Matthew H. Liang

Liang was born in California but grew up in Guangzhou, China. A relative of Liang Qichao and Liang Sicheng, his grandfather originally migrated from the farming village of Jianlong 见龙 , Xinhui District in the province of Guangdong. His father, Ping Yee Liang, graduated from the first western-styled medical school, the Rockefeller-funded Peking Union Medical College[4] in a class of 15 . His mother, Alice Kao, had accompanied a missionary who had suffered a stroke back to Springfield, Massachusetts who helped her go to NYU Nursing School. She became head nurse in the newborn nursery at Johns Hopkins Hospital where she met Ping Yee. The family returned to China, but then fled in 1949 by truck to Macau and then Hong Kong, eventually settling in the United States. He attended public schools and the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute,[5] leaving before graduation to go to Johns Hopkins University.

After Johns Hopkins, he went to Dartmouth Medical School and Harvard Medical School, where he earned his MD in 1969.[1] After house staff training at the University of Minnesota and a locum in the Grenfell Mission, he studied tropical public health and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, earning a MPH in 1972.[1] Afterwards, on the Harvard Medical Service at the Boston City Hospital [6]with the encouragement of Dr. Charles Davidson, he spent part of his residency as the founding internist of a neighborhood health center in Roxbury and worked with Roger Mark, a champion for inner city patients.[5] Mark and Liang developed a Nursing Home Telemedicine system for over 400 residents of five nursing homes and showed that nurse practitioners could provide effective, economic care.[7]

Major Liang served in the US Army Medical Corps. He implemented the Army's algorithm-based physician extender program (AMOSIST),[8] and the first training program in general internal medicine and a chronic disease nurse practitioner program at Walter Reed Hospital.[9] AMOSIST cared for over 30,000 patients a month. He also helped design the computerized hospital information system. After the service, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and a rheumatology fellow with Halsted Holman at Stanford.[10]

In 1977 Liang was recruited to build a new NIH multipurpose arthritis center program at the old Robert Brigham Hospital and as a founding member of the new Division of Primary Care and General Medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham by K. Frank Austen, H. R. Nesson and Eugene Braunwald.[11] The center became focused on population-based research and pursued several lines of etiologic and methodologic research

The burden of illnesses and conditions in a population has traditionally been described in terms of morbidity and mortality and the prevalence and incidence of specific diseases. His group was the first to use function, the final common pathway of all health conditions, as a surrogate and as a means of case-finding for targeting interventions. The concept has been applied to international studies of disability. He demonstrated that functional decline in reverse order the sequence of acquiring function in normal growth and development.

In a randomized trial, they showed that at a small marginal cost, many homebound patients could achieve their functional goals with simple coordinated interventions; a few patients improved dramatically from a bedridden to an independent status. Another study evaluated the Social Security disability determination process for patients with osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus in partnership with the federal agency, to test a more equitable and efficient system that affected over 75,000 subjects with arthritis disability. In a study at the Boston Post Office, they demonstrated that widely-touted safe-lifting programs did not prevent back injuries nor lead to less severe injuries.

The identification of the causative organism of Lyme Disease and its effective treatment were important discoveries, but its long-term course was largely unknown. It continues to be a major public health problem. The group assembled the only prospectively followed group of Lyme disease patients in Nantucket Island to determine its long-term consequences. They also identified the reasons why people did not practice healthy behaviors to avoid tick bites. At a time when a new Lyme vaccine was being withdrawn from the market and rates of disease were continuing to climb the group showed that a novel intervention using street entertainers on the ferry boats to Nantucket prevented the disease in a clinical trial of some 30,000 passengers.

The epidemiology and risk factors for the systemic rheumatic diseases. With Frank Speizer and Walter Willett they established the case-identification methods for the largest cohorts in rheumatic disease epidemiology in the Nurses' and Physicians' Health Studies. They showed that silicone breast implants did not cause connective tissue diseases or gammopathies; that oral contraceptives did not prevent rheumatoid arthritis; and that women risked developing lupus from oral contraceptives and post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy. They provided the first convincing evidence that the anti-phospholipid antibody was a risk factor for thromboembolic disease in healthy men. The group sorted out the effects of lower socioeconomic status and the characteristics associated with it that could be modified in populations with health disparities. They discovered that self-confidence in self-management and self-monitoring was linked to poorer health status, and then showed an intervention to improve self-efficacy could improve the quality of life in patients with lupus.

