Biography
Dr. Andrea Wallace is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Health Systems and Community Based Care Division at the University of Utah College of Nursing. She received her clinical doctorate (ND) as well as her PhD from the University of Colorado Denver College of Nursing, where she received NIH pre-doctoral funding to examine differences in health services access for children with severe asthma. Dr. Wallace then participated in an NIH and AHRQ funded post-doctoral fellowship in Health Care Costs, Quality, and Outcomes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she also delivered direct care to patients as an APRN-Clinical Nurse Specialist in the UNC Division of Internal Medicine’s Center for Excellence in Chronic Illness Care.
A primary objective of Dr. Wallace’s research is to design high quality chronic health care service interventions aimed at narrowing gaps in clinical outcomes while simultaneously understanding how these interventions can be feasibly administered during routine service delivery (e.g., without research resources) where they can benefit a range of patient populations. She has participated in the development, conduct, and publication of research studies focusing on the quality of chronic disease care (asthma, diabetes, depression, chronic back pain) in community, primary care, and acute care settings and, with a multidisciplinary team, has developed a widely disseminated a low literacy diabetes intervention. She has successfully partnered with clinicians to develop means of feasibly and effectively incorporating a self-management intervention in community (vs academic) primary care practice settings serving vulnerable patient populations, as well as with clinicians in the VA Medical System to better understand the discharge experiences of rural veterans. Most recently, Dr. Wallace 's AHRQ- and NIH-funded research program has focused on how to best account for patients’ social determinants of health during routine inpatient and ED discharge planning and in risk modeling. As a consequence of her methodological interest in how to best implement research into clinical settings, Dr. Wallace was appointed to the NIH workgroup on implementation methodology. She regularly serves on scientific review panels for the NIH, AHRQ, and PCORI.