Mr. Fullam joined the Strategic Planning Dept at Rush in 2002. He now shares his time between this dept as Senior Director of Marketing Research and the graduate Health Systems Management programs.
He began working with the predecessor of the HCAHPS survey program with the Picker-Commonwealth project in 1989 at the University of Chicago Hospitals. He works on a number of projects at Rush that touch on the intersection of the patient experience, consumer perceptions and quality.
He has severed on the CAHPS Database Advisory Board, the national body that advises on the family of these national patient surveys including HCAHPS and CG-CHAHPS. He has been an active participant in University HealthSystems Consortium / Vizient activities and events related to patient satisfaction. He has chaired several UHC conferences and research projects over the years related to improving the patient experience at academic medical centers.
In his faculty role at Rush University, he works to combine the academic and clinical missions through research and teaching. His research interests on the patient experience have covered the topics of reducing the risk of lawsuits; the impact of HCAHPS; improved dr-pt communication, the effect of the built environment; and the impact of reduced residency hours. He is co-author of chapter on survey patients in the 2014 John Wiley & Son publication,”Handbook of Health Survey Methods.” Since 2015 he has taught a graduate course on the patient experience at Rush University.