Since its inception, the Center has been directed by Lisa Rubenstein, MD, MSPH, a nationally recognized health services researcher and former recipient of the Under Secretary for Health’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Health Services Research. Elizabeth (Becky) Yano, PhD, serves as Deputy Director, and together they oversee Center strategic planning and operations. Acknowledging the growth of HSR&D as over one-third of GLA’s research funding, Steven Asch, MD, MPH, now serves as the Deputy ACOS/R&D in Health Services, as well as Associate Director for Education. The Center’s core management team also includes Brian Mittman, PhD, Senior Social Scientist and Vera Snyder-Schwartz, MA, Assistant Director for Finance and Operations. The Center has an Executive Committee (Rubenstein, Asch, Mittman, Shekelle, Sherman, Snyder-Schwartz, Vivell, and Yano) and Advisory Board (Brook, Beck, Kanouse, Shapiro, Anderson, Kaplan, Rubenstein, Guze, Norman, Clark/McDougall, and Yamaguchi), comprised of nationally recognized health services researchers and local VA clinical and research leaders.

This year, we enacted a new strategic organizational plan to map our principal core functions (survey/IRB support, statistics/analysis, intervention evidence syntheses) to our research mission through a series of research cores in main topic areas (e.g., mental health, end of life care) and cross-cutting areas (e.g., implementation science, organizations and business case research). We will continue to operationalize and implement this new organizational structure in the coming year based on a series of management retreats as we align Center core resources to our chosen strategic and content core areas.

Core Investigators
The Center is home to 18 core investigators, including 13 MD and 5 PhD researchers. Almost all of our MD investigators are current or former VA HSR&D Career Development Awardees; our PhD faculty now includes two MREP awardees. Our MD investigators represent both internists and sub-specialists in gastroenterology, rheumatology, and psychiatry. Social science and management research expertise now includes organizational sociology, educational psychology, organizational psychology, health care epidemiology, biostatistics and business/health services management/financing. We also lost two of our core MD investigators late in the year: Scott Sherman, MD, relocated to NYU and the Manhattan VA, retaining his currently-funded studies in Los Angeles, and Ian Gralnek, MD, relocated to Israel and transferred his studies and mentoring roles to Dr. Paul Shekelle.

Affiliated Investigators
The Center has 24 affiliated investigators, which include a combination of researchers from our affiliated VA (GRECC, MIRECC, PADRECC, CURE, Primary Care) and non-VA (RAND, UCLA) institutions. Our affiliated investigators typically have a wide array of ongoing research and clinical care activities in their “home” centers or institutions, but have specific research interests or areas of expertise in provider behavior, quality improvement or other content areas that make their affiliation of mutual advantage. Our strongest ties outside the VA are with RAND Health and the UCLA Schools of Medicine and Public Health. New collaborations have been established with the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management and UCLA School of Public Policy.

Core Technical, Administrative and Project Staff
No Center is effective without a well-qualified and well-trained staff of research administrators, budget analysts, project directors, research assistant, program analysts, statistical programmers and the myriad of frontline research staff who ensure that each project is conducted to protocol to the extent possible. Center core staff is now comprised of over 11 FTEEs who have all or some portion of their salaries covered by the Center’s core allocation. These include individual staff members whose chief role is to support the entire Center’s research enterprise, from support for proposal generation to management oversight and technical consultation upon study funding to editorial support and production of papers, reports and other research products. The number of project staff has grown to 100 individuals over the course of the past year.