Rachel Kohn, MD, MSCE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care at the Perelman School of Medicine. Her research intersects health services research and health care operations, specifically focused on how fluctuations in demands on hospital resources influence patient flow, patient care, and patient-centered outcomes, and how to mitigate the potential negative effects when resources are strained. She has particular interest in “ward capacity strain,” reflecting the mismatch between the demand for ward-based resources and their availability, and a subset of ward capacity strain called “geographic dispersion,” when specialty wards exceed capacity and patients overflow to alternate locations. By elucidating what contributes to ward capacity strain and geographic dispersion and how these constructs impact patient-centered outcomes and care efficiency within a learning health system, she ultimately seeks to design and test interventions that improve how limited ward-based resources are organized and allocated to improve patient outcomes, care delivery, and efficiency.
Dr. Kohn received her undergraduate degree in Chemistry with a minor in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. She subsequently earned her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, and completed residency training in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2014. She completed fellowship training in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 and received her Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology at the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017.
