Project Summary/Abstract
The objective of Stanford's Health Services Research Training Program (HSRTP) is to develop
independent, diverse, well-trained researchers who conduct rigorous, innovative, reproducible, and
responsible health services research (HSR) with the goal of improving the U.S. healthcare system. The
program is motivated by our view that excellent HSR requires a strong grasp of core methodological skills and
the ability to apply them to important real-world problems, diversity in its practitioners and in its practice,
inter- and multidisciplinary engagement, and interaction with both traditional and emerging research
questions. We thus incorporate strong training in our core disciplinary areas of health economics, decision
science, and outcomes research and evaluation methodology; training in key foundational content areas like
health equity and social determinants of health, healthcare delivery, and healthcare systems; exposure to
cutting-edge data science and methodologies; and engagement with a range of academic and non-academic
settings. We emphasize the presence of diverse perspectives in our trainees, mentors, and research
environment. Trainees work in a rich multidisciplinary environment, frequently side-by-side with trainees
and faculty from areas like clinical medicine, economics, engineering, ethics, informatics, and law.
Mentored research experiences are central to our program. Trainees pursue independent research in their
area(s) of interest, working with multiple mentors with complementary expertise including at least one
mentor focused on career development. The program includes 42 faculty mentors, with diverse backgrounds,
drawn from 16 departments or programs. Trainees will find opportunities to engage with experts in a wide
variety of areas, including AHRQ priority areas of quality, safety, equity, access, affordability, and value.
Our program takes advantage of collaborations with delivery systems including Stanford Medicine and its
learning health care system, Kaiser Permanente, the Veterans Administration, and Intermountain
Healthcare; our location in Silicon Valley and connections to leading private sector settings doing health-
related research like Google, Apple and Facebook; and major investments in cutting-edge data and computing
resources to support HSR along with leading investigators in advanced computing, machine learning,
artificial intelligence, textual processing, and their application.
The program will support 7 pre- and 3 postdoctoral trainees per year, providing 2–3 years of full-time
support for each trainee. Predoctoral trainees earn a PhD in Health Policy or a related field and postdoctoral
fellows with a professional degree (e.g., MD) commonly earn an MS in Health Policy. Postdoctoral trainees
with a research degree focus on research complemented by our core curriculum and targeted electives. Our
aim is that these trainees will strengthen the next generation of diverse HSR leaders, equipped to generate,
translate, and disseminate the evidence needed to improve health care delivery in the United States.