Stanford/Intermountain Fellowship in Population Health, Delivery Science, and Primary Care
Our health care system continues to change rapidly, demanding a broader focus on populations, value and service over generating visits. This new joint Stanford/Intermountain Fellowship aims to train the next generation of leaders in population health, primary care, and delivery science crucial to meeting that challenge. Stanford Medicine and Intermountain Healthcare have joined forces to take advantage of their synergies in research, system implementation design, and institutional and population diversity, forming an excellent base for such a training program.
The two-year program includes tuition support for a master’s degree in health services research that gives fellows a basic understanding of epidemiology, study design, cost effectiveness, health policy, implementation science and other disciplines needed for a successful research or program development career. Fellows will also be exposed to key health delivery concepts including Lean healthcare design, the Patient Centered Medical Home, longitudinal population outcomes tracking, and change management. Each Fellow will assemble a formal mentorship team from world class faculty at both institutions to help him or her develop a project from conception to completion and publication. The program will also provide each fellow with $50K to support their research efforts and prepare them for a successful independent career. Clinical responsibilities will be minimal (1/2 day per week) to ensure ample time to develop these skills.
Please contact Dr. Steven Asch (sasch@stanford.edu) at Stanford or
Dr. Raj Srivastava (Raj.Srivastava@imail.org) at Intermountain.
Application process for 2022 is officially open!
Co-directors
Steven M. Asch MD, MPH
Steven Asch, MD, MPH is the Vice -Chief for Research, Division of Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford University, where he leads more than 150 faculty, and the Chief of Health Services Research at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Healthcare System. He develops and evaluates quality measurement and improvement systems, often in the care of patients with communicable or chronic disease.
Dr. Asch has led several national projects developing broad-based quality measurement tools for veterans, Medicare beneficiaries, and the community. He directs the Center of Innovation to Implementation (Ci2i) which aims to maximize value by testing organizational innovations to make medical care more collaborative and efficient using implementation science methods. His educational efforts are primarily focused on training fellows in health services research.
Dr. Asch is a practicing internist and palliative care physician and the author of more than 300 peer-reviewed articles.
Raj Srivastava MD, MPH
Raj Srivastava, MD, FRCP(C), MPH, is the Assistant Vice President of Research at Intermountain Healthcare and Co-Executive Director at the Intermountain Healthcare Delivery Institute. He also serves as Medical Director of the Office of Research, and Vice-Chair of Research, Department of Medicine, Intermountain Medical Center. He is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah in the Division of Inpatient Medicine. Dr. Srivastava is also a practicing hospitalist at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City.
As part of the Stanford-Intermountain collaboration, Dr. Srivastava serves as Co-Chair of the Intermountain-Stanford Collaborative Committee and Co-Director of the Stanford-Intermountain fellowship program. The program focuses on advancing clinical care best practices, education and training, and clinical research. The purpose of the fellowship is to take advantage of the two institutions’ synergies in research, system implementation design, and strong desire to deploy effective, evidence-based interventions in both healthcare systems.
In addition, he is the past-Chair of the only funded hospitalist network, Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS). PRIS is a >100 hospital research and implementation network conducting several large multi-center studies that are important to the field of Hospital Medicine. He was also a 2013-2014 Australian American health policy fellow funded by the Australian Department of Health.
Fellows (2021-2023)
Theadora Sakata, MD
Thea was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Harvard University, where studying for her bachelors degree in environmental science and public policy first introduced her to thinking about systems and the connections between traditionally siloed fields. After college, she earned a masters degree in land economy from Cambridge University before deciding to pursue a career in medicine. While applying to medical schools, she worked at the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center as a clinical research coordinator for an international multicenter radiotherapy trial while also providing patient medical decision-making support as a consultation planner. While at Northwestern University for medical school, she spent her first summer participating in an Illinois Academy of Family Physicians externship that opened her eyes to the unique perspective that family physicians and other primary care specialties have on the American health care system. A mix of urban, rural, advocacy, and winter sport opportunities brought her to the University of Utah, where she completed her residency in family medicine before completing a sports medicine fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic.
