Dr. David Johnson (VA/UCLA Scholar) is a urologic oncology fellow at UCLA who completed urology residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He received his bachelor’s degree in economics at Duke University and his medical degree and master’s in public health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. While pursuing his MPH degree, Dr. Johnson established an ongoing research collaboration in Cuba to study ways to reduce the burden of prostate cancer mortality in a health system with limited resources. He also began work on innovative ways to improve the shared decision-making process for men with localized prostate cancer that he continued into residency. Dr. Johnson focused his research efforts during residency on studying quality and appropriateness of care, overtreatment and overdiagnosis, and surgical outcomes for patients with urologic malignancies. He was honored for his work during residency by receiving the UNC Lineberger Cancer Center’s John William Pope Clinical Fellow Award recognizing outstanding work in clinical cancer research, the UNC Lineberger Cancer Outcomes Research Travel Award, and the British Journal of Urology International’s Coffey-Krane Prize awarded to the urology trainee who contributed the best paper published in the journal in 2014-2015.

Career Interests: Dr. Johnson is interested in combining clinical care of patients with urologic malignancies with system-level redesign towards the “quadruple aim” of improving population health, controlling costs, enhancing the patient experience, and maximizing provider well-being.

Research Interests: As a Scholar, Dr. Johnson plans to continue working with physicians and public health officials in Cuba to implement and study population-level measures to reduce the mortality from prostate cancer. He is also interested in innovative delivery system redesign to better align patient values with treatment decisions and incentive high value, patient-centered care.