Kathryn M. McDonald

Kathryn McDonald is the executive director of CHP/PCOR and a senior scholar at the centers. She is also associate director of the Stanford-UCSF Evidence-based Practice Center (under RAND). Her work focuses on measures and interventions to achieve evidence-based patient-centered healthcare quality and patient safety.

McDonald has served as a project director and principal investigator on a number of research projects at the Stanford School of Medicine, including the development and ongoing enhancement of the Quality and Patient Safety Indicators for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. She has authored numerous peer reviewed articles and government reports, including several with wide enough followership to merit recent updates: Care Coordination Measures Atlas, Closing the Quality Gap, and Patient Safety Practices. She served on the Institute of Medicine Committee that produced Measuring What Matters: Pediatric and Adolescent Health and Health Care, and currently is part of the IOM Committee on Diagnostic Errors in Health Care.  

Previously, she worked as a manager for technology optimization and business development at Stanford Hospital, and as a research and development manager for new product development for a medical device company. She received a master of management degree (MBA and MHA equivalent) from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, with an emphasis on the healthcare industry, and she holds a BS in chemical engineering from Stanford University.