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Raina Merchant

Trustee
NORC Board of Trustees

Raina is Penn Medicine Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer. She is a tenured Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and has secondary appointments in the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care, Division of General Internal Medicine, and Division of Health Policy. She is the inaugural Director of the Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health and Co-Director of the Penn National Clinician Scholars Program (the legacy program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program). Raina’s research is at the intersection of digital media and health. She has specifically conducted projects evaluating health behaviors and communication using digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Instagram, Reddit, and Google. One of her projects involves “banking language” through the development of a unique longitudinal database of social media data merged with health record data. Much of her work also bridges new technologies in the fields of cardiovascular health, mental health, cancer care, disaster medicine, public health, and resuscitation science. Raina has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2011. She is currently the PI of 2 R01s, a K24, and an R21 Research Grant. She has over 180 peer-reviewed publications in journals such as NEJM, JAMA, Circulation, and Health Affairs. Her work has been featured in Wired, the Economist, New York Times, the Atlantic, and others. She is a member of the editorial board of JAMA. She is an Aspen Health Innovators Fellow and was recognized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as one of 10 investigators likely to have a significant impact on the future of health and healthcare in the U.S. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Education

MSHPR

University of Pennsylvania

MD

University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine

BA

Yale University

Appointments & Affiliations

Professor of Emergency Medicine

Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

Associate Vice President

Digital Health

Chief Transformation Officer & Vice President

University of Pennsylvania Health System

Senior Fellow

Institute for Biomedical Informatics; Penn Center for Public Health Initiatives

Co-Director

National Clinician Scholars Program, University of Pennsylvania

Director

Center for Digital Health, University of Pennsylvania

Affiliated Faculty

Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics

Member

National Academy of Medicine