Training and Education at IHPS | UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies

Patient Support Corps

The Patient Support Corps is a service-learning internship program operating out of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF. We train pre-health interns to serve patients as navigators or health coaches, while earning academic credit or a stipend. This program has a special focus on attracting students from under-represented backgrounds, and supporting patients who are under-served. In this way we are simultaneously advancing patient care and student careers. The Patient Support Corps has recently expanded the program to community college students.

IHPS How to Impact Policy Series

The Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies conducts a webinar training series - How to Impact Policy Change. This series is designed for UCSF faculty, staff, and trainees to improve their skills in interacting with policymakers and other stakeholders that influence health policy. Sessions have covered basics of health policy, working with journalists, the timeline of the California state budget process, how to write op-eds and perspective pieces, how to utilize social media to advance health policy, how to be an expert witness and how to partner with UCSF's government relations among others. The series provides both skills and an intimate session with experts who can give first-hand experience to enhance learners’ ability to effectively engage with policymakers to advance health.

UCSF – UC Law SF Master of Science in Health Policy & Law

The UCSF – UC Law SF Master of Science in Health Policy & Law (HPL) is a jointly-conferred degree that provides learners with knowledge and skills to effect positive change in health and health care.

HPL is a 24 semester-unit, online master’s program intended for students who wish to obtain transdisciplinary training in the fields of health science, law, and policy. The degree is intended for working professionals with both part and full-time enrollment options. The program was designed by and features leading faculty experts from both UCSF and UC Law, and it introduces students to policymaking, legal analysis and research, health economics, health leadership and advocacy and more.

The current HPL class brings a wide range of experience in healthcare, including consumer advocacy, health care administration, state government, population health, social work, case management, medicine, nursing, and tech, and is led by Co-Directors Sarah Hooper and Janet Coffman and Associate Director Mallory Warner. The IHPS faculty that teach in the program include Chris Koenig, Taressa Fraze, Dorie Appollonio, Jenny Liu, Tracy Lin, Kai Kennedy, and Janet Coffman.

For more information about the program email Mallory Warner at warnermallory@uchastings.edu.

Philip R. Lee Health Policy Fellowship

The current Philip R. Lee Health Policy Fellows are Juliana Friend, PhD and Alyssa Mooney, PhD. The postdoctoral training program has a strong foundation established during the AHRQ-funded joint training program from 1985-2008 (T32 HS00086) and 2017-2022 (T32HS022241); from 2013-2017, AHRQ only supported the UC Berkeley predoctoral T32 training program. The highly successful joint program trained 65 researchers, over half of whom are now faculty at major universities, and approximately 90% of whom are still involved in health services research (HSR). Housed at the UCSF IHPS, the postdoctoral component provides two, two-year fellowships focused on providing intensive experiential HSR training to doctorally-trained social and behavioral scientists, as well as doctoral-level health professionals with the equivalent of an MPH degree. In its 50-year history, IHPS has provided continual postdoctoral training for interdisciplinary cohorts of social, behavioral, and clinical scientists with support from extramural funders including AHRQ, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Harkness foundation. The Institute also provides intramural support for trainees including via faculty research awards and philanthropic funds. IHPS maintains training partnerships with UCSF clinical departments and department-based training programs in which many members of the Health Policy faculty group are also active mentors.

With ongoing dramatic and unpredictable change in the American system of healthcare, US decision makers require a broad organizational, economic, and social understanding of health systems, financing, and delivery in order to design and implement health policy decisions that effectively improve the delivery and quality of health services. To help produce the evidence base to inform this decision-making, a new generation of health services researchers must be prepared to integrate expertise across many levels, including advances in the comparative effectiveness of clinical personalized medicine, evolving organizational approaches for high quality learning healthcare systems, the latest economic and behavioral understanding of how to effectively motivate and shape behaviors of payers, providers, and patients, the political science of how health reform is advanced through government and private parties, the theory and assessment of cultural and structural factors that perpetuate inequality, and data science methods for efficiently addressing population-level needs of diverse populations.

Interdisciplinary approaches to improving health and healthcare for all Americans is a cornerstone of the UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco (UCSF) approach to health services research (HSR) training: UC Berkeley with academic strengths in economics, organizational behavior, and data science and UCSF with applied strengths in developing, implementing, and evaluating health care delivery and policy interventions and health disparities research. This interdisciplinary lens allows our students and fellows to acquire cutting-edge education and training to enable meaningful contributions to improving healthcare that can be effectively translated into policy and practice. For example, to effectively improve system and patient outcomes, well-articulated models of payment reform based on economic theory must be combined with an in-depth understanding of organizational behavior and data science tools that support implementation and dissemination of effective policies and evidence-based practices.

Emerging Scholars Program

The Emerging Scholars Exchange Program is a joint program with IHPS and the Institute for Health Innovation and Policy at the University of Michigan and the Leonard Davis Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. The Emerging Scholars Program is designed to provide career development opportunities for UCSF early career faculty via invited presentations at prestigious peer universities. Through the Exchange Program, early career faculty have the opportunity to develop relationships with potential research collaborators, mentors, and sponsors; hone their oral presentation skills; and bolster their CVs as they prepare for promotion. Two exchanges happen each year, with each partner institution hosting a scholar from each of the others.

National Clinician Scholars Program

Committed to diversity and inclusion, the National Clinician Scholars Program (NCSP) at UCSF aims to train the next generation of health and healthcare change agents, prepared to work in diverse settings to achieve our goals of a healthier and more equitable world. Based at UCSF’s Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, the NCSP at UCSF is a partnership between UCSF’s Schools of Medicine and Nursing and the San Francisco VA Medical Center. Scholars train in a closely-knit cohort, receive mentorship from faculty from different disciplines, and build their skills in community partnered research, implementation and dissemination sciences, policy, and health system transformation.

NCSP aims to offer unparalleled training for clinicians as change agents driving policy-relevant research and partnerships to improve health and health care.

The goal of the program is to cultivate health equity, eliminate health disparities, invent new models of care, and achieve higher quality health care at lower cost by training nurse and physician researchers who work as leaders and collaborators embedded in communities, healthcare systems, government, foundations, and think tanks in the United States and around the world.