Elizabeth Yano, Ph.D., M.S.P.H. is the Director of the VA HSR&D Center for the Study of Healthcare Innovation, Implementation and Policy at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System and Adjunct Professor of Health Policy & Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Dr. Yano has over 30 years experience as a health services researcher and implementation scientist embedded in the national VA healthcare system.  She has received a number of awards, including those from the health system and Veteran groups for her research impacts on practice and policy. 

Her research focuses on implementation of evidence-based practice and policy and an improved understanding of the multilevel influences on health system performance and quality improvement with a focus on primary care and women’s health. She has been a leader in the development of partnered research and multilevel stakeholder engagement strategies for accelerating implementation of research into practice, including major funded initiatives to use research to transform care in the VA healthcare system.  

Dr. Yano currently directs the VA Women’s Health CREATE—a collaborative, partnered research initiative comprised of 5 inter-related studies designed to accelerate implementation of comprehensive care for women Veterans. Under the CREATE, she leads a national organizational evaluation of impacts of different approaches to delivering comprehensive care on patient experience and quality of care and a cluster randomized trial of an evidence-based quality improvement (EBQI) approach to tailoring VA’s patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) to the needs of women Veterans. She has also evaluated impacts of EBQI approaches on implementation of PCMH innovations, depression collaborative care, and smoking cessation guidelines in several multistate studies. 

Dr. Yano also directs the VA Women’s Health Research Network, which provides education/training, technical support, mentorship and dissemination support to a national Consortium of over 250 researchers and clinicians, and facilitates inclusion of women Veterans in VA research through establishment of the VA Women’s Health Practice Based Research Network, involving 60 VA medical centers and their respective site leads, local leaders and frontline providers. She led development of VA’s first National Women’s Health Research Agenda, first National Reproductive Health Report, and first National Health Equity Report, and has studied organizational and patient-level determinants of racial-ethnic and gender disparities in VA care. 

Dr. Yano has been continuously funded as PI for over 25 years, and has been PI or Co-PI on over $30 million in research funding. She has published 170 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of General Internal Medicine and Women’s Health Issues, and been guest editor on five journal supplements focused on primary care, women’s health and partnered research. Her implementation research expertise has led to scientific review roles for VA HSR&D, QUERI, AHRQ, NIH and PCORI. She was a Stakeholder Council Member for PCORI’s Dissemination & Implementation Action Plan Development, joined NCI’s multilevel intervention and implementation research efforts, and has served on multiple AHRQ Technical Expert Panels on contextual frameworks for medical home implementation, primary care team-based measurement and primary care workforce models, in addition to roles as subject matter expert for Congressional briefings as well as international efforts focused on gender-sensitive medicine and evidence-based care.

At the VA and UCLA, Dr. Yano has mentored over 40 career development awardees and post- and pre-doctoral fellows locally and across the country. She co-directs the VA Women’s Health Fellowship Program and the UCLA NRSA Primary Care Fellowship Program, has served on the Research Advisory Board for the UCLA/VA Clinical Scholars Program, and previously directed the VA Health Services Research Associated Health Pre- and Post-doctoral Fellowship Programs, in addition to serving on the VA HSR&D Career Development Award Review Committee for over a decade. In 2012, Dr. Yano received VA’s highest honor—the Under Secretary for Health Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in Health Services Research, in addition to receiving the VA HSR&D Senior Research Career Scientist Award, which recognizes her research impacts and contributions to mentorship and service. She has twice been honored as Professor of the Year in the UCLA School of Public Health’s Executive Masters’ Program in Health Policy & Management, and has received numerous special contribution awards for her work improving research and care for women Veterans. 

Dr. Yano received her B.S. in Psychobiology at UCLA, and her M.S.P.H. and Ph.D. degrees in Epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, where she trained under a Pew Memorial Trusts Predoctoral Health Policy Fellowship at the RAND-UCLA Center for Health Policy Studies.

AcademyHealth Board of Directors Nominations Committee 2016 - 2019

Authored by Elizabeth M. Yano, Ph.D., MSPH

Blog Post

The Gender Gap in Suicide Rates is Narrowing in the United States

In this Veterans Day post, Lauren Denneson, Claire Hoffmire, and AcademyHealth Board Member Elizabeth Yano highlight a growing need for suicide prevention efforts tailored to women veterans and announces a call for papers on the topic for a special supplement of Medical Care.