Leah Tuzzio, MPH
“Researchers continually generate new ways to improve health. But these advances don't make a difference unless people use them and systems implement them. My goal is to help people and communities use evidence to improve their lives.”
Leah Tuzzio, MPH
Research Associate, Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute
Leah.Tuzzio@kp.org
206-287-2109
Areas of focus:
Biography
Leah Tuzzio, MPH’s research focuses on improving patient experience, reducing health care costs, and improving the health of populations. She is currently working with teams at KPWHRI’s MacColl Center for Health Care Innovation and the Center for Community Health and Evaluation on projects related to quality improvement in primary care, patient-centered care, community-based research, and translating evidence into practice.
One of her main projects is Healthy Hearts Northwest, an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality-funded project to implement and evaluate quality improvement approaches in primary care. In addition, she is working with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Collaboratory’s Health Care Systems Interactions core to report on lessons learned from implementing pragmatic trials.
Leah’s other projects include writing manuscripts from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Learning from Effective Ambulatory Practices (LEAP) project, studying the primary care workforce and the role of lay health workers, providing technical assistance to the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute’s first Evidence-to-Action Network focused on asthma research, and studying the use and adaptation of the Decision-to-Implement toolkit funded by the University of Washington’s Institute of Translational Health Sciences.
Leah has co-led Kaiser Permanente Washington's patient-centered care interest group since 2012, and she is a member of the Health Care Research Systems Network (HCSRN) Patient Engagement in Research Workgroup. She earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health in the Behavioral Sciences and Health Education program. Her master’s thesis was about the quality of life of people with dementia and their caregiver’s burden. While at Emory she helped disseminate the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Healthy Days quality of life measure across the United States and edited consumer books at the American Cancer Society’s national office.
Research interests and experience
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Behavior Change
Health promotion; social/behavioral theories; smoking cessation
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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
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Health Services & Economics
Primary care organization and design; quality of primary care; implementation science; value-based health care; patient-centered care; team-based care
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Preventive Medicine
Preventive care; evidence-based medicine; immunization
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Healthy Communities
Clinic-community linkages; preventive medicine; addressing social determinants of health
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Patient-centered care
Patient-centered medical home
Recent publications
Tuzzio L, Larson EB. The promise of pragmatic clinical trials embedded in learning health systems. EGEMS (Wash DC). 2019;7(1):10. doi: 10.5334/egems.285. PubMed
Doria-Rose VP, Greenlee RT, Buist DSM, Miglioretti DL, Corley DA, Brown JS, Clancy HA, Tuzzio L, Moy LM, Hornbrook MC, Brown ML, Ritzwoller DP, Kushi LH, Greene SM. Collaborating on data, science, and infrastructure: the 20-year journey of the Cancer Research Network. eGEMS (Wash DC). 2019;7(1):7. doi: 10.5334/egems.273. PubMed
Tuzzio L, Larson EB, Chambers DA, Coronado GD, Curtis LH, Weber WJ, Zatzick DF, Meyers CM. Pragmatic clinical trials offer unique opportunities for disseminating, implementing, and sustaining evidence-based practices into clinical care: proceedings of a workshop. Healthc (Amst). 2018 Dec 26. pii: S2213-0764(18)30060-5. doi: 10.1016/j.hjdsi.2018.12.003. [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed
Baldwin LM, Fischer MA, Powell J, Holden E, Tuzzio L, Fagnan LJ, Hummel J, Parchman ML. A virtual educational outreach intervention in primary care based on the principles of academic detailing. J Contin Educ Health Prof. 2018 Oct 16. doi: 10.1097/CEH.0000000000000224. [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed
Hartzler AL, Tuzzio L, Hsu C, Wagner EH. Roles and functions of community health workers in primary care. Ann Fam Med. 2018 May;16(3):240-245. doi: 10.1370/afm.2208. PubMed
Lewis CC, Klasnja P, Powell BJ, Lyon AR, Tuzzio L, Jones S, Walsh-Bailey C, Weiner B. From classification to causality: advancing understanding of mechanisms of change in implementation science. Front Public Health. 2018 May 7;6:136. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2018.00136. eCollection 2018. PubMed
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.
Healthy Findings Blog
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.
Read it in Healthy Findings.
Preventive Medicine
How to boost rates of cancer screening among Latinas and Black women?
Group Health patients suggested several potential solutions to Susan Carol Bradford and colleagues.
Read our Healthy Findings blog article, published in Healthcare in America.
Healthy Communities
CCHE joins project to build local clinic capacity faster and better
A pilot program supported by Kaiser Permanente will boost clinical, operational, and financial performance of safety net clinics, with CCHE evaluating.
Read about it in News and Events.
healthy findings blog
Helping primary care practices decide whether to adopt proven programs
To be, or not to be, put into practice? Leah Tuzzio describes a decision-to-implement worksheet for evidence-based interventions.
Read it in Healthy Findings.
