Gehr Family Center For Health Systems Science And Innovation

Affliates

Connect and Collaborate

Current Affiliates

  • Sarah Axeen, PhD is Director of Data and Analytics at the USC Schaeffer Center and an assistant professor of research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

    Her research focuses on understanding drivers of and evaluating solutions to opioid use and abuse in the United States. She also examines the impact of state-level policies on mental and behavioral healthcare outcomes, and has explored geographic variations in healthcare and the relationship between changes in commercial prices and spending and utilization in Medicare.

    Axeen earned a BA in public policy analysis and politics, cum laude, from Pomona College, and a PhD, specializing in health policy and economics, from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. Her dissertation, “Essays in Opioid Use and Abuse,” won the USC Price Henry Reining Jr. Award for best dissertation written in public policy and management. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the USC Schaeffer Center and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
  • Tiffany Abramson, MD is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Dr. Abramson is board certified in Emergency Medicine and Emergency Medical Services. Since joining the Keck School of Medicine Faculty in 2019, she has worked clinically in the emergency departments at LAC+USC Medical Center and Verdugo Hills Hospital. Dr. Abramson’s research interests involve the intersection of healthcare disparities, resource utilization, and prehospital emergency care with a focus on utilizing mobile integrated health and novel healthcare delivery models to care for vulnerable populations, specifically persons experiencing homelessness.
  • Dr. Belson is Program Director for the M.S. Degree in Healthcare Systems Management Engineering. He has held positions in management and in consulting for over 30 years. He has held management positions with Ernst & Young, IBM and Universal Studios. He is a member of the USC faculty in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Price School. Dr Belson’s business experience includes a start-up business involved in digital media. He has done independent consulting with companies such as Providence HealthCare, Roche Pharmaceutical, and Nissan Automobile Company. He has provided expert testimony involving litigation related to healthcare. Doctor Belson works with many hospitals to improve processes, reduce costs and increase productivity. He has taught Lean methods and performance improvement at over 30 hospitals. In recent years he has worked for the U.S. Veterans Health Administration and the Los Angeles County Department of Healthcare Services. He is currently a contractor for the California Hospital Association and the State of California. Over 10 years ago he organized the Society for Healthcare Professionals (SHIP) which has about 300 members in the Los Angeles area.
  • Elizabeth Burner, MD, MPH, MSci is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. In 2013, Dr. Burner joined the faculty at the Keck School and has worked clinically in the emergency department at the LAC+USC hospital, the Jail Urgent Care based in the LA County Twin Towers Correctional Facility as well as several community hospitals in the Los Angeles area. Dr. Burner’s research interests center on investigating emergent health communication tools to reach health disparity groups, and directing patients to chronic care and medical homes as appropriate. She is committed to engaging patients in healthier lifestyles. She conducts mixed methods research to better understand the viewpoints of marginalized populations, particularly urban Latino immigrants. Her work has been supported by several NIH, institutional and local grants.
  • Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs School of Pharmacy and Professor of Clinical Pharmacy, USC Mann School of Pharmacy

    Dr. Steven Chen is the Chair of the Titus Family Department, one of the School’s two departments. Dr. Chen holds the Hygeia Centennial Chair in Clinical Pharmacy and is an Associate Professor at the USC School of Pharmacy. His current clinical practice role includes the supervision of clinical and consultative pharmacy services to 19 safety net community clinics in Southern California. At these clinics, Dr. Chen oversees teams of clinical pharmacists, pharmacy residents, pharmacy students and pharmacy techs.

    Prior to joining the USC faculty in 1998, Dr. Chen provided administrative and clinical services to Cedars-Sinai Medical Group (CSMG) in Beverly Hills and served as a Faculty-in-Residence at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. From 1994-1998, Dr. Chen served as Clinical and Residency Coordinator at the VA Outpatient Clinic in Los Angeles. Prior to that, he helped develop the Ambulatory Care and Education Program at Sepulveda VA Medical Center also in Los Angeles.

    Dr. Chen’s responsibilities include the provision of disease management and consultative services and coordination of clerkship students at several safety net clinics. Pharmacist-run disease management services provided include asthma, dyslipidemia, diabetes, hypertension, and heart failure. His lecture topics for theS School of Pharmacy and postgraduate education include asthma/chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, arthritis, dyslipidemia, and other cardiovascular diseases.

