Dale Shaller is Principal of Shaller Consulting Group, a health policy analysis and management consulting practice based in Stillwater, Minnesota. He has devoted nearly three decades to the design, implementation, and evaluation of health care quality measurement and improvement programs, with a special focus on listening to the voice of the patient and promoting methods for engaging consumers in managing their health and health care.

His work on measuring and improving the experience of patients and families has been based in the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) program funded by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. He has served as a member of the Harvard and Yale CAHPS research teams for 10 years, working on patient experience survey design, measurement, and reporting issues. He has directed the National CAHPS Benchmarking Database since its inception in 1998 and is a co-author of The CAHPS Improvement Guide and other articles related to strategies for improving the patient experience as measured by CAHPS.

Dale’s work with the CAHPS program has led to numerous related projects aimed at measuring and improving patient-centered care. He currently serves as the Chair of the Patient Experience Committee for the national Aligning Forces for Quality program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He has been a principal investigator on several projects funded by the Picker Institute, including a series of case studies documenting factors contributing to high-performing patient- and family-centered medical centers. He also has written a series of reports on consumer decision-making in health care, and was a founding developer of the TalkingQuality website that provides practical guidance to developers of health care quality reporting tools for consumers.

Dale has provided strategic planning and technical assistance to over 50 public and private sector purchasing groups and coalitions interested in collecting and using health care performance information. He was the founding Executive Director of the Minnesota Health Data Institute, a public-private partnership created by the Minnesota Legislature in 1993 with the overall mission of improving the quality and efficiency of health care services in Minnesota. Prior to his work with the Institute, he served as senior consultant to the nation’s first voluntary, collaborative effort among employers, hospitals, and physicians to create a community-wide hospital quality measurement system in Cleveland, Ohio.

Before establishing his independent consulting practice in 1989, Mr. Shaller was with the Center for Policy Studies in Minneapolis for seven years. Prior to his work at the Center, he was a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in Latin America where he worked on problems of rural development.

Dale has served on many national health care advisory panels and is a frequent writer and presenter on health care quality and patient engagement strategies. He received his B.A. from Kalamazoo College and holds a Master's degree in public affairs from the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.