Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion

Profile

Keri L. Rodriguez, PhD is a CHERP Investigator, Research Health Scientist and Co-Director of CHERP's Qualitative Methods Core. Dr. Rodriguez works at the interface of medicine, sociology, palliative care, and linguistics. She is an active member of the Palliative Care-Heart Failure Education and Research Trials and the VA Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee. Building on existing work in oncology, she is interested in how cardiologists negotiate information transfer and decision making.

Her research is aimed at gaining a better understanding of doctors' communication styles and determing whether doctors modify their conversation based on their patients' values, sociodemographic characteristics, or clinical status. Ultimately, her goal is to develop interventions to improve relevant skills, reduce disparities, and promote equity in health and health care among vulnerable groups of Veterans and other populations.

Dr. Rodriguez has a background in medical sociology, postdoctoral training in health services research, and is a past recipient of a VA HSR&D Merit Review Entry Program award. She has a track record of productive independent and collaborative research across a broad range of content areas. In particular, she has expertise using qualitative methodology to explore health and health care for vulnerable populations. In her role as a qualitative methodologist, she has collaborated on research studies and quality improvement projects with various teams of interdisciplinary collaborators at VAPHS (e.g., MIRECC, HERL, VERC, CHERP), Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center (CMCVAMC) in Philadelphia, VA Connecticut Healthcare System, Durham VA Health Care System, and our academic affiliates. SHe has participated in research in a variety of content areas including but not limited to disparities in health care, patient and provider satisfaction with care, end-of-life care, inappropriate prescribing, women's tubal sterilization decisions, intensive-care unit family support, alcohol screening and brief intervention, homelessness, and sleep medicine. She has used a variety of qualitative methods with numerous stakeholders, including Veteran and civilian patients and their family members, healthcare providers, and hospital administrators. Qualitative methodologies across these projects included interviews (e.g., participant-generated photographs with photo-elicitation interviews), focus groups, open-ended survey questions, audio-recorded clinic visits, observational data (e.g., fieldnotes), as well as projects using multi- and mixed-methodology.