Deborah Cohen, PhD, is a Professor and Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Family Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University. She is an expert in qualitative and mixed methods research with more than 20 years of experience, and has spent more than a decade studying primary care practices, with a focus on clinician-patient communication, practice implementation, change and improvement, and health information technology use.
Dr. Cohen has expertise in a range of qualitative methods and approaches, including interviewing, observation, and conversation analysis. Dr. Cohen is a highly skilled analyst, and she has experience supervising qualitative and mixed methods teams in data collection, and management and analysis of qualitative and mixed methods data.
Dr. Cohen uses her qualitative expertise on mixed methods teams to look at how improvements are implemented in primary care practices, to identify what changes are made, and to compare the effectiveness of observed practice change on process and outcomes measures. She has been a Principal Investigator on several federal and foundation funded grants, and is currently the Principal Investigator for ESCALATES, the mixed methods national evaluation of AHRQ’s EvidenceNOW initiative, aiming to improve heart health in 1500 small- and medium-sized primary care practices across the United States (escalates.org). ESCALATES aims to understand and learn from the complicated problems related to scale-up, implementation and dissemination of new innovations and quality improvements in primary care practice. Additionally, Dr. Cohen’s work with ESCALATES and other projects focuses on comparing the effectiveness of approaches for improving preventive services, health behavior and behavioral and mental health care, and cardiovascular preventive care in the primary care setting.
In addition to her research, Dr. Cohen is an Associate Editor for the Annals of Family Medicine, and she also created a web-based resource for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that is designed for people with an interest in qualitative research (www.qualres.org).