Bita A. Kash, PhD, MBA, FACHE

Dr. Bita Kash is the Director of the Center of Outcomes Research at the Houston Methodist Research Institute. The Center for Outcomes Research at Houston Methodist is a partnership with Texas A&M University School of Public Health.  Dr. Kash is also a Professor at Texas A&M University’s School of Public Health. Dr. Bita Kash received her PhD in Health Services Research from Texas A&M University in 2007 and joined the Department of Health Policy and Management at the School of Public Health in September 2007. She currently teaches the Architecture for Health Lecture Series in the College of Architecture and serves on multiple PhD student committees at the Health Science Center and College of Architecture.

Dr. Kash is the co-director of a seven-university National Science Foundation (NSF) industry/university cooperative research center – the Center for Health Organization Transformation (CHOT) – anchored at Texas A&M University. As co-director and PI of the NSF Center for Health Organization Transformation (CHOT), Dr. Kash conducts research to support the implementation of evidence-based transformational strategies within healthcare organizations.

Dr. Kash’s time and effort has been funded through external research grants at 55 to 60 percent time and effort yearly. In terms of published research productivity, Dr. Kash authored over 65 research papers and editorials published in peer-reviewed journals since 2005, and involved students as co-authors on more than half of these publications. Furthermore, her papers are published in leading health policy and management journals, such as Milbank Quarterly, The Gerontologist, Healthcare Management Review, and The Journal of Applied Gerontology. The Milbank Quarterly, at 4.644 impact factor in 2014, was ranked #1 in the journal categories of Health Policy & Services and Health Care Sciences & Services, the same year her first paper was published in this journal. Kash’s research in the areas of perioperative care coordination and the effective use of health information exchanges has resulted in several publications in top-tier health services and policy journals, recently featured in the NSF’s “Industry-Nominated Technology Breakthroughs of NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRC)” 2016 report, as well as Politico and other media. Finally, as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Healthcare Management (JHM), Kash lead a peer-reviewed journal in the field of healthcare management that incorporates a practitioner application for every research article published from 2014-2017. Total subscriptions for the JHM reach over 43,000 and include healthcare executives, practitioners, researchers, and students.

In 2013, Kash started conducting a first-of-its-kind large-scale study of the Perioperative Surgical Home (PSH) concept. The major implication from this study is the potential for cost savings and quality improvement in surgical care. Results of this study were published in the Milbank Quarterlyin 2014. Since publication in 2014, the PSH paper has been featured in Becker’s Hospital Review, eMedEvents, American Journal of Managed Care, Science Daily, and other outlets. Implications for medical residency training were recently published in a top-tier medical specialty journal, Anesthesia & Analgesia. According to the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), the ASA’s efforts to help implement the PSH nationally were enhanced as a result of Kash’s research and publications.