Health Services Research at the VA Bedford Medical Center

Dr. Varsha Vimalananda is an endocrinologist, an Associate Professor of Medicine at Boston University, and a Physician-Scientist at the Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research (CHOIR) at the VA Bedford Medical Center. She leads research to improve the quality of specialty health care delivery from patient and clinician perspectives. Dr. Vimalananda received a career development award from the New England VA Healthcare System and then from the VA Health Services Research & Development Service (HSR&D), followed by independent funding from VA HSR&D.

Dr. Vimalananda’s research draws on her expertise in survey methods, qualitative methods, care coordination, and endocrinology subspecialty care. She enjoys mentoring Endocrinology fellows in the conduct of health services research.

Her projects include work to:
– Develop and validate survey measures of specialty care coordination from patient and clinician perspectives
– Measure coordination of face-to-face care, virtual care, and cross-system care and understand its influences and outcomes in order to guide improvement work
– Identify and apply strategies to improve the efficiency and experience of e-consults and virtual care
– Ensure a clinical perspective in research on secure messaging, text messaging, patient portals, and natural language processing to improve care for patients with diabetes