Ira Wilson, MD
Biography
Dr. Wilson is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health, as well as Professor of Medicine at the Alpert Medical School. Dr. Wilson graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. He completed a Primary Care Internal Medicine residency program at Beth Israel in Boston, MA, where he then served as Chief Medical Resident. He was a General Medicine Fellow and received an Sc.M. in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. In 1993 he joined the faculty at Tufts Medical Center where he rose to the rank of Professor in 2006. In 2010, he moved to Brown to become Chair of the Department of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the School of Public Health. Dr. Wilson is the Co-Director of the Professional Development Core of the Providence/Boston Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) and Director of the Professional Development Key Component of the Rhode Island Institutional Development Award in Clinical and Translational Research (IDeA-CTR). He has two active R01 awards from NIMH to study aspects of HIV and aging.
Dr. Wilson’s main research interests are in how structural features of healthcare systems affect the interactions between physicians and patients, and how those interactions in turn affect patients' health outcomes. He has studied patients with chronic conditions such as the elderly, persons with depression, and persons with HIV. In recent years, his research has focused on understanding and improving the quality of medication prescribing and medication management, the development and testing of interventions to improve adherence, and aspects of HIV and aging. He is national Co-Chair of the Behavioral Science Advisory Group that provides input to the five international HIV clinical trials groups funded by the NIH Division of AIDS, and a member of the National Board of the HIV Medicine Association. In 2014, he was appointed by Governor Raimondo to be Co-Chair of the “Working group to Reinvent Medicaid” in Rhode Island, and has been a member of a number of subsequent groups appointed by the Governor to reform health care in the state.