Katie Coleman, MSPH
Katie Coleman is Director of the MacColl Center. She also leads the Kaiser Permanente Washington Learning Health System Program, which connects KPWHRI researchers to delivery system needs and priorities. As program leader, she has been helping to guide collaborations between researchers and partners in the Kaiser Permanente delivery system to discover new ways to improve services and member health. Ms. Coleman is the Kaiser Permanente principal investigator for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Delta Center for a Thriving Safety Net initiative, a national collaboration to advance value-based payment and care. Her other work includes being part of the MacColl Center team on the Safety Net Medical Home Initiative, supported by the Commonwealth Fund to improve care in 65 community health centers in five states. [bio]

Brian Austin
Brian Austin founded the MacColl Center in 1992 with Ed Wagner, and serves as its Associate Director.  Mr. Austin is deputy director of “Learning from Effective Ambulatory Practices” (LEAP), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which has created a publicly available website containing tools and models to help leaders and staff engaged in transformation to build more effective teams.   He is also on the executive leadership team of MacColl's parent organization, the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, which conducts epidemiologic, health services, behavioral, and clinical research addressing a wide and evolving range of clinical and public health questions.  

Michael Parchman, MD, MPH
Dr. Parchman is Senior Investigator at the MacColl Center, which he joined in 2012. His research focuses largely on improving chronic illness care in primary care clinics by approaching them as complex adaptive systems. Dr. Parchman has extensive health services research experience with a focus on advancing the field of implementation science with practice facilitation and coaching, and implementation of the patient-centered medical home. A family medicine physician, Dr. Parchman previously served the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality as the director of Practice-Based Research Network Initiative and senior advisor for primary care. Before joining AHRQ in 2010, he was the Mario Ramirez Endowed Professor of family and community medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He is currently Principal Investigator for Healthy Hearts Northwest, an AHRQ-funded study of scale-up and spread methods to accelerate improvements in heart health risk factors across 200+ small primary care practices in Washington, Oregon and Idaho. He is also leading an implementation study of team-based approaches to safer opioid use for chronic pain in rural health centers in Eastern Washington and Central Idaho. He has a joint appointment at the Department of Family Medicine and the Department of Health Services Research at the University of Washington and is a collaborator in their Institute of Translational Health Science. [bio]

Dona Cutsogeorge, MA
Dona Cutsogeorge is the MacColl Center's communications coordinator, leading the Improving Chronic Illness Care website since its inception. She collaborates with researchers to create communications materials and clinical practice resources, including the Safety Net Medical Home Initiative's online practice coaching curriculum.  A member of the MacColl team since 2001, Ms. Cutsogeorge manages technical projects, serves as communications lead for Healthy Hearts Northwest, and is a member of the Kaiser Permanente Washington Learning Health System program evaluation team. 

Leah Tuzzio, MPH
Leah Tuzzio is a research associate studying quality of care, patient-centered care, community-based research, and translating evidence into practice. Ms. Tuzzio works with collaborators from Qualis Health and the National Association of Community Health Centers. She also serves on Group Health's (now Kaiser Permanente) Partnership for Innovation program, where she works with clinicians and administrators on proposing and implementing clinical innovations. Her publications include studies on improving the quality of care, patient-centered care, and community-based care management trials for chronic illnesses. [bio]

Susan Bennett
Susan Bennett is the MacColl Center's Program Coordinator. She is responsible for developing, negotiating, and monitoring project budgets.

Robert Frazier
Robert Frazier is a research support specialist for the MacColl team.  Robert rejoined Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in August 2015 after two years in eastern Washington while his spouse pursued a DVM degree.   In his previous capacity at the Institute, Robert supported immunization studies and staffed the search committee for the MacColl Center’s current director.

Paula Blasi, MPH
Paula Blasi is a research associate at the MacColl Center and Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. She works on the LEAP project, as well as Taking Action on Overuse, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded initiative focused on reducing the use of low-value services. Her research interests include prevention, behavior change, and evidence-based care. [bio]

Cara C. Lewis, PhD
Cara C. Lewis is an associate investigator of the MacColl Center and affiliate faculty in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of Washington. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and Beck Scholar and current president of the Society for Implementation Research Collaboration. Dr. Lewis’ research is currently funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and focuses on evaluating cognitive behavioral therapy for depression and comorbid disorders, solving measurement issues in the service of advancing both the science and practice of implementation, and investigating optimal approaches to support the implementation of evidence-based practices into community settings. [bio]

Caitlin Dorsey, BAH
Caitlin Dorsey is a Research Specialist III at the MacColl Center and Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. She earned her BAH from Indiana University and shortly after was hired as a Project Coordinator in the Training Research and Implementation in Psychology (TRIP) Lab at Indiana University. Caitlin joined KPWHRI in August 2016, and her current work aims to investigate instrumentation issues within the field of implementation science. 

Kayne Mettert, BA
Kayne Mettert is a research specialist at the MacColl Center. Kayne joined Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in August of 2016 after earning his BA in Psychology from Indiana University. His primary research interest focuses on measurement issues in implementation of evidence-based practice. He is currently being funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. 

Claire Allen, MPH
Claire Allen is a MacColl Center Senior Implementation and Evaluation Associate working to develop and grow the Kaiser Permanente Washington Learning Health System program and collaborating with our team on a variety of applied research projects. Claire earned her MPH at the University of Washington and worked at the UW Health Promotion Research Center and at Swedish Health Services before joining KPWHRI in 2018.

Sarah Nielson, MEH
Sarah Nielson is the post award grant administrator for several of the MacColl Center faculty.

Jess Mogk, MPH
Jess Mogk is an Implantation and Evaluation Associate working to optimize clinic processes as part of the Kaiser Permanente Washington Learning Health System Program. She collaborates on multiple projects as a practice coach, qualitative researcher, and evaluator. Jess has been at KPWHRI since 2015 and earned her MPH from the University of Washington’s Community Oriented Public Health Practice Program in 2018. 

Janna Webbon is a Research Support Specialist II in MacColl. She provides support for meetings, manuscripts, travel, and grant applications. Most recently, she has been mentoring newer research support specialists. She began her KPWHRI career in 2017 after earning her BA from Baylor University. 

Lorella Palazzo, PhD is a sociologist who specializes in optimizing care delivery and improving access to health services.  A Research Associate at KPWHRI, Dr. Palazzo's interests include finding ways that social scientists can best collaborate with other health researchers to improve health care.[bio]

Clarissa Hsu, PhD is an Assistant Investigator at MacColl and KPWHRI.  Trained as a medical anthropologist, Dr. Hsu conducts research using a holistic approach that unites the cultural, social, and political factors that shape health and health care. [bio]

Nora Henrikson, PhD, MPH is an Assistant Investigator at MacColl and KPWHRI who seeks to improve the lives of people with cancer and their families. [bio]

OUR FOUNDER
Ed Wagner, MD, MPH
Dr. Wagner is Director Emeritus (retired) and founder of the MacColl Center. A general internist and epidemiologist, he served as director of the national program office for Improving Chronic Illness Care, which the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded from 1998 to 2011. His current research interests include developing and testing population-based care models for diabetes, frailty in the elderly, and other chronic illnesses; evaluating the health and cost impacts of health promotion/disease prevention interventions; and interventions to prevent disability and reduce depressive symptoms in older adults. Ed Wagner was the founding director of Group Health Research Institute (now Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute), a position he held until 1998. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine. Ed Wagner retired in June 2017. [bio]