New Term Chair for Penn Nursing Professor
Karen B. Lasater, PhD, RN, FAAN, Associate Professor in Penn Nursing’s Department of Biobehavioral Health Sciences, has been appointed as the Jessie M. Scott Term Chair in Nursing and Health Policy. The appointment took effect on July 1, 2023.
Lasater’s program of research contributes new knowledge to health services and patient outcomes research by delineating the value case of nursing in terms of costs to hospitals for investing in nursing resources and clinical outcomes for patients. One example of this research, published in Policy, Politics, & Nursing Practice (2021), found that Magnet hospitals performed better than non-Magnets on quality measures linked with Medicare reimbursements. She is also the driving force behind the use of rapid policy response research, an innovative methodological advancement that can accelerate the pace at which academic research informs policy discussions using real-time data. Lasater recently applied this pioneering research approach to inform New York state level policy debates about safe staffing requirements.
In addition to this appointment, Lasater is core faculty in the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR), Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, and a Research Associate at the Population Aging Research Center (PARC). Lasater is a nationally recognized researcher whose scholarship in nursing value and health policy is exceptional and uniquely deserving of this recognition. Her awards include the New Investigator Award from AcademyHealth’s Interdisciplinary Research Group on Nursing Issues and the Student Nurses at Penn Undergraduate Award for Teaching.