Fadia Tohme Shaya is Professor at the University of Maryland Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine, and Director of Informatics at Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, University of Maryland Baltimore. Dr. Tohme Shaya also serves as Director, Center on Drugs and Public Policy and Executive Director, Behavioral Health Research Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore. She serves as adjunct faculty at the American University of Beirut and has held appointments at the Health Planning Commission in Paris, France.
Dr. Tohme Shaya leads digital transformation in health services research, and has built research and training capacity to support all stages of drug and medical device development, evaluation and policy, from pre-clinical trials to post-marketing surveillance. She develops comparative effectiveness, clinical, economic, policy, decision analytic and budget impact models. Working with Medicare and Medicaid programs and commercial plans; she helps inform safety and effectiveness assessments and coverage decisions. Her extra-mural research is supported by federal, state, commercial and foundation grants and contracts. She keeps a balance of interests in research, policy, academic and government affairs, serving on the Faculty Senate, the Maryland Higher Education Commission, Editorial Advisory Boards, and as referee for peer-reviewed journals, with over 500 papers reviewed, and over 200 published.
Dr. Tohme Shaya’s work promotes policy, research and practice that improve access to care, drugs and medical devices, optimize health care quality for vulnerable populations, and eliminate health disparities. Her work addresses the translation and dissemination of research into policy and practice with a strong focus on state policy. She collaborates with State Medicaid programs, has served as Chair of the Maryland Governor’s Advisory Board on Hepatitis C and Diseases of the Liver, is a member of the Maryland State Behavioral Health Advisory Committee and the State Epidemiological Outcomes Workgroup. In that role, she studies epidemiological indicators of substance use and its consequences, and diffuses the information in culturally competent messages to public health departments, the public and other stakeholders across the state. Using the Strategic Prevention Framework, she leads teams across the state to translate data into information, to help in needs assessment, capacity building, strategic planning, implementation and evaluation, then policy development. Her programmatic work is largely funded by prevention funds from SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) through the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH); she leads the Substance Abuse Prevention Block Grant, the Partnership for Success and Strategic Planning Framework for the non-medical use of prescription drugs, specifically addressing the opioid epidemic.
She has used innovative methods and analytic approaches to leverage existing and emerging data sources: linking Maryland hospital utilization, Medicare Chronic Condition Warehouse, Medicaid, and the National Survey on Drugs Use and Health data for example. Her current work helps build the state-level infrastructure for the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), linking data to utilization and clinical data sources. As well, she is leveraging non-traditional data sources (e.g. highway safety administration, criminal justice, housing) to inform the evaluation of policies and practices. In reaching out to young audiences, she reaches out to non-traditional groups, such as Sesame Street Workshop® for example.
As a long-time and active member of AcademyHealth, Dr. Tohme Shaya is committed to the organization and its goals to strengthen health services research and promote its use in health policy and practice. She has consistently contributed to the Organization’s meetings, and Committees. For over fifteen years, she has served different terms as a member of study sections at the Agency for Health Quality Research (AHRQ) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She serves on the Johns Hopkins University Community Advisory Board, Center to Eliminate Cardiovascular Disparities, on the Advisory Board of the Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education at Xavier University Louisiana in New Orleans, and is a Leadership and Research Fellow of the American Academy of Colleges of Pharmacy. She is a member of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) funded Maryland Center for Regulatory Science and Innovation (CERSI) and is a lead on the Patient Preference Information Group, spanning all FDA funded CERSIs, setting the structure at the FDA for building infrastructure and developing methods to support and incorporate patient input into drug and device development and safety and effectiveness evaluation.
She has spearheaded the quality outcomes analysis for the State of Maryland Patient Centered Medical Home, and directed the Maryland Learning Collaborative, helping design and implement practice-based training in the state. Dr. Tohme Shaya continues to work with State Medicaid and other programs, Federally Qualified Health Centers, has served as Chair of the Maryland Governor’s Advisory Board on Hepatitis C and Diseases of the Liver, as Officer for the Delmarva Foundation for Medical Care, the Delmarva Foundation and the Quality Health Foundation Boards and as a member of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Clinical Pharmacology Advisory Panel. She is an invited reviewer for the Community Based Participatory Research and Health Disparities study sections at the National Institute of Health and for the study section of the French “Institute National du Cancer” (INC) in France.
Dr. Shaya obtained her PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, her doctoral health economics degree (DESS) from the Sorbonne University Paris-IX Dauphine in France and her Master’s in Public Health (MPH) and BSc in Chemistry-Biology from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. She also completed training in health economics at the University of Manchester in England, and finally, two comprehensive executive training programs, at Harvard Business School (GMP - General Management Program) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (ACE - Advanced Certificate for Executives in Management, Innovation and Technology).
AcademyHealth Board of Directors Nomination Committee Member 2017 - 2020