Karleen Giannitrapani

Bio

Research Focus: In contrast to bounded teams with static membership, dynamic teaming reflects the common challenge of interdisciplinary healthcare teams with changing rosters. Such dynamic collaboration is critical to addressing multi-faceted problems and individualizing care. At present, off the shelf interventions to improve the way healthcare teams work - often assume static and bounded teams. I intend to leverage design approaches to build a new kind of healthcare “teaming intervention,” which respects the nature of their constantly changing membership and more closely aligns with how healthcare teams actually collaborate.

Expertise: My expertise includes organizational behavior, building interdisciplinary teams, implementation science, mixed methods-research, quality improvement, pain and palliative care research, and global health.

Positions: I am an Instructor in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford University School of Medicine and a Core Investigator at the Center for Innovation to Implementation (Ci2i) in the VA Palo Alto Health Care System where I am PI or co-investigator on multiple ongoing studies representing over 25 million dollars of competitive government grant funding. I am also a Director of the VA Quality Improvement Resource Center (QuIRC) for Palliative Care, supporting Geriatrics and Extended Care programs for 170 Veterans Affairs facilities nationally. In QuIRC I lead a portfolio of projects on improving the processes that interdisciplinary teams can leverage to improve pain and symptom management among high-risk patients; specifically I’m aiming to bridge the gap of poor palliative care integration in the perioperative period.

Accomplishments: I have over 50 peer reviewed publications in high quality medical and health services delivery journals such as Medical Care, JAMA Surgery, the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management and Pain Medicine. I recently received a 5-year VA Career Development Award on building better teams across disciplines and am an American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine Research Scholar for related work.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=karleen+giannitrapani


Professional Education
PhD, University of California Los Angeles, Health Policy and Management (2015)
MPH, University of California Los Angeles, Community Health Sciences (2010)
MA, University of California Los Angeles, African Studies (2010)
BA, Boston University, Anthropology and Religion (2006)