at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy in Washington, DC. In this role, he directs a portfolio of payment and delivery reform initiatives, which focus on ACOs, alternative payment models for specialty care, new payment and delivery approaches for serious illness care, and translating evidence to policy-relevant options. 

Prior to joining Duke-Margolis, Dr. Saunders was a Senior Director and then Senior Advisor to the President of the National Quality Forum, where he managed a large federally-funded project that provided recommendations on more than 200 quality measures for 20 different federal programs in a period of two months. As Senior Advisor, he directed special projects on topics including data, payment reform, systems engineering, and future of healthcare quality measurement. There, he authored targeted communications to translate the organization’s technical work for a broad audience, including journal perspectives, white papers, and blogs and supported the development of new funding opportunities, including developing relationships with foundations and authoring concept papers and proposals. He was previously Senior Program Officer at the Institute of Medicine and managed health care legislative affairs for Representative Rush D. Holt.