Associate Professor
San Diego State University
San Diego, California, United States
Dr. Melody K Schiaffino is a bilingual, bi-cultural health services researcher and epidemiologist. Her primary research interests center around identifying disparities in the organization and delivery of health services to diverse older adults. Using systems science and big data approaches to study how care is delivered, her work leverages information technology and telehealth applications to improve sub-optimal outcomes for minority aging populations. Her current work addresses treatment variation in timely care to diverse and older adults with cancer as well as the role of language, social and other demographic barriers in access to care and advanced care including the role of telehealth and telemedicine.
Dr. Schiaffino earned her PhD in health services research at the University of Florida (2014) where she studied the role of social-spatial context on disparities in the delivery of language services in hospitals, she developed a novel method to assess hospital service areas at a smaller neighborhood scale than the usual larger areas used by hospitals to identify mismatches in where services were needed versus where they were available. She also holds an MPH in Epidemiology with a focus on HPV and cancer epidemiology from the University of South Florida (2008). Her research areas of interest are health system disparities, social-spatial context, the role of care fragmentation on quality and outcomes and how technology can benefit aging populations. Her work is informed by cross-disciplinary theories including organizational, network, and geography theory as well as systems science. She is a 2019 Butler-Williams Fellow and in 2022 and her work has been funded by NIA, NIMHD, and NHLBI.
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Friday, November 4, 2022
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM ET
Friday, November 4, 2022
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM ET