Sarah Greene, M.P.H., is a Consultant and Senior Advisor to the National Academy of Medicine. With a 25-year career in health care research, strategy, and consultation, she combines scientific and methodological expertise with a patient-centered orientation to support the realization of a true national learning health system.
Ms. Greene recently completed her tenure as the first-ever Executive Director of the Health Care Systems Research Network (HCSRN, formerly the HMO Research Network), a consortium of 19 research centers that are based in health care delivery systems including Geisinger, HealthPartners, Kaiser Permanente, Harvard Pilgrim, and many others. Ms. Greene leveraged her deep background and versatility in her role, overseeing a full spectrum of activities, including strategy, communication, and operations.
In her previous position, she served as Associate Director with the Methods and Infrastructure Program at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). In that position, she was responsible for providing intellectual and organizational leadership for the program, primarily working with collaborators on PCORI’s National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network, PCORnet. She directed numerous aspects of PCORnet, including communication and dissemination activities, independent evaluation of the network, and the interface between PCORnet and participating health systems.
Prior to joining PCORI, Ms. Greene held multiple positions at Group Health Cooperative (now Kaiser Permanente Washington). As a strategy consultant for care delivery, she led initiatives on improving patient-centered care, cancer outcomes measurement, and identification of a new vendor for patient experience surveys, and served as the liaison between the care delivery system and health plan division. While on the Group Health research faculty, her research included patient-centered communication, health literacy, quality of care, approaches to improving the research oversight process, and optimizing collaboration. She held leadership roles on several research consortia, including the Cancer Research Network and Coordinated Clinical Studies Network. As a member of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards consortium, Ms. Greene chaired the national Community Partners Integration committee.
Ms. Greene is a champion of consumer/patient engagement and has served as the Chair of the Washington Health Alliance’s Consumer Engagement Committee since 2008. Over the course of her career, she has frequently served in facilitation, change management, and team development roles, and complements these soft skills with strong technical capabilities including literature synthesis, evaluation, and analysis.
An accomplished writer and speaker, Ms. Greene has presented to the National Academy of Medicine, American College of Cardiology, International Society of Pharmacoeconomics Research, and numerous other organizations. She has authored more than 70 manuscripts, many focused on development and implementation of multicenter research, and she created ResearchToolkit.org, which aggregates publicly available resources related to conduct of health research studies. She received both her M.P.H., and a B.A. in Psychology and Italian from Indiana University, and currently resides in Seattle.
Involvement with AcademyHealth: