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Adjunct Professor
University of Texas Medical Branch
I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.
Dr. Eschbach is a demographer and sociologist. He was a professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Geriatrics and a Senior Fellow at the Sealy Center on Aging at the University of Texas Medial Branch in Galveston, TX. He is currently adjunct professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Population Health. Dr. Eschbach’s primary areas of research specialization are investigation of the causes and solutions to disparities in health, healthcare access, and healthcare outcomes among racial, ethnic, and socio-economic groups. In particular, his research has focused on the interplay of geographic location and local social/environmental context as a mediator of disparities in population health and in healthcare outcomes. He has extensive experience with the U.S. federal statistical systems, including data from Census, the National Vital Statistics System, data collection by the National Center for Health Statistics, as well as more specialized working data sets produced by agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Internal Revenue Service, and state and county tax assessors. Dr. Eschbach served a term as State Demographer of Texas (2008-2010) by appointment of the state’s governor. He has worked with large administrative databases, vital registration and census data, and has published extensively on data quality issues concerning inferences about patterns of health and health care use using such data. Dr. Eschbach has experience with geographic information system technology to integrate contextual data sources with registry and administrative claims records, to study the study of small area variations in health and health care outcomes. He was the principal investigator for a component research project of an NCI-funded P-50 Center on Population Health and Health Disparities. This project examined social-contextual influences on cancer risks, incidence, treatment, and mortality. Dr. Eschbach was principal investigator of the knowledge dissemination core for the multi-university consortium center for research on Comparative Effectiveness Research on Cancer in Texas. A significant focus of his current research has been on understanding the role of medical care access and quality in maintaining disparities among Hispanics and non-Hispanics Whites and Blacks.