Returning to Utah from Cleveland, she has enjoyed spending the last few years working in a combination of urgent care and occupational medicine for Intermountain Healthcare. She has worked with the musculoskeletal service line on evaluating options for an orthopedic urgent care; and during the COVID-19 pandemic, Thea was redeployed to Intermountain's COVID monoclonal antibody team, which utilized a novel care delivery system for connecting eligible patients to treatment across the state as cases were spiking over the winter.
Outside of work, you can usually find Thea hiking, painting, singing, cooking, skiing, skating, or watching a baseball game. Go Giants!
Fellows (2020-2022)
Vivan Ho, MD
Vivian was born and raised in Dallas, Texas and completed her undergraduate degree in Biology at Stanford. She attended the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons in New York for medical school, and returned to Stanford for her Integrated Vascular Surgery residency. As part of her program, Vivian has completed 3 years of clinical training and is now taking a two year fellowship to pursue her interest in academic surgery.
Vivian’s research leverages epidemiological and machine learning methods to evaluate surgical diagnostics and decision-making tools, with the goal of reducing unnecessary testing and streamlining the pathway from diagnosis to intervention. Previously, she has used national databases to delineate gender differences in outcomes of aortic surgery and the effect of systemic anticoagulation on patients with traumatic aortic injury. She is particularly interested in using the electronic medical record as a source of clinical data and a platform for clinical decision-making support. She will be pursuing a Masters in Biomedical Informatics at Stanford from 2020-2022 to refine her computational techniques.
In her free time Vivian enjoys cooking, biking, and playing tennis.
Griffin Olsen, MD
Griffin is Rocky Mountain born and raised. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor of Arts in Middle East Studies and Arabic and went on to become a fellow with the Center for Arabic Study Abroad at the American University in Cairo. Griffin first began thinking about value in healthcare while volunteering at the Egyptian National Cancer Institute, where he witnessed firsthand the challenges of delivering quality care in a resource-limited setting.
The following year, Griffin became a clinical researcher for the Surgical Services Clinical Program at Intermountain Healthcare. Working with a multidisciplinary team, he helped provide surgeons across the Intermountain system with real-time cost and outcomes data to inform the decision-making process at every stage of surgical care. Griffin attended medical school at The Ohio State University College of Medicine and completed the first two years of postgraduate surgical training at Parkland Memorial Hospital and the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. Parkland is the public hospital for Dallas County, and seeing the disparities that exist in this large urban community prompted him to pursue additional training in population health.
As a Stanford-Intermountain Fellow, Griffin is working with leaders in the field of delivery science to continue to develop innovative ways to enhance the value of patient care. He will then return to Dallas to finish his surgical residency and continue a career as a surgeon and leader in healthcare delivery. When he’s not at the hospital, Griffin can be found exercising outdoors, cooking with his wife, or fishing from his kayak.
Fellows (2019-2021)
Samuel Thomas, MD
Samuel was born and raised in Salt Lake City, UT. After serving an LDS mission in Russia for 2 years, he pursued a love for science and the humanities and earned undergraduate degrees in Chemistry, Russian and International Studies from the University of Utah. He then returned to the University of Utah for medical school where he was given a scholarship to add an additional year to his education to earn a Masters in Bioengineering with an emphasis on medical technology innovation through the BioInnovate Program. He has been involved in numerous NSF and NIH funded research and innovation projects within the University of Utah Health Sciences, Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, and the Center for Medical Innovation. He is the co-founder of multiple startups focusing on digital health, minimally invasive surgery, and smart technology. During medical school he was the President of the AMA for the Utah medical student chapter, was a voting member of the Board of Trustee for the UMA (Utah Medical Association), and co-founded two medical-student driven outreach clinics for the homeless and refugee populations.
