David Cella
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David Cella is a licensed clinical psychologist and Professor at Northwestern University, United States. He has been research-focused for most of the last 25 years, following 15 years of clinical practice. His interest is in promoting patient-centered healthcare by working with health systems to integrate standardized patient reported outcome assessment into the clinical encounter to aid in early identification of issues that emerge in chronic disease management, promote shared decision-making, and enhance patient empowerment.
David Cella joins the Paris IAS in September 2025 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Patient reported outcomes; health-related quality of life assessment; healthcare delivery; psychology; implementation; health services research.
Can Healthcare be Humanized?
Humanistic patient care will be defined as “patient-centered care” today. This is health care that moves away from considering patients to be passive recipients of a service provided, to active participants in co-producing health through education and counseling as needed, shared decision making at inflection points in the person’s trajectory, and careful consideration of economic and cultural factors that influence human values vis-à-vis health. Abundant research evidence in chronic disease settings shows that routine monitoring of patient symptoms and function improves satisfaction with treatment, reduces suffering, and in some cases even lengthens life. And yet, these research findings are rarely implemented in clinical practices outside of the research setting. In essence, we have a situation in which healthcare professionals are not successfully transitioning care to be truly patient-centered, despite their best intentions.
This project will identify the barriers to achieving this by summarizing the historical tradition of the medical model, the legacy of systemic and unconscious bias as they affect communication and decision-making, and the resistance of health systems to the use of formal assessments of patient self-reported health status. The work product will focus on classifying the institutional, clinician, and patient barriers that must be overcome to accomplish truly patient-centered care, and summarizing recommendations.
Key publications
. "Systematic symptom management in the IMPACT Consortium: rationale and design for 3 effectiveness-implementation trials". JNCI Cancer Spectrum. 7(6), December 2023.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jncics/pkad073
"Shared decision-making and disease management in advanced cancer and chronic kidney disease using patient-reported outcome dashboards". Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 31(10): 2190–2201, October 2024.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocae180
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