LDI/SOM HSR Workshop with Scott Lorch, MD, MSCE
“Access to high level pediatric care: Policies and barriers”
Scott A. Lorch, MD, MSCE, is Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He is an attending neonatologist, the director of the Center for Perinatal and Pediatric Health Disparities Research (CPHD), and director of the Neonatal-Perinatal Fellowship Training Program at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). He is centrally involved with research projects concerning racial disparities, perinatal epidemiology, health economics, and quality of care in both adult and pediatric settings. His work has investigated various measures of infant quality of care and analyses of systems for delivering neonatal care, specifically using an instrumental variables approach and other methods to reduce systematic biases. Dr. Lorch has extensive experience in quantifying the quality of health care received by pediatric and adult patients, and identifying factors, such as insurance status, that are associated with poorer quality care. He also has experience using longitudinal cohorts of discharged premature infants to study the role of race and ethnicity on outcomes and health care use. Additionally, his other R01-funded work investigates the role of the health system on variations in patient outcomes.
As director at CPHD, he assists approximately 20 residents, fellows and faculty members performing research in health equity and health disparities through scheduled didactics, lab meetings, and an annual conference on health equity research. He facilitates engagement and collaboration among faculty, fellows, residents, and staff across the CHOP and University of Pennsylvania research communities interested in perinatal and pediatric disparities work. Dr. Lorch earned both his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and his Medical Degree from Northwestern University in 1992 and 1996, respectively. He received his Master of Science degree in Clinical Epidemiology (MSCE) from the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003.