Mary K. Goldstein, M.D. (VA Liaison)

Mary K. Goldstein, M.D., M.S. in HSR, is Director of the Geriatrics Research Education and Clinical Center (GRECC) at VA Palo Alto Health Care System; Professor of Medicine in the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR) at Stanford University; Professor of Health Research and Policy (by courtesy) at Stanford University; and Director of the Program on Primary Care Policy and Practice Advancement at PCOR.  Dr. Goldstein received her undergraduate degree, majoring in philosophy, from Barnard College, and her medical degree from the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University.   She completed residency at Duke University, and a fellowship and master’s degree in health services research at Stanford University.

As GRECC Director, Dr. Goldstein leads a program that integrates basic and clinical research, clinical demonstration projects for care of older adults, clinical education programs for health care trainees from multiple disciplines, and other educational programs in geriatrics and gerontology.  She is the Program Director for the VA Special Fellowship Program in Advanced Geriatrics (SFPAG) at VA Palo Alto, based at GRECC.  Dr. Goldstein has served on the board of directors of the American Geriatrics Society and of the American Board of Family Medicine.  She was the 2010 recipient of the Department of Veterans Affairs Undersecretary’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Health Services Research.

Dr. Goldstein’s research focuses on quality improvement in health care, using health information technologies.  For more than 10 years she has led a research team developing, implementing, and evaluating evidence-based automated clinical decision support using the ATHENA- Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system.  Current work includes automating performance measures for patients with complex comorbidities and natural language processing to extract data elements from free-text of electronic health records (EHRs). She also leads FLAIR project (Functional Limitations And Independence Research), studying older adults perceptions of the quality of life of health states of functional dependency and developing measures that can be applied to decision analyses and cost-effectiveness analyses of health care interventions for older adults.