They were the first group in arthritis and musculoskeletal conditions to apply decision analysis and cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis, goal-attainment scaling, Big Data for the evaluation of health practices and the internet for early diagnosis and referral of polyarthritis. The group developed the methods for determining measurement sensitivity and responsiveness. More than 25 years before the establishment of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute authorized by Congress in 2010, they organized, standardized, validated the first consensus patient-oriented outcome measures in arthritis and musculoskeletal disease and applied them in the evaluation of surgical, medical, rehabilitation interventions and systems of care. In clinical trials they developed the theory, quantitative outcome measures, more efficient and informative trials in multisystem autoimmune diseases - particularly systemic lupus erythematosus .

In one generation, the management of severe burns in children has gone from a uniformly fatal injury to a chronic condition. Starting in the 1990s, Tomkins, Daltroy, Kazis and Liang developed the first standardized patient-oriented outcome measures in survivors of pediatric burns, benchmarked its recovery course, creating opportunities for improving the processes and outcomes of burn management.

In the 80s, Liang and Martin Larson, Lawren Daltroy, and Bob Lew were asked to take responsibility for clinical research training in arthritis and musculoskeletal diseases. The program and others like it became a model for the National Institutes of Health pathway for clinician scientists[12].The trainees came from 8 countries; many went on to become leaders in their own right. Eighteen are full professors.They included Sang-Cheol Bae, Gillian Barclay, Richard Bell, Elizabeth Benito-Garcia, Louis Bessette, Heike Bischoff-Ferrari, Juliet Brause, Elizabeth Brooks, Rowland Chang, Chan-Bum Choi, Michael Corzillius, Karen Costenbader, Paolo dePablo, Axel Finckh, Julia Fridman-Simard, Paul Fortin, Katherine Ginsburg, Nelson Greidanus, Jodi Grosflam, Robert Hartley, Hideki Hashimoto, Mauricio Hernandez-Avilla, Elaine Husni, Maura Iversen, Elizabeth Karlson, Jeffrey N. Katz, Min Kocher, Liz Lingard, Lisa Mandl, Nizar Mohamed, Charles Ratzlaff, Charles Rivest, Celeste Robb-Nicholson, Neal Roberts, Larissa Roux, Jorge Sanchez-Guerrero, Oliver Sangha, Carolyn Schwartz, Nancy Shadick, Daniel Solomon, Steven Stern, Gerold Stucki, John Wade, Tommy Wang, Marc White, They have been recipients of the 2001, 2006, 2007 and 2011 American College of Rheumatology (ACR) Henry Kunkel Awards, the 1988 and 2001 Edward Dubois Awards, the 2013 ACR Award of Distinction for Clinical Research, Outstanding Clinical Scientist (Canada), Outstanding Young Investigator (American Bone and Mineral Society), Outstanding Young Investigator (American Nutrition Society), the 2008 APLAR Distinguished Clinical Scientist, Jean and Linette Warnery Prize, the Hirzel-Callegari Prize, ACR 2005-2008 Clinical Scholar Educator Award, the 2009 Mary Betty Stevens Young Investigator Prize, 2009 DSM Nutrition Award, 2005 US Presidential Lifetime Service Award, President Bush's Council on Service and Civic Participation, Distinguished Scholar from the  National Academy of Physical Therapy Practice, 2011 Distinguished Scholar Award from the ACR/ARHP, and the Lawrence H. Daltroy Fellowship, the 2004 Angela M. Kuo Award of the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America, the 2005 Kappa Delta Award/OREF Clinical Research Award of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the 2015 Prix Docteur Jeffrey Shiroky, the 2018 Wunsch Medical Award, and the 2019 ARP Lifetime Achievement Award.

Patented "polypill," US Patent No. 6,576,256, Treatment of patients at Elevated Cardiovascular Risk with a Combination of a Cholesterol Lowering Agent, an Inhibitor of the Renin-Angiotensin System, and Aspirin and 4 copywritten outcomes instruments, one medical device, and published over 400 papers, books, book chapters,etc.[14]