AHRQ Staff: Karin Rhodes
Karin Rhodes, M.D., M.S.
Chief Implementation Officer
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Karin Rhodes, M.D., M.S. is chief implementation officer at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), in charge of strategic planning and oversight of AHRQ’s Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund investments and contributing AHRQ’s practice improvement efforts. She completed an emergency medicine residency and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Clinical Scholar’s Program at the University of Chicago. She was director, Center for Emergency Care Policy & Research at Penn Medicine (University of Pennsylvania Health System).
At Penn Medicine, she was inaugural chair of the Center for Emergency Care and Policy Research, where she led research teams testing emergency department innovations in screening/intervening for health-related social risks, improving transitions in care, and tracking the impact of Affordable Care Act insurance expansions on access to primary care. As vice president for care management at Northwell Health, Dr. Rhodes designed and evaluated innovations to address the complex care needs and social determinants of health of patients across the continuum of care. In Washington, DC, she served as a RWJF Health Policy Fellow in both the Senate and House, after which she was director of the Division of Public Health for the State of New Mexico. During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City (NYC), she organized Emergency Medicine All Threats (EMAT), an informal network of NYC-area emergency medicine leaders seeking to break down silos across competing health systems, share regional knowledge and actionable data, and improve health equity and public health preparedness.
At AHRQ, she hopes to build on these experiences and support Federal cross-agency teams to generate, synthesize, disseminate, and integrate evidence into clinical care, inform health policy, and give patients a voice in the complex process of health systems change.
