Malcolm Maclure

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Malcolm Maclure

Dr. Maclure is a health services epidemiologist specializing in methodology.

He is principal investigator of a Chart Insert Pilots Study (ChIPS) in British Columbia, a 5-province evaluation of academic detailing (educational outreach to physicians by prescribing advisors) and a 5-year Interdisciplinary Team grant from CIHR called ‘Drug Policy Futures: Forecasting, Financing, Governance, Public Values and Evidence.’
With colleagues at Harvard Medical School, he is developing a randomized trial of quality improvement in primary care in collaboration with the BC Ministry of Health and the BC Medical Association. The trial is funded by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Dr. Maclure’s career has moved gradually from ‘micro’ to ‘macro’ sciences. At Oxford, he studied biochemistry. At Harvard, he studied and conducted chronic disease epidemiology. His teaching shifted to health services epidemiology during the decade he served in the BC Ministry of Health in the 1990s. His current investigations mainly concern pharmaceutical policy research and knowledge translation studies.

Among epidemiologists, he is best known for inventing the case-crossover study design to study triggers of acute events. In health services and policy research, he is increasingly known for inventing camouflaged contacting (a method of using administrative databases to contact patients while preserving data privacy) and developing low-cost randomized policy trials (the use of randomized delays in implementation to enable rigorous evaluation with central administrative databases.)