Celebrating Senior Champions

Grand Champion, Individual

Loren Roth, MD

Loren H. Roth, MD, MPH, is associate senior vice chancellor for Clinical Policy and Planning, Health Sciences, University of Pittsburgh; professor of psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; professor of health policy and management, University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health; and senior advisor, Quality, UPMC Health Plan.

Dr. Roth is the former senior vice president, Quality Care, and chief medical officer of UPMC.

He has been a faculty member of the University of Pittsburgh School of   Medicine and UPMC for 38 years. He is the former chairman of the University of Pittsburgh’s Health Sciences-Wide Panel on Medical Ethics.

A graduate of the Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Yale and Massachusetts General Hospital's psychiatric residency programs, Dr. Roth has conducted seminal research and writing in law and psychiatry, relating to informed consent, patient dangerousness and competency, confidentiality, and ethics in research. He is a past winner of the American Psychiatric Association's prestigious Isaac Ray Award, given for outstanding lifetime career contributions to law and psychiatry.

In 1989, Dr. Roth was the psychiatric team leader of a unique U.S. State Department/American Psychiatric Association/National Institute of Mental Health delegation of 26 psychiatrists, lawyers, and human-rights experts that assessed recent changes in Soviet psychiatry and the status of political prisoners (dissidents) in Soviet mental hospitals. His efforts to improve human rights and eliminate the psychiatric abuse of patients in the former U.S.S.R. have been widely acknowledged.

In his role as senior vice president, Quality Care, and chief medical officer of UPMC (2003 to 2007), Dr. Roth directed quality-improvement activities across the health care system, provided overall supervision for residency training, and worked with University of Pittsburgh faculty and administrators, community hospitals and physicians, and insurers to link UPMC with the southwestern Pennsylvania health care community.

Currently, as associate senior vice chancellor, Center for Policy and Planning, Health Sciences, Dr. Roth works with the deans of the Schools of the Health Sciences to prepare future graduates for a health care environment stressing innovation, accountability, interdisciplinary communication and teamwork, quality, safety, and a lifetime learning process to ensure patients' best interests.

From September 2001 until November 2007, Dr. Roth led all UPMC hazard-preparedness planning efforts. He received the senior vice chancellor’s Extraordinary Service Award in recognition of his efforts in conceptualizing and coordinating the implementation of a biodefense infrastructure for the University of Pittsburgh, UPMC, and the western Pennsylvania community. Dr. Roth is the former chairman of the board of a 100-company “business continuity” coalition, the Pittsburgh Regional Business Coalition for Homeland Security.

Dr. Roth has made seminal contributions to the planning and execution of the curriculum of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He was the originator of the medical school's curriculum for the Patient-Doctor Relationship Block, as well as the Introduction to Being a Physician course for first-year medical students. This innovative course has been taught at the school for the last 19 years. With colleagues, Dr. Roth initiated the medical school's Interdisciplinary Course on Quality and Safety, involving all the Schools of the Health Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Roth twice received the Outstanding Teacher Award from the psychiatric residents of Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC.