Dr. Carey is a Research Professor of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and is the past-director of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research there. Dr. Carey is on the faculty of the University’s AHRQ-funded T-32 Pre- and Post-Doctoral Training Program in Health Services Research. He is a senior advisor the RTI-UNC Evidence-Based Practice Center. His current activities include ongoing work in comparative effectiveness research, examination of treatment patterns and clinical effectiveness in chronic musculoskeletal problems, and he serves in the leadership of UNC’s NIH Clinical Translation Science Award (CTSA) program, focusing on type 2 translational research and cross-disciplinary collaboration. He has received funding support for investigator-initiated research and training grants from AHRQ, NIAMS, NCMHD, HRSA and foundations to conduct outcomes studies, secondary data analyses, and literature syntheses. He works with medical students, doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows.
Dr. Carey joined the faculty at UNC in 1985. He was chief of the Division of General Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology in the School of Medicine from 1990-2000, and served as the director of the Sheps Center from 2000-16. The Sheps Center manages more than 60 projects at a time with a budget of more than $19 million, houses two training grants and conducts policy-relevant research on access, quality, and efficiency of care. He has extensive experience in interdisciplinary and translational research across multiple disciplines, as well as in research administration.
Dr. Carey has published more than 160 peer-reviewed articles and conducted research in numerous content areas, including the epidemiology and utilization patterns in chronic back and neck pain, determinants of work disability, end-of-life issues including utilization of gastric feeding tubes, and health disparities in chronic pain treatment. Dr. Carey has been recognized with the John Eisenberg Award for mentoring from AHRQ, the American College of Physicians’ Laureate Award, and is past chair of AHRQ’s Health Care, Quality and Effectiveness Research (HCQER) Study Section.
Dr. Carey received a medical degree from the University of Vermont and trained in internal medicine at Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. After completing clinical training, he practiced primary care in rural Kentucky for four years as medical director of a health center, and then received additional training and a master’s degree in public health through the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at UNC.