Meet Dr. Brigit Hatch!

Dr. Hatch is a physician-researcher in OHSU Family Medicine who focuses on strategies to improve primary care. This broad topic has led her to focus on a variety of approaches including health policies, health systems organization, clinical care models, and specific individual- and clinic-level interventions. Most of her work focuses on improving preventive care for underserved patient populations (those served by rural health clinics and community health centers), and especially among women and children. Dr. Hatch was also recently appointed to the Charles and Velma Sharp Endowed Professorship – a position focused on non-traditional cancer prevention in primary care. 

Dr. Hatch describes herself as an (almost) native Oregonian, originally born in a rural community in Maine before moving to Corvallis as a small child. In college, she studied nutrition and spent lots of time upside-down while competing in NCAA D1 gymnastics. After college, she worked in nutrition education and public health, advocating for nutrition policies and programs that improve the health of communities. She loved this work, but wanted to do more to support individuals on the ground, so joined the MD/MPH program at OHSU in 2006 with a focus in epidemiology and biostatistics.

What she’s currently working on

Dr. Hatch is currently working to wrap up a 6-year project called RAVE (The Rural Adolescent Vaccine Enterprise) that aimed to test a clinic-tailored practice facilitation intervention to improve HPV vaccination in rural Oregon primary care clinics. This work primarily occurred at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, however the project ultimately found that despite all the challenges facing primary care clinics, clinics were still engaged in improving HPV vaccination – a real testament to both the perceived importance of HPV vaccination and the work ethic and resilience among rural primary care clinics. The team is hoping to do a lot more work in this area in the future and is busy working on next steps.

In partnership with OCHIN, she is also working on two “big-data” projects looking at children’s healthcare during the pandemic. One project is a partnership with teams from the AAP’s Pediatric Research in Office Settings (PROS) network that looks specifically at the impact of telemedicine on pediatric health outcomes and health disparities.  In another project, she and the OCHIN team are examining healthcare utilization patterns before, during, and after the height of the pandemic among vulnerable children at community health centers (e.g. children experiencing houselessness) and they are learning how pandemic restrictions differently impacted various groups and how these groups are making their way back into care.

Finally, she is working on a clinical trial that is testing a specific model of brief behavioral telehealth intervention for kids with anxiety and depression. This has been a partnership with teams at San Diego State University, Kaiser Center for Health Research, and OCHIN that has been many years in the making and it has been exciting to kick off this testing at community health centers where there has been great interest in additional tools supporting mental health care for kids.

Dr. Hatch’s favorite projects have been ones that use big data to describe changes in healthcare behavior and health outcomes after policy changes. This work has looked at the impacts of big and small policies over the years – Oregon’s health insurance lottery, the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid expansion in various forms, and even Oregon’s COVID vaccination mandates. This type of research always brings about many more questions than answers and highlights exciting progress as well as the inevitable need for future progress.

What keeps you here at OHSU Family Medicine?

OHSU Family Medicine provides two unique opportunities. First, OHSU allows her to balance a wide array of activities, like academic research, teaching, and care of patients across inpatient, outpatient, and obstetric settings. The ability to stay engaged with this variety of work has greatly enhanced her perspective in each of these activities. Second, OHSU Family Medicine is a hub of unmatched primary care innovation and thought leadership. She is constantly impressed by the work her colleagues do to innovate and improve every aspect of primary care – from education, to process improvements, to innovation in payment methodology and care models, to transformative research and advocacy for our communities. The energy and inspiration she gets from working in this environment keeps her going.

Looking ahead: A hopeful future for primary care

She hopes that the next decade brings a re-investment in primary care that emphasizes the power of relationships in healthcare and utilizes teams and technology to improve access to care. In this way, all healthcare (and particularly preventive care) becomes seamless and streamlined. She also hopes that the vast mountains of collected healthcare data become more easily useable and get used (more frequently) to answer the many pressing questions of the day. Finally, she is optimistic that the next decade will bring some dramatic restructuring in both healthcare payment methodology and healthcare delivery in ways that improve access, efficiency, outcomes, and equity, and also works toward restoring trust in healthcare and improving job feasibility for primary care clinicians and staff. Hopefully it’s going to be a big decade ahead!