Biography
Rachel Gold, PhD, MPH, is an epidemiologist and health services researcher. Her work focuses on how health information technology can be harnessed to address health disparities experienced by patients served in safety net clinics, and the implementation methods needed to support clinics adopting such technologies. Dr. Gold has worked with the OCHIN practice-based research network since 2005; she now has a joint appointment at the Center for Health Research and OCHIN, where she is the lead research scientist. In that capacity, she works to support research conducted in OCHIN’s member safety net clinics.
Dr. Gold is an expert on practice improvement-related implementation in primary care safety net settings. She recently studied how to adapt an initiative that improved cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes care in Kaiser Permanente for community health centers serving socioeconomically vulnerable patient populations, during which she compared the effectiveness of different implementation support strategies. She is currently studying the impact of an innovative point-of-care risk assessment tool on CVD outcomes in community clinics. She also developed and pilot-tested electronic health record-based tools for documenting and addressing patient-reported social determinants of health; she is now studying how to help community clinics adopt and sustain systematic social determinants screening and referral-making activities.
Past efforts include analyzing the impact of state insurance policy changes on pediatric care in safety net clinics, and the relationship between continuous insurance coverage and receipt of diabetes care in community clinic settings.