Bita A. Kash, PhD, MBA, FACHE

Biography

Dr. Bita Kash 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 Ph.D. student committees at the Health Science Center and College of Architecture. 

Bita Kash is Professor of Health Policy and Management at Texas A&M University and Director of the Center for Outcomes Research at Houston Methodist. She is also Co-Director of a seven-university National science Foundation (NSF) funded industry-university cooperative research center, the Center for Health Organization Transformation (CHOT), anchored at Texas A&M University. She currently serves as the Interim Director for the Center for Health & Nature. She is a fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives and an active member of Academy Health, the Gerontological Society of America, and Academy of Management. Her areas of research include organizational capacity for change and transformation, evaluation of organizational innovations and technologies in the healthcare delivery system, and healthcare strategic planning and marketing. Her most recent research projects focus on development of strategy bundles to reduce hospital readmission rates, and access to appropriate care interventions. She has published over 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals. She is a fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) and received the ACHE Service Award in 2015.

Research:

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 of this study is the potential for cost savings and quality improvement in surgical care. Results of this study were published in the Milbank Quarterly in 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.