Leah Tuzzio, MPH

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

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
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

Parchman ML, Anderson ML, Dorr DA, Fagnan LJ, O’Meara ES, Tuzzio L, Penfold RB, Cook AJ, Hummel J, Conway C, Cholan R, Baldwin LM. A randomized trial of external practice support to improve cardiovascular risk factors in primary care. Ann Fam Med. 2019 Aug 12;17(Suppl 1):S40-S49. doi: 10.1370/afm.2407. PubMed

Curtis LH, Dember LM, Vazquez MA, Murray D, DeBar L, Staman KL, Septimus E, Mor V, Volandes A, Wells BL, Huang SS, Green BB, Coronado G, Meyers CM, Tuzzio L, Hernandez AF, Sugarman J. Addressing guideline and policy changes during pragmatic clinical trials. Clin Trials. 2019 May 14:1740774519845682. doi: 10.1177/1740774519845682. [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed

Henrikson NB, Banegas MP, Tuzzio L, Lim C, Schneider JL, Walsh-Bailey C, Scrol A, Hodge SM. Workflow requirements for cost-of-care conversations in outpatient settings providing oncology or primary care: a qualitative, human-centered design study. Ann Intern Med. 2019;170(9_Supplement):S70-S78. doi: 10.7326/M18-2227. PubMed

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