Leah Tuzzio, MPH
“I am a qualitative researcher who uses human-centered design principles to improve people’s care experience.”
Leah Tuzzio, MPH
Senior Research Associate, Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute
Leah.Tuzzio@kp.org
206-287-2109
Biography
Leah Tuzzio, MPH, focuses on improving patient experience, implementing evidence into health systems, and improving the health of populations. She is collaborating with teams at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI)’s MacColl Center for Health Care Innovation and Center for Community Health and Evaluation on projects related to social determinants of health, including financial hardship in cancer care, quality improvement in primary care, patient-centered care, and community-based research.
She co-leads the National Institutes of Health Collaboratory’s Health Care Systems Interactions core, which reports on lessons learned from implementing pragmatic trials embedded in health systems. The core disseminates these lessons in the Living Textbook, in manuscripts, and through learning workshops. With Dr. Nora Henrikson, Leah studies ways to improve price transparency at the point of care and the impact of price data on behavior. With several teams at KPWHRI, she conducts qualitative research to learn about people’s values for their health and well-being, barriers and facilitators to getting preventive screening, clinicians’ ideas for implementing evidence into shared decision making, and how research affects health policy. At Kaiser Permanente Washington, she is a steering committee member of the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Equity and Access Team, also called HEAT. In addition, she co-leads the Health Care Systems Research Network (HCSRN) Patient Engagement in Research Scientific Interest Group.
Research interests and experience
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Health Services & Economics
Health promotion; social/behavioral theories; smoking cessation
Behavior Change
Health promotion; social/behavioral theories; smoking cessation
Health Services & Economics
Primary care organization and design; quality of primary care; implementation science; value-based health care; patient-centered care; team-based care
Patient-Centered Care
Patient-centered medical home
Aging & Geriatrics
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Chronic Illness Management
Collaborative approaches to transforming health care systems; design of health care systems and teams; evaluation of health care systems; measurement of change in health care systems
Preventive Medicine
Preventive care; evidence-based medicine; immunization
Healthy Communities
Clinic-community linkages; preventive medicine; addressing social determinants of health
Cancer
Social Determinants of Health
Recent publications
Dillon EC, Tuzzio L, Madrid S, Olden H, Greenlee RT. Measuring the impact of patient-engaged research: how a methods workshop identified Critical Outcomes of Research Engagement (COREs). J Patient Cent Res Rev. 2017;4:237-46. doi: 10.17294/2330-0698.1458
Parchman M, Hsu C, Fagnan L, van Borkulo N, Tuzzio L. Building a learning health care organization: external facilitation tailors support to the learning capacity of primary care settings. J Patient Cent Res Rev. 2017;4:187.
Chambers D, Coronado G, Green B, Jarvik J, Septimus E, Tuzzio L, Zatzick D. Designing with implementation and dissemination in mind: introduction. In: Rethinking Clinical Trials: A Living Textbook of Pragmatic Clinical Trials. Bethesda, MD: NIH Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory. DOI: 10.28929/0.
Zatzick D, Tuzzio L, Chambers D, Suls J, Darnell D, Coronado G, DeBar L, Green B, Huang S, Jarvik J, Septimus E, Simon G, Vazquez M. Dissemination and implementation: conceptualizing the challenge. In: Rethinking Clinical Trials: A Living Textbook of Pragmatic Clinical Trials. Bethesda, MD: NIH Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory. DOI: 10.28929/072.
Tuzzio L, Chambers D, Tambor E, Suls J, Green B, Huang S, Weinfurt K, Zatzick D. Dissemination approaches for different stakeholders: introduction. In: Rethinking Clinical Trials: A Living Textbook of Pragmatic Clinical Trials. Bethesda, MD: NIH Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory.
Green BB, BlueSpruce J, Tuzzio L, Vernon SW, Shay A, Catz SL. Reasons for never and intermittent completion of colorectal cancer screening after receiving multiple rounds of mailed fecal tests. BMC Public Health. 2017 May 30;17(1):531. doi: 10.1186/s12889-017-4458-6. PubMed
Tuzzio L, Ludman EJ, Chang E, Palazzo L, Abbott T, Wagner EH, Reid RJ, Design and implementation of a physician coaching pilot to promote value-based referrals to specialty care. Perm J. 2017;21. doi: 10.7812/TPP/16-066. PubMed
Henrikson NB, Tuzzio L, Gilkey MB, McRee AL. "You're never really off time": healthcare providers' interpretations of optimal timing for HPV vaccination. Prev Med Rep.doi:10.1016/j.pmedr.2016.05.002. [Epub ahead of print].
Co-designing with patients
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Research
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news
What defines outstanding primary care leadership?
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health services & economics
Community health workers can help make the difference for patients
Leah Tuzzio, MPH, and colleagues describe an underutilized role that can help primary care become truly patient-centered.
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