leader image

Lawrence Kleinman, MD, MPH

Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research
Department of Pediatrics, Rutgers RWJ Medical School

larry.kleinman@rutgers.edu, (617) 699-3357

Dr. Lawrence C. Kleinman is a pioneer and national leader in children’s health. He grew up in New Brunswick and has a BA in History from Rutgers College. His MD, from Wake Forest University, Larry completed Pediatric residency at UConn and served four years in the National Health Services Corps, the first pediatrician to provide care in one of the most medically vulnerable neighborhoods in Connecticut.

Dr. Kleinman received his MPH from UCLA, where he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar. Considering it the ‘new advocacy’ he began to develop expertise in measuring and improving health care quality. His paper questioning the appropriateness of tympanostomy tube surgery in children was a landmark, and his paper on assessing the health of the homeless in the field was named Article of the Year by AcademyHealth. Dr. Kleinman joined Dr. Charles Homer at Boston Children’s Hospital, where they helped to pioneer child health services research and the measurement and improvement of quality care for children.

Dr. Kleinman spent a decade innovating as an entrepreneur: in Disease Management; as CMO for a venture funded medical informatics company, working with a community hospital system, and developing Quality Matters, Inc as a boutique consulting firm. Dr .Kleinman re-entered academia as Vice Chair of Population Health Science and Policy at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he created a Primary Care Research T32 program, assumed leadership of the Community Engagement Core of their CTSA, and was co-Director of the Masters and PhD programs in clinical investigation. He was PI for the CAPQuaM, a national consortium funded ($8M) as an AHRQ-CMS CHIPRA Center of Excellence in the federal Pediatric Quality Measures Program. Dr. Kleinman also developed an innovative analytical method that improves researchers’ ability to estimate the impact of an intervention.

The opportunity to integrate child health services research and policy to benefit the strategic needs of a distressed community and the institutions that serve it led Dr. Kleinman to Case Western Reserve University and the UH Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, where Dr. Kleinman directed the Center for Child Health and Policy (CCHP) and served as Frederick C Robbins, MD Professor in Child and Adolescent Health. He helped to lead efforts to integrate behavioral and primary care and to systematically consider social determinants of health in the planning and delivery of health care.

Dr. Kleinman returned home to Rutgers University in February 2019 to serve as Vice Chair for Academic Development and to help to develop a new Division of Population Health, Quality, and Implementation Sciences (PopQuIS) within the Department of Pediatrics at Rutgers RWJ Medical School.