NCHS Appoints New Leaders for National Health Surveys

For Immediate Release

Contact: NCHS Press Office (301) 436-7551

The National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has named new directors for its major, national surveys, bringing new leadership to the programs which monitor the nation’s health. These appointments were made on the retirement of long-term previous directors and after extensive nationwide recruitment efforts.

Dr. Jane F. Gentleman has been appointed Director of the Division of Health Interview Statistics, which conducts a large-scale annual household interview survey gathering data on a wide array of health topics including essential measures of health status, health behaviors and the use of health services. Dr. Gentleman comes to NCHS from Statistics Canada where she was Assistant Director of Analytical Methods in the Social Survey Methods Division, and where she also served as Chief of the Health and Vital Statistics Studies Section and Editor-in-Chief of “Health Reports.” She has a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Waterloo where she was later on the faculty in the Department of Statistics for a number of years. She has served in leadership positions on many scientific committees with both the U.S. and Canadian Governments, academia and several professional societies. She has made outstanding contributions to the development of innovative statistical methodologies for analyzing and presenting health data. At NCHS, she will oversee a program which is moving into new areas such as adapting national data collection systems to meet state-based information needs as well as taking a central role in data coordination at the national level.

The rapidly evolving area of health care delivery is monitored by NCHS’s National Health Care Survey and Dr. Linda K. Demlo is the newly appointed Director of the program. As Director of the Division of Health Care Statistics, she is responsible for surveys of health care utilization in a variety of settings, including hospitals, physician offices, emergency rooms and outpatient departments, nursing homes and home health and hospice care. Prior to her NCHS appointment, Dr. Demlo was Director of the Office of Scientific Affairs at the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, where earlier she created the Office of Program Development and also served as the Acting Director of the Center for Quality Measurement and Improvement. She also held senior positions at the General Accounting Office, the Health Care Financing Administration, the Institute of Medicine and the University of Iowa, where she directed a university-wide center for health services research. She holds a Ph.D. in Health Services Research/Administration from Yale. She is recognized for contributions in health care quality measurement and health services research and was selected in the first group of Fellows named by the Association for Health Services Research.

Drs. Gentleman and Demlo join Dr. Raynard S. Kington who was earlier appointed Director of the Division of Health Examination Statistics, which conducts the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), one of the nation’s most comprehensive health surveys, including health interviews, standardized health examinations, and laboratory testing. Over the years, the NHANES programs have provided much of what is known about patterns of heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes in the U.S. population as well as tracking infectious disease and providing national reference data on nutrition and physiological measurements. Dr. Kington is directing the program in new areas of data collection in what has now become an annual survey. He has an M.D. degree from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. with an concentration in Health Policy and Economics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to NCHS he was a Senior Scientist at RAND. Dr. Kington has an impressive record of achievement in the study of differences in health among racial and ethnic groups, furthering the understanding of the issues involved and contributing to the development of national health policies.