Leah Marcotte Selected as a CATALyST K12 Scholar

Congratulations to VSSL member, Dr. Leah Marcotte, who was recently accepted into the CATALyST K12 program, which "brings together four learning health systems with deep expertise in translational research: Kaiser Permanente Washington, the University of Washington, the Veterans Affairs (VA) Puget Sound Health Care System, and the Washington State University College of Medicine."

The goal of the provide "is to provide experience and training that produces independent scientists who will become the future leaders of LHS research that improves quality, safety, equity, and patient health."

The motivation for Dr. Marcotte's work is that while measuring and improving health care quality is a key goal of a learning health system, performance as measured by quality measures has not always been ideal. While the reason for suboptimal performance is complex and multifactorial, Dr. Marcotte's project is based on the idea that one contributing factor may be due to poor clinician engagement in performance measures; and that one way to engage clinicians in these measures is to show clinicians their performance in comparison to peers (i.e., peer comparison).

To address this issue, Dr. Marcotte will serve as a K12 scholar for 3 years, during which she will used mixed methods to conduct work that will inform health systems how to use peer comparison feedback for improving quality in an LHS model. This work will be conducted under the mentorship of VSSL Director Dr. Joshua Liao and Dr. David Flum, faculty in the Department of Surgery and Director of the Center for Health System Innovation and Learning (CHSIL). Dr. Marcotte's mentorship team also incorporates expertise in primary care delivery (Dr. Karin Nelson; Department of Medicine; VA Puget Sound), marketing (Dr. Nidhi Agrawal; Foster School of Business), and human-centered design (Dr. Andrea Hartzler; Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education).

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Marcotte on this new work!