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Dr. Marion Sills is the director of OCHIN’s Science Programs team, which is the research investigator team, and a senior scientist at OCHIN. As the founding director of the Science Programs team, she is developing OCHIN’s research team and infrastructure—including data and processes—to optimize impact on health equity.
Marion is an experienced and innovative physician, scientist, and leader who leverages her clinical experience and analytic skills in developing a proven track record in research and quality improvement leadership, clinical practice, and health services research. As a physician, she practiced pediatric emergency medicine for 25 years, where she saw firsthand the impact of social drivers of health on children. Her federally funded research focused on modeling electronic health record data and multi-level drivers of health outcomes, including health disparities. She is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where she has been on faculty since 1999. Her leadership experience includes directing multidisciplinary research centers, mentorship programs, and quality improvement teams. Her research training is in health services research with a focus on policy-related, systems-level, social/regional, and biomedical drivers of health.
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Honors
Social drivers of health (SDOH)—the nonbiological factors that determine individuals' health and opportunity—are a key determinant of disparities in health care delivery, health outcomes, and health status in the United States. These studies model various SDOH and race and ethnicity in relation to processes and outcomes of health care.
A challenge in identifying the independent contribution of social drivers to the equity of care is building objective measures of disease severity, response to therapy, and quality—including equity—of the processes and outcomes of care. The projects below exemplify the diversity of analyses Marion has led or co-led that have involved operationalizing and modeling these measures. These projects have helped advance the science of measuring quality of care and its drivers, both in research and in quality improvement.
Quality improvement can be a key intervention for achieving health equity, and a general rise in quality does not always reduce disparities. Research can help advance methods of operationalizing health equity in quality improvement metrics. The projects below exemplify some of the work Marion has led or co-led in advancing health equity via quality improvement.
OCHIN Connections is a monthly newsletter featuring the latest OCHIN news and perspectives supporting our mission to drive health equity.