Karin Rhodes, M.D., M.S.

Karin Rhodes is an emergency physician, a health services researcher, the vice president for care management design and evaluation in the Office of Population Health at Northwell Health, and professor of emergency medicine and psychiatry at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. She was founding director of the Center for Emergency Care Policy and Research at the Perelman School of Medicine and a senior fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where she led a health system-wide initiative to improve transitions in care and continues to have adjunct faculty appointments.

Rhodes currently works with a multidisciplinary team from the University of Pennsylvania to evaluate the use of patient video narratives and complementary pain reduction strategies to improve provider-patient informed decision-making and to prevent opioid abuse. At Northwell, she is helping to develop, evaluate, and disseminate innovations in home-based primary care, community paramedicine, health information exchanges, and telehealth to reduce hospitalization and address the complex care needs and social determinants of patients across the continuum of care.

Her research focuses on developing effective patient-centered responses to health-related social problems that impact individual and public health. Rhodes has conducted policy-oriented research in the areas of access, disparity, doctor-patient communication, domestic violence, maternal-child health, mental health, the quality of hospital discharge instructions, smoking cessation, and substance abuse. She created a linked health care and criminal justice database with colleagues in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to identify systemwide deficiencies in and opportunities to improve the emergency care of victims of domestic violence. Rhodes also has measured disparities in specialty care access for children insured by Medicaid and co-led a national research team to track the impact of Affordable Care Act (ACA) insurance expansions on access to primary care in 10 states. This work has included measuring the impact of the ACA on appointment access and wait times to care and the impact of providing premium assistance to help low-income patients access private insurance.

Rhodes earned an associate’s degree in nursing at the University of Albuquerque; a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and an MD at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Chicago. She interned in primary care internal medicine at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. She completed a residency in emergency medicine at The University of Chicago and also completed the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, along with a master’s in health studies, at The University of Chicago. (Updated 09.01.17)