    Chen received an honorary fellowship of the California Society of Health-System Pharmacists in 2000 and an honorary fellowship of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) in 2001. He received the Best Practices Award from ASHP in 2002, and has NABP certification in dyslipidemia and asthma management. Dr. Chen has received 7 teaching awards from USC students and residents. In 2013, Dr. Chen was awarded the American Pharmacists Association Foundation Pinnacle Award for Individual Achievement.

    Currently, Dr. Chen is part of a team of USC faculty directing $12 million grant-funded research, evaluating the impact of pharmacist-managed patient care services for underserved populations.
  • Dr. Stacey Dusing is the Sykes Family Chair of Pediatric Physical Therapy, Health and Development, a Tenured Associate Professor, and Director of Pediatric Research in the Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy at the University of Southern California where she also directs the Motor Development Laboratory. She is a board-certified pediatric physical therapy specialist and a Catherine Worthing ham Fellow of the American Physical Therapy Association with over 25 years of clinical and research experience working with infants and children. Her research focuses on early detection and interventions to advance development in infants with or at high risk of having developmental disabilities. Equity in policy, health service, and diverse stakeholder engagement is integrated throughout her research, advocacy, and clinical implementation work. In addition to leading clinical trials on interventions for infant and families, Dr. Dusing leads several implementation initiatives to improve access to care for children in Los Angeles and California. The Early Identification and Intervention for Infants Collaborative (EI3) launched a website and has hosting trainings for over 100 providers in Southern California to increase awareness and capacity for early detection of cerebral palsy.
  • Anne E. Fehrenbacher, PhD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Population and Public Health Sciences in the Division of Disease Prevention, Policy and Global Health in the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Dr. Fehrenbacher is a social epidemiologist specializing in biobehavioral HIV prevention with sex workers and sexual and gender minority populations. Dr. Fehrenbacher is currently preparing to launch a five-year K01 study funded by the NIH Fogarty International Center on PrEP implementation science with hard-to-reach populations in India evaluating policy, structural, and organizational barriers to widespread rollout and scale-up of PrEP. Dr. Fehrenbacher is the PI for two studies on PrEP acceptability and adherence barriers among sex workers in India and Co-PI for a study on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods of sex workers in collaboration with the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee in West Bengal. Dr. Fehrenbacher serves as a Scientific Advisor for the Sex Work Lived Experience Affirming Research Network (SW LEARN) funded by the California HIV/AIDS Research Program (CHRP): Community-Centered Research Collaboratives to Address Local HIV-Related Syndemics Across California. Dr. Fehrenbacher is the recipient of the 2022 Mark A. Etzel Scholarship Award for Implementation Science Research from the UCLA Center for HIV Identification, Prevention, and Treatment Services for her work to develop scalable, sustainable, and effective PrEP implementation strategies to reduce disparities in HIV incidence globally. Previously, Dr. Fehrenbacher was a Research Scientist and Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and completed a Fogarty GloCal Fellowship sponsored by the UC Global Health Institute with the Public Health Research Institute of India and Ashodaya Samithi in Karnataka. Dr. Fehrenbacher earned her PhD and MPH in Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and her BA in Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.
  • Jeanine Hall, MD is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, is a Gehr Center affiliate. Dr. Hall is board certified in Pediatrics and Pediatric Emergency Medicine. She provides acute care to patients in the emergency department at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Her research interest includes patient advocacy in the realms of access to care and health services delivery especially for low income and underserved populations. Her research projects in progress include in examining barriers to access to care pre- and post-emergency department visits.

     

  • Ronan Hallowell, EdD, MA is an assistant professor of clinical medical education at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. As a learning scientist in the Department of Medical Education at Keck, he works with colleagues to provide a suite of curriculum and instruction services to faculty and administrators that includes instructional design, faculty development and the Physician-Citizen-Scientist Curriculum Renewal Initiative. He currently serves as a Co-Investigator on a digital health literacy grant funded by the AMA as part of its Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative. Dr. Hallowell also conducts research on curriculum design, the medical humanities and cross-cultural perspectives on medicine. He works with faculty at the Gehr Center for Health Systems Science as a co-instructor for the Introduction to Health Policy course for second year MD students in the Professionalism and the Practice of Medicine Program. In addition, he is part of the team creating a new health systems science curriculum to be launched in 2021 as part of a larger curriculum renewal initiative. Dr. Hallowell also serves as an associate director of the USC Center for Mindfulness Science which is a collaborative hub for interdisciplinary research and innovation in the practice of mindfulness. He earned his EdD in Educational Psychology from the University of Southern California, his MA in Philosophy and Religion from the California Institute of Integral Studies and his BA in Economics from Boston College.
  • Michael Hochman, MD, MPH, is the inaugural CEO of SCAN’s Homeless Medical Group initiative, Healthcare in Action. Under his leadership, the group uses a “street medicine” model to focus on the care of patients experiencing homelessness in California. Dr. Hochman, a board certified general internist, is an active physician providing care within the medical group.

