Lisa Rubenstein, M.D.

Lisa Rubenstein is professor of medicine at VA Greater Los Angeles and UCLA, and a senior natural scientist at RAND. She directs the VA Health Services Research & Development Center of Excellence for the Study Healthcare Provider Behavior, and is a practicing general internist and geriatrician.

Dr. Rubenstein is a former Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar with a strong research background. She has directed post-doctoral fellowships in geriatrics, health services research, and women’s health, and currently directs a course for health services research fellows on quality improvement and implementation research. She has also held clinical leadership roles in geriatrics (UCLA) and primary care (VA), with a focus on strategic planning and redesigning care systems.

She has used her clinical management, research, and educational expertise to design and carry out randomized experiments focusing on improving quality of life, on depression, and on primary care quality, and has carried out a variety of non-experimental evaluations of quality improvement interventions including the Medicare Prospective Payment System and the VA primary care redesign. Dr. Rubenstein has adapted structured implicit review methods for use in inpatient nursing home and outpatient settings. She strongly believes in the importance of creating new models for interdisciplinary teams in health care, with particular focus on nurses. Her current research focuses on implementing research on depression care in routine primary care practice in VA and non-VA settings.

Dr. Rubenstein received her B.A. from Sara Lawrence College, her M.S.P.H. from the UCLA School of Public Health, and her M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.