Lisa Ruth Hirschhorn

Starting as a public health and researcher and HIV clinician in the 1980’s, my research has focused on understanding the causes and developing feasible and effective solutions to the implementation gap and disparities in delivery, outcomes and quality of care in resource limited settings in the US and in Africa. This work started during the 15 years I ran the HIV Medical Care Program at Dimock Community Health Center’s HIV Program working to ensure high quality of prevention and care delivered in the community and integrating implementation and improvement science to improve and learn from this work. Relevant recent work has included applying implementation and improvement science methods to identify factors associated with poorer quality, low rates of health system responsiveness and patient-centered care, inequity and outcomes in care in the US and in Africa and the Caribbean, identifying, adapting and testing existing evidence-based interventions to address these gaps. As Director for Implementation and Improvement Sciences at Ariadne Labs, a partnership between Harvard School and Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, I led a team focused on developing more effective approaches to study and support innovative approaches to apply evidence-based practices from initial discovery of simple effective solutions through scale-up to realize the full potential to improve care and reduce suffering and improve patient-centered outcomes and care delivery. At Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine as Professor in the Departments of Medical Social Sciences and Psychiatry, member of the Third Coast Center for AIDS Research, my current work continues to focus on continuing the work to further apply implementation science methods to effectively measure and improve implementation and quality and effectiveness of care in the US and a number of countries in Africa. Throughout my career, I have been committed to providing training and mentorship for students and junior faculty in the US and in many countries in Africa including Tanzania, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe. I developed and co-led a course focused on building skills to produce scholarly mentored projects for students at Harvard Medical School, serve as a mentor for the Northwestern AOSC program and am co-PI for a newly funded D43 project in Tanzania to build capacity for patient centered outcome research. and have led multiple workshops to build capacity for measurement and interventions to improve quality of care, both technical and patient’s experience. Current projects include exploring barriers to pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV for women in Chicago, primary health care improvement in low and middle income setting, strengthening quality measurement focusing on people-centered care and evaluation of quality improvement collaboratives in Africa.

My academic work has focused on understanding and improving disparities in quality and outcomes of health care in the united Stated and globally using implementation research. This work has ranged from understanding quality of care for women with HIV in the US to neonatal mortality reduction in Rwanda and improving maternal care in India. As an implementation and improvement scientist, I have also worked to develop novel approaches to using mixed methods to better understand these gaps and leverage the use of routine health information and more efficient measurement strategies. I am also working to increase the effectiveness of research to identify and understand disparities in care and outcomes, increasing data use and policy change o drive evidence-based decision making working with organizations including the Doris Duke Charitable foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization.