Craig Pollack, MD

Dr. Craig Pollack is the Katey Ayers Endowed Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the School of Nursing, and the School of Medicine. His area of clinical expertise is in internal medicine. 

He received his M.D. and completed his residency at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. He performed a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars program. Dr. Pollack also earned an M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.H.S. from the University of California at Berkeley.

• Heart and Vascular Institute
• Hopkins Population Center
• Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center

• Research in the Craig Pollack Lab focuses on cancer prevention and control, particularly prostate cancer. Our work aims to understand how the organization environment of health care affects the type and quality of care that patients receive. Other work investigates the broader social context of health and health care-- specifically housing, financial hardship and socioeconomic status.

Dr. Pollack’s research focuses on two areas.  First, his research investigates social determinants of health and housing policy.  He currently co-leads a NIH-funded project to investigate whether housing mobility is linked with improvement’s in children’s asthma and is principal investigator of a project to link the Moving To Opportunity social experiment with data on health care utilization (funded by RWJF).  Previous research has leveraged a natural experiment to study the impact of mixed income housing on social networks and health (funded by the MacArthur Foundation) and has studied the links between home ownership, foreclosure and health. 

His second line of research focuses on improving the delivery of cancer screening and care .  He is particularly interested in how patient and physician social networks impact decision-making and care coordination.  He co-leads a project investigating the link between physicians’ experiences in their social networks and recommendations for breast cancer screening, and he has been using large datasets to study issues around the adoption of guideline concordant care.  As the Johns Hopkins site lead for the Movember Foundation TrueNTH initiative, he works on multiple projects to improve care for men with prostate cancer.

• Pollack CE, Green HD, Kennedy DP, Griffin BA, Kennedy-Hendricks A, Burkhauser S, Schwartz H, The impact of public housing on social networks:  a natural experiment. American Journal of Public Health, 2014;104(9):1642-9

• Pollack CE, Soulos PR, Herrin J, Xu X, Christakis NA, Forman HP, Yu JB, Killelea BK, Wang SY, Gross CP.  The Impact of Social Contagion on Physician Adoption of Advanced Imaging Tests in Breast Cancer.  Journal of National Cancer Institute.  2017; 109(8): djw330

• Pollack CE, Weissman GE, Lemke KW, Hussey PS, Weiner JP. Patient Sharing among Physicians and Costs of Care: A Network Analytic Approach to Care Coordination Using Claims Data. Journal of General Internal Medicine. 2013;28(3):459-65

• Kennedy-Hendricks A, Schwartz H, Thornton RJ, Griffin BA, Green HD, Kennedy DP, Burkhauser S, Pollack CE. Intergenerational social networks and health behaviors among children living in public housing. American Journal of Public Health. 2015;105(11):2291-7

• Radhakrishnan A, Nowak, SA Parker AM, Visvanathan K, Pollack CE. Provider breast cancer screening recommendations following guideline changes: results of a national survey. JAMA Internal Medicine. 2017; 177(6): 877-8