He recently graduated from the Internal Medicine residency program at the University of Utah where he was able to continue much of his research and innovation projects. During his training he gained a new perspective on systemic challenges within health care delivery and implementation. His current interests involve improving outcomes, reducing costs, and increasing patient and provider satisfaction via a multidisciplinary effort that brings together advanced analytics, implementation science, system and process modeling, smart technology, and patient-centered design to enable the medical community with the information and tools they need for the management of patients throughout the health care system.
Samuel enjoys spending time with his wife and two boys, snow skiing, biking and working on his 1970 Ford Bronco.
Kenji Taylor, MD
Kenji was born and raised in rural Kansas and Pennsylvania, the youngest of a four. He headed to the big city of Providence, RI to study Neuroscience, East Asian Studies and Entrepreneurship at Brown University. Following graduation, his short-lived career in finance took him to Los Angeles, London and Tokyo, before he decided medicine was how he could directly help others who needed it the most. He attended the University of Pennsylvania where he developed a passion for health disparities, social justice and community medicine in West Philadelphia. As a medical student, he developed the Cut Hypertension program, a blood pressure screening, education and referral program based in African American barbershops. He has since spread the work to Atlanta, GA and now the Bay Area as a resident and then chief resident at UCSF. He is excited about the potential for innovative care models, financing and informatics in the community to improve the health of underserved populations through the Cut Hypertension Program. He is also interested in HIV primary care, mentoring black men of color in medicine and medical education. For fulfillment outside of medicine, he loves being a new dad, plays the violin, travels, spends time outdoors and enjoys cooking with friends and family.
Fellows (2018-2020)
Stacie Vilendrer, MD
Stacie was born & raised in Minnesota where her family still works in medical devices. She wanted to become a doctor since childhood after watching her grandfather survive metastatic prostate cancer with the support of his extended family and medical team. She came out to Stanford for college where she honored in Human Biology with a focus on global health & infectious disease. After graduating, she worked with nonprofits for two years to scale the health worker training capacity in India and Tanzania.
Stacie returned to Stanford School of Medicine to complete her medical degree where she focused on cost-effectiveness research for a genetic screening tool. Inspired by her entrepreneurial parents and recognizing the increasing importance of market dynamics in healthcare delivery, Stacie also chose to pursue her MBA at the Graduate School of Business. She is keenly interested in moving healthcare systems towards value-based reimbursement models and believes this will mitigate much of the ballooning costs in healthcare. She is also interested in optimizing electronic medical record design and better understanding how technology & artificial intelligence can improve healthcare's "quadruple aim" of improving patient outcomes, lowering costs & improving the patient & physician experience.
Stacie completed her medical training at UCSF-affiliate Santa Rosa Family Medicine and is a practicing board-certified family physician. In her free time, she loves hiking, alpine skiing & horseback riding.
Harris Carmichael, MD
Harris was raised outside the rural community of Jackson, Georgia, a town recently recognizable as the primary filming location for the Netflix series Stranger Things. While there Harris graduated from Butts County Georgia Public Schools and is immensely grateful for all the education and support he received from his family and local community. Harris attended Auburn University where he earned honors in Biomedical Sciences and completed his initial research in polymetric chemistry. While at Auburn, he was fortunate enough to meet his wife, Chelsea.
Harris next spent two years working as a protein technician and research assistant in the Titus H.J. Huisman Hemoglobinopathy Laboratory in Augusta, Georgia. He remained in Augusta for his medical degree, graduating Alpha Omega Alpha from the Medical College of Georgia. Harris and Chelsea moved to Salt Lake City for his residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Utah. After completing residency, he stayed in Salt Lake City to serve as a Chief Medical Resident. It was at the University of Utah where he first gained interest in rates of best practice utilization and methods for education of Evidenced Based Clinical Practice. He plans to continue research in Implementation and Care Delivery Science with the aim of improving best practice standards utilization throughout healthcare.
Harris is currently enjoying time as a new father to his daughter Ainsley, and likes to spend his free time downhill skiing, snowboarding, hiking, and camping.