Events
Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute hosts regular seminars where our scientists and collaborators present their research findings.
All are welcome.
Upcoming events and seminars
There are no events or seminars currently scheduled.
Past events and Seminars
May 6, 2025
Examining the potential for antipoverty tax credits to address adolescent mental health disparities
4 to 5 p.m.
Speaker: Laura Chavez is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine and Principal Investigator at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. She is a mental health services researcher whose research program is focused on understanding the influence of social determinants of health on mental health outcomes and equity for adolescents and young adults (“youth”). Much of her work has focused on access to prevention and treatment services for mental health conditions among youth experiencing health disparities. Dr. Chavez serves as a principal investigator on grants from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Her research has been featured in major media outlets including CNN, NBC News, and PBS Frontline. She holds an undergraduate degree in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an MPH and PhD from the University of Washington School of Public Health, Department of Health Services.
Summary
- Evaluation of the effects of the 2021 Child Tax Credit Expansion on adolescent mental health in Ohio.
- Qualitative findings of caregiver experiences of receiving the child tax credit advance payments in 2021.
- Developing and sustaining a medical financial partnership in primary care settings to increase access to antipoverty tax credits.
April 16, 2025
Leveraging electronic health record data to understand the short- and long-term impacts of wildfires on health
Noon to 1 p.m.
Speaker: Joan A. Casey received her doctoral degree from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Casey uses large secondary spatial data sources to investigate the health impacts of a range of emerging environmental exposures including wildfires, power outages, fossil fuel infrastructure, and the energy transition. She prioritizes the study of joint social and environmental risk factors that help explain persistent health disparities and focuses on policy-relevant climate justice work. Dr. Casey also holds a BS in Biological and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University and an MA in Applied Physiology from Teachers College at Columbia University.
Summary
Wildfires have reversed decades-long improvements in ambient air quality in the Western US and increasingly impact human populations. Both short- and long-term wildfire exposure likely matter for health. Here, I describe studies evaluating both, including a novel association between long-term wildfire fine particulate matter exposure and incident dementia. I discuss differential exposure and response to wildfires among groups in the context of climate change, as well as co-exposure to other hazards like power outages. I conclude by describing a recent rapid-response study on the January 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires using Kaiser Permanente Southern California electronic health record data, demonstrating their utility for such work.
March 19, 2025
Leading Innovation in Qualitative Methods at KPWHRI: Rap-GAP, Q-FORS and Beyond
12 to 1 p.m.
Speakers: Clarissa Hsu, PhD is an Associate Investigator at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, and an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health. Dr. Hsu is a medical anthropologist who has over 25 years of experience conducting health services research with a focus on using qualitative methods to design and evaluate health interventions. An overarching focus of her work is ensuring care is patient/people centered and supports the provision of high quality, accessible information and collaborative decision making.
Laurel Hansell joined KPWHRI in 2018. She brings expertise in qualitative health research methods, human centered design, and stakeholder engagement. Laurel contributes to a variety of projects and topic areas including chronic pain, hypertension, and cancer research.
Jessica Mogk: Since 2015, Jess has been collaborating on multiple applied research projects at KPWHRI aimed at improving patient safety, reducing staff burnout, and addressing patient social needs. She has expertise in practice facilitation, change management, quality improvement, qualitative research, and program evaluation.
Summary
This seminar will provide an in-depth introduction to 2 methodological innovations in qualitative research Dr. Hsu and her colleagues have developed. The goal is to provide a broad audience an introduction to these new tools and encourage their use, refinement, and spread. The presentation will end by highlighting the critical work that other KPWHRI qualitive researchers are doing in the area of qualitative methods innovation.
March 4, 2025
Incorporating prior knowledge into the analysis and interpretation of epidemiologic studies: Can this lead to fewer false-positive and false-negative inferences?
4 to 5 p.m.
Speaker: Noel S Weiss, MD, has been a faculty member at the University of Washington, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center since 1973. His primary research interests have been in the areas of cancer epidemiology, clinical epidemiology, and epidemiologic methods.
Summary
Data obtained in an epidemiologic study may speak for themselves, but an understanding of just what they are saying generally is enhanced by knowledge of the relevant biology, and of the results of prior studies of the question. Examples will be presented in which the failure to adequately consider prior knowledge has led to incorrect inferences. opportunities for collaboration.
February 19, 2025
Multiwave Validation Sampling for Error-prone Electronic Health Records
12 to 1 p.m.