    Dr. Hochman previously served as the inaugural director of the USC Gehr Family Center for Health Systems Science and Innovation; the Medical Director for Innovation at AltaMed Health Services; and the Senior Health Deputy for LA County Board of Supervisor Member Mark Ridley-Thomas.

    Dr. Hochman attended Harvard Medical School. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at the Cambridge Health Alliance and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Fellow at UCLA. As an instructor, Dr. Hochman has won several clinical teaching awards from Harvard Medical School and LAC+USC Medical Center.

    Dr. Hochman has written on health topics for the Boston Globe and other publications, and is the founding editor of the 50 Studies Every Doctor Should Know book series published by Oxford University Press.

     

  • Dr. Lorraine Kelley-Quon is an Assistant Professor in Surgery and Preventive Medicine at CHLA and the Keck School of Medicine of USC. She obtained her B.S. in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the University of California, San Diego and completed her M.D. and General Surgery training at the University of California, Los Angeles followed by a fellowship in Pediatric Surgery at Nationwide Children’s Hospital at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. During residency, she completed the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and obtained a Master’s in Health Services Research from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Currently, she is developing a pilot project to explore postoperative opioid use in adolescents and identify predictors of use, abuse, diversion, and conversion to chronic use. Her goal is to create physician decision support tools to optimize opioid prescribing for children and to inform policy makers of prudent initiatives regarding pediatric opioid legislation.
  • Alexis Coulourides Kogan, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Geriatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and holds joint appointments in the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. She is a mixed-methods health systems researcher that focuses on translation and measurement of person-centered models of care and education for older adults and individuals with serious illness. Dr. Kogan’s work focuses on outpatient primary care settings and home-based care to better meet the physical health and service needs of older adult patients, patients with serious illness, and their caregivers. Dr. Kogan has a special interest in person-centered care for older adults, advance care planning, patient readiness to engage in sensitive discussions, and home-based palliative care. Dr. Kogan holds a BS degree from Tulane University in exercise and sports sciences, and a MS and Ph.D. in gerontology from the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. She is the recipient of a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Career Development award from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health.
  • Danica Liberman, MD, MPH is an attending physician in the Division of Emergency and Transport Medicine at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, and an affiliate of the Gehr Family Center for Health Systems Science & Innovation at USC. Her research interests include health services research, population health, and quality improvement. She directs the Health Justice and Systems of Care Seminar course at KSOM, teaches within the MPH program, and is Faculty Advisor to the MD/MPH dual-degree students at USC. At the undergraduate level, she is the co-founder and lead Professor of two pre-health undergraduate USC courses taught on site at CHLA focusing on pediatric clinical research and addressing social determinants of health, which have graduated dozens of students into medical school and other fields within healthcare, enhanced the research productivity of the Division, and assisted numerous families in identifying and connecting to the community resources they need. She received her undergraduate degree in History from Yale University, her medical degree from Brown Medical School, and her master’s in public health from the University of Southern California.

     

