Rachel Gold, PhD, MPH, is an epidemiologist and health-services researcher. Her work focuses on how health information technology can be harnessed to address health disparities, and on implementation methods needed to support safety-net clinics’ adoption of such technologies.
Dr. Gold has worked with the OCHIN practice-based research network since 2005; she now has a joint appointment at the Center for Health Research and OCHIN, where she is the lead research scientist. In that capacity, she works to support research conducted in OCHIN’s member safety-net clinics.
Dr. Gold is an expert on practice-improvement-related implementation in primary care safety-net settings. Her past research included a study on how to adapt an initiative that improved cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes care in Kaiser Permanente for community health centers serving socioeconomically vulnerable patient populations, and the comparative effectiveness of different implementation strategies at supporting the adoption of that initiative. She then studied the impact of an innovative point-of-care risk assessment tool on CVD outcomes in community clinics.
Dr. Gold also developed and pilot-tested electronic health record (EHR)-based tools for documenting and addressing patient-reported social determinants of health (social risks). She is now studying how to help community clinics adopt and sustain systematic social-risk screening and referral-making, and how to use EHR-based tools to help primary care teams minimize impacts of social risks on patients’ ability to follow care plans. She leads the laboratory of the Building Research in Implementation and Dissemination to close Gaps and achieve Equity in Cancer Control (BRIDGE-C2) Center, which studies how to implement improvements in cancer preventive services in community clinics. She also co-leads the Network for Community-Engaged Primary Care Research site involving OCHIN and Morehouse School of Medicine, as part of the NIH’s CEAL program, which studies how to better engage safety-net patients in studies of chronic disease management.
Past work includes analyzing the impact of state insurance-policy changes on pediatric care in safety-net clinics, and the relationship between continuous insurance coverage and receipt of diabetes care in community-clinic settings.
Dr. Gold earned her PhD in epidemiology from the University of Washington and her MPH from Temple University.
Selected Current Studies
- Does a Prioritized, Point-of-Care Clinical Decision Support Tool Improve Guideline-Based CVD Risk Factor Control in Safety Net Clinics?—CV Wizard (NHLBI)
- COHERE: COntextualized care in cHcs’ Electronic health Records—COHERE (NIH)
- ApproacheS to CHC implEmeNtation of SDH data collection—ASCEND (KP)
- Building Research in Implementation and Dissemination to Close Gaps and Achieve Equity in Cancer Control Center—BRIDGE-C2 (NIH)
Selected Publications