Speaker: Pamela A. Shaw, PhD is a Senior Investigator in the Biostatistics Division of Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute with expertise in measurement error, design and analysis of complex epidemiologic studies, clinical trials, and survival analysis. Dr. Shaw’s current statistical research includes a focus on methodology and two phase study design to allow correction for covariate and outcome measurement error, with application to studies reliant on electronic health records and large observational cohort studies. She is co-Director of the Data Analysis Core for the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT), a long-running study of aging, and has continued collaborations in a variety of epidemiologic and clinical studies, with a focus on chronic and infectious diseases and lifestyle exposures.
Summary
Electronic health record (EHR) data are increasingly used for biomedical research, but these data have recognized data quality challenges. Data validation is necessary to use EHR data with confidence, but limited resources make complete data validation typically impossible. Using EHR data, we illustrate prospective, multiwave, two-phase validation sampling as a practical way to estimate the association between maternal weight gain during pregnancy and the risks of her child developing obesity or asthma, while correcting for errors in the EHR data. The proposed optimal validation sampling design depends on the unknown parameters, which are initially estimated using unaudited data and then adaptively updated as validation data accumulate. For efficiency, estimation combines multiple sampling frames that target different outcomes of interest and incorporates the unvalidated data using survey calibration. We validated 996 of 10,335 mother-child EHR dyads in six sampling waves. Estimated associations between childhood obesity/asthma and maternal weight gain, as well as other covariates, are compared to naïve estimates that only use unvalidated data. In some cases, estimates markedly differ, underscoring the importance of efficient validation sampling to obtain accurate estimates incorporating validated data.
February 4, 2025
The Adult Changes in Thought Study: Opportunities for Collaboration
4 to 5 p.m.
Speaker: Linda McEvoy, PhD (she/her) is a senior investigator at KWPHRI and an MPI on the Adult Changes in Thought Study. She is also Professor Emerita at Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Longevity Sciences, University of California San Diego. She studies risk and protective factors for cognitive and brain health in aging using multidisciplinary approaches.
Rod Walker, MS, is a principal collaborative biostatistician at KWPHRI and a co-Lead of the Data and Analysis Core for the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study. He supports aging and Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias research and contributes to the infrastructure and data sharing goals of the ACT U19 Research Program. For the presentation, he will provide information on these data sharing activities and illustrate an ACT website tool that supports these efforts
Nicole M. Gatto, MPH, PhD is a Principal Collaborative Scientist at KPWHRI and serves as co-lead of the Administrative Core of the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) Study. Nicole will describe options for researchers interested in collaborating with ACT including requesting data for a manuscript or for a grant proposal. She will also demonstrate where this and other related information may be found on the ACT website: https://www.actagingresearch.org
Paul K. Crane, MD MPH, is a multiple Principal Investigator (MPI) of the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study. Dr. Crane is a Professor of Medicine and an Adjunct Professor of Health Systems & Population Health at the University of Washington. He has worked with ACT since ~2002. Dr. Crane will present a brief history of the ACT study.
Summary
The Adult Changes in Thought Study is a landmark, longitudinal prospective study of cognitive health in aging. It enrolls members of KPWA aged 65+ (>6500 participants enrolled) and follows them every 2 years, obtaining measures of cognitive and physical function, life course exposures to dementia risk factors, objective measures of physical activity and sleep, and a multitude of other measures including clinical and pharmacy data, genetics, and neuroimaging. Approximately one third of the cohort consents to brain donation, and state-of-the-art neuropathology data is available on >1000 participants. This panel presentation will provide an overview of the study, our efforts to enroll a more diverse cohort, information on how to access ACT data and opportunities for collaboration.
January 15, 2025
Cluster randomized and stepped-wedge trials: design issues and tools
12 to 1 p.m.
Speaker: Mary Ryan Baumann, PhD, (she/her/hers), is an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, with joint appointments in the Department of Population Health Sciences and the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics. She researches both methodological and logistical issues in clustered data analysis and study design, particularly cluster randomized and pragmatic trials. This allows her to help her UW and UW Health colleagues conduct sophisticated health and health services research for Wisconsin and beyond.
Summary
CRTs (cluster randomized trials) and stepped-wedge trials are popular study designs used to answer large-scale, community-based research questions. However, it can be difficult to obtain information to reliably inform design parameters like intracluster correlation. I’ll discuss some recent work documenting the challenges real study teams have faced in designing and analyzing these trials, and several tools I and colleagues have developed to bridge these gaps.
Land Acknowledgment
Our Seattle offices sit on the occupied land of the Duwamish and by the shared waters of the Coast Salish people, who have been here thousands of years and remain. Learn about practicing land acknowledgment.