  • Eugene Lin, MD, MS is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine and a health services researcher with a focus on economic policies pertaining to nephrology. His research interests are in cost-effectiveness and assessing the impact of financial incentives on patient outcomes. He recently concluded a project studying the appropriateness of 30-day rehospitalizations in dialysis patients (NIH/NIDDK F32) and is studying the economic and social determinants of home dialysis drop-out (NIH/NIDDK K08). He also has interests in how Medicare policies affect the billing and delivery of health care by physicians and other providers, optimization of healthcare delivery, and has recently studied the cost-effectiveness of a multi-disciplinary care program in chronic kidney disease. Dr. Lin is also a faculty affiliate at the USC Schaeffer Center. Eugene completed a postdoctoral fellowship in nephrology at the Stanford School of Medicine in 2018 and a MS in Health Services Research at Stanford University in 2017. He received a BS in biology (minor in mathematics) from Stanford University, an MD from Baylor College of Medicine, and completed his Internal Medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
  • Kimberly Miller, PhD, MPH is an Associate Professor in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences and Department of Dermatology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on understanding the health behaviors and healthcare engagement of children, adolescents, and young adults with a particular focus on cancer-related health disparities. She is currently Principal Investigator of two NCI R01-funded studies in this area: a longitudinal study that examines the impact of a cancer diagnosis on the social well-being, symptom burden, and activity behaviors of ethnically diverse young adult cancer patients over the course of a year; and a study using data from the California Cancer Registry to examine the effects of residing in an ethnic enclave on the healthcare utilization of Asian American young adult survivors of childhood cancer. Her research incorporates behavioral, epidemiological, and implementation science methodologies to inform clinical practice and policies to improve cancer-related health outcomes and reduce disparities for this at-risk cancer population. With Drs. David Freyer (Children’s Hospital Los Angeles) and Joel Milam (University of California, Irvine), she is co-director of the Center for Young Adult Cancer Survivorship Research, an interdisciplinary research collaborative whose mission is to study and improve the health outcomes of young adult cancer survivors.
  • Brian S. Mittman, PhD is a Senior Research Scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research and Evaluation and a Senior Scientist at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Center for Healthcare Innovation, Implementation and Policy in Los Angeles. His research interests include healthcare implementation and improvement science and healthcare delivery science. He has additional affiliations at RAND (senior advisor, health program), USC (research faculty, School of Social Work) and UCLA, where he co-leads the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Implementation and Improvement Science Initiative and where he previously served as a Visiting Professor in the School of Public Health and the Anderson School of Management. Dr. Mittman convened the planning committee that launched the journal Implementation Science and served as co-editor in chief from 2005-2012. He was a founding member of the US Institute of Medicine Forum on the Science of Quality Improvement and Implementation and chaired the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Special Emphasis Panel on Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health in 2007 and 2010. He directed VA’s Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) from 2002-2004. He currently serves on the Methodology Committee for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), where he leads the Methodology Committee initiative to develop methods standards for studying complex interventions. He is a member of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Advisory Panel on Research and advisory boards for several additional U.S. and international research programs in implementation science, including the King’s College London Centre for Implementation Science. He is a past member of the AcademyHealth Methods Council and Education Council. He has led or supported numerous implementation and improvement science studies and policy/practice improvement projects and has taught implementation science throughout the US and abroad.
  • Jo Marie Reilly, MD, MPH is a Professor of Family Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC (KSOM). She is the Director of the Keck School of Medicine of USC (KSOM) Primary Care Initiative, Associate Director of the KSOM Introduction to Clinical Medicine Course and KSOM Family Medicine Pre-Doctoral Director. She graduated from Georgetown Medical School, completed her internship and residency in family medicine at the Kaiser Permanente Family Residency Program in Los Angeles and her fellowship in women’s health and obstetrics at the White Memorial Family Practice Residency Program where she remained as faculty for 13 years. She completed her master’s in public health at the Keck School of Medicine of USC in 2017 where she focused on incorporating the behavioral health and social determinants of health into primary care clinic settings. She is past chair of the American Academy of Family Physician’s Commission on Education, Student and Resident subcommittee, on Editorial Boards of Family Medicine, American Board of Family Medicine, Family Systems and Health and PULSE, the KSOM senior Family Medicine Student Advisor and on the leadership team of the Society of Teacher’s of Family Medicine’s bioethics and humanities interest group. Dr. Reilly’s publications and research interests include developing a primary care workforce, inter-professional care teams, physician well-being, care of the underserved, humanities and narrative medicine, and women and children’s health.
  • Dr. Saluja is the Medical Director and Vice President of Population Health at Healthcare in Action where she oversees clinical teams and leads research and evaluation efforts. She is a board-certified internal medicine physician with a background in health services research and medical education. Dr. Saluja previously served as the Direct of the Gehr Family Center for Health Systems Science and Innovation at USC’s Keck School of Medicine where she was an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine and Hospitalist at LAC+USC Medical Center. Dr. Saluja attended medical school at the University of Wisconsin and completed her residency at Providence Portland Medical Center. She completed a fellowship in general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and concurrently received her Master’s in Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
  • Jane K. Steinberg, PhD, MPH is an Associate Professor in the Department of Population Sciences and Public Health in the Keck School of Medicine at USC. Trained as a behavioral scientist, her research focuses on determinants of multiple risk behaviors (alcohol/drug use, tobacco and cannabis use) among youth, and the development of effective programs and policy responses to reduce health risks and achieve health equity. Dr. Steinberg also serves as the Director of Public Health Practice for the department. She is currently a co-investigator on a HRSA workforce development grant to develop a career pipeline for MPH students into public health sector careers through scholarships, workforce training, mentorship and career placement opportunities. Dr. Steinberg received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Davis, and her MPH and PhD in Community Health Sciences from the University California, Los Angeles.