Lucy Savitz has over 30 years of experience in health care delivery and health services research and is newly appointed as professor of health policy and management at Pitt Public Health where she also serves as the director of external affairs for the department. She is senior advisor to the UPMC Health Plan, Center for High-Value Health Care. Previously Dr. Savitz was vice president for health research in the Kaiser Permanente Northwest Region and the director for the Center for Health Research based in Portland, Oregon for 5 years. She was assistant vice president for delivery system science in the Intermountain Healthcare Institute for Healthcare Delivery Research, facilitating mission critical health services research for 12 years. Dr. Savitz was an elected member of the Board of Directors for the High Value Healthcare Collaborative overseeing the Discovery of Dissemination Board Committee—a group of leading delivery systems across the U.S. committed to driving transformational change in quality and payment reform. At Kaiser Permanente, she served on the board and is the immediate past chair for the Health Care System Research Network. She has worked as an economist for the Colorado State Legislature, a financial planner at UNC Health Care, a rural health researcher at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, as a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a senior health services researcher at RTI and Abt Associates, Inc. Her PhD minor was in medical geography, applying this knowledge base in projects to assess resource allocation and spatial variations in service delivery as well as examining neighborhood-level social risk factors. Dr. Savitz has led projects specific to quality measurement for AHRQ and served on several subsequent technical expert panels related to measurement for AHRQ and CMS; and overall led more than two dozen applied projects in health care system settings across the rural-urban continuum. Dr. Savitz has been acknowledged as an Examiner for the 2001 and 2002 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program. At Academy Health, Dr. Savitz is an elected board member and serves on the Delivery System Science Fellowship Program Committee and is past chair of the Methods and Data Council and Committee on Advocacy for Public Policy. At AHRQ, she currently serves as an invited member of the Subcommittee to the National Advisory Council. Her area of committed thought leadership is in advancing the science and future workforce in embedded, learning health system science.
