Thursday, April 10, 2025
4/10/2025
Stanford Health Services Research Training Program - 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.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).