P. Adam Kelly, PhD, MBA

P. Adam Kelly, PhD, MBA, is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine in the Section and a research health scientist at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System.

Dr. Kelly’s field of academic and professional focus is psychometrics. Dr. Kelly has extensive experience in designing and adapting health outcome measures, surveys, and assessments of intervention efficacy for clinical research studies, and has conducted validation studies of the same types of instruments in diverse patient populations. He is experienced in survey item design, item writing, factor analysis, structural equation modeling and mixed-methods research designs, and is proficient with statistical software including SPSS, LISREL and Winsteps, and with online survey development tools including Qualtrics, REDCap and SurveyMonkey. His expertise also extends to qualitative techniques such as focus groups, key informant interviews, observations, and qualitative coding of text. He is experienced with qualitative data analytic software such as Atlas.ti and Amos.  Prior to joining the Tulane faculty, Dr. Kelly served from 2001-2010 as an Assistant Professor of Medicine and research health scientist at Baylor College of Medicine and the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, both located in Houston, Texas.

Dr. Kelly’s topic of research focus is measurement of health communication, with special emphasis on patient health literacy its impact on communication between patients and their health care providers. In his current and recent studies, Dr. Kelly developed and implemented an innovative computer-based tool for measuring patients' moment-by-moment perceptions of communication with their provider. The data gathered with this tool informed a patient-centered clinical communication skills training course for providers that was implemented and tested at two sites in the VA system.

Dr. Kelly is an independently funded researcher within the VA Health Services Research and Development Service. He was principal investigator of three research studies at the VA and is a VA Career Development Award alumnus. He is currently a co-investigator on two VA research studies, performing psychometric analysis. Dr. Kelly has authored or co-authored over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles and reports to federal agencies on topics in psychometrics and health services research and has led or served as co-investigator on over 30 federal agency or private research grants. He is also a regular or ad-hoc reviewer for over 10 peer-reviewed scientific journals.