Biography

Robert I. Field is a nationally recognized expert in health care regulation and its role in implementing public policy. He holds a joint appointment as professor of health management and policy at Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health.

Field is the author of “Mother of Invention: How the Government Created ‘Free-Market’ Health Care,” published in 2013 by Oxford University Press, which presents a historical overview of government programs in creating and maintaining the health care system and places health reform in the context of an ongoing evolutionary process. He is also the author of “Health Care Regulation in America: Complexity, Confrontation and Compromise,” a comprehensive overview of health care regulation, also published by Oxford University Press.

His recent scholarly work has focused on health reform and its effects on the structure of the health care system, ethical issues in vaccines and policy implications of genetic databases. His work has appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Villanova Law Review, Drexel Law Review, Health Affairs, Vaccine and the Journal of Clinical Oncology. He writes a blog for the Philadelphia Inquirer on health policy, entitled “The Field Clinic,” which features 14 prominent Philadelphia health care leaders as regular contributors.

Before joining the Drexel faculty, Field founded and chaired the Department of Health Policy and Public Health at University of Sciences in Philadelphia, where he was also professor of health policy. Previously, he led business planning and development for the primary care network of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. He has also conducted health policy research at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the Center for Law and Health Sciences at Boston University, practiced health law with the Philadelphia firm of Ballard Spahr, LLP, and directed public policy research for Cigna Corporation.

Field earned his JD at the Columbia University School of Law, where he was associate editor of the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, his master of public health at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and his PhD in psychology at Boston University.