Leo Cooney

Leo Cooney is the Humana Foundation Professor Emeritus of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine. A graduate of the College of the Holy Cross and Yale School of Medicine, he joined the Yale faculty in 1976 with the goal of establishing a program in Geriatrics. He was named the Humana Foundation Professor of Geriatric Medicine in 1987 and served as chief of the Section of General Internal Medicine from 1993 to 1999, and as chief of the Section of Geriatric Medicine from 1999 to 2012. 

Dr. Cooney served as president of the Yale New Haven Hospital Medical Staff IPA from 1992 to 2002, as president of the Medical Staff of Yale New Haven Hospital from 2008 to 2010, and is a past president of the American Geriatrics Society. He and his colleagues developed the Resource Utilization Groups, which provided the method by which Medicare reimbursed skilled nursing facilities from 1999 to 2019.

He is the recipient of a number of teaching awards from Yale medical students and resident physicians. In 2014 he received the David J. Leffell Prize for Clinical Excellence, and he became an emeritus professor in 2020.