Dr. Lilian Chumba is a Research Scientist at HealthPartners Institute. She is also part of the Institute staff for the Community Advisory Council for Research and Evaluation and a member of the team involved in the creation for the HealthPartners Center for Innovation and Translation.
Dr. Chumba is a Kenyan-born and trained physician with a Master of Science degree in Global Health from Duke University. Her current work is focused on effective and equitable implementation of evidenced-based interventions especially relating to chronic disease care.
As a Kenyan-trained physician and a Research Scientist at HealthPartners Institute, Dr. Chumba has both research and clinical experience as well as a unique perspective shaped by experiences working with care systems in the United States and Africa. She relocated to the U.S. in 2010 and has since been seeking to advance her research experience and education. She worked as a field interviewer for the National Children’s Study with NORC at University of Chicago before going to back to Kenya to complete medical internship in 2014. During her medical internship, she provided clinical care to patients and gained a passion for research while volunteering as a research assistant with Dr. Peter Kussin, a visiting physician from Duke University, and his team. This prompted her to pursue a Master of Science in Global Health upon return to the U.S. in 2016 at Duke University, where she also worked as a graduate teaching assistant and a research assistant. While at Duke, she gained experience in qualitative and mixed methods research as well as implementation science while working on her master’s thesis “Facility-Level Factors Affecting Implementation of the Option B+ Protocol for Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV (PMTCT) in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania” and other projects.
Dr. Chumba joined the Institute in 2018 as a Research Project Manager. She successfully managed two large research projects and multiple smaller projects. After signaling her interest in becoming an independent researcher, she was promoted to the role of a Research Scientist at the Institute in 2022, a position that is comparable to that of an Assistant Professor in an academic setting.
Dr. Chumba has multiple peer-reviewed publications and several more manuscripts under review or in preparation from the NIH-funded research projects she has been managing. She has presented at national scientific meetings, including the10th Annual Conference on the Science of Dissemination and Implementation in Health, the HCSRN Conference and the Academy Health Annual Research Meeting, and has participated in preparation of several other posters and abstracts that have been accepted and/or presented at such meetings.
Conducting Institute research since 2018
Education and training:
Master of Science in Global Health (MScGH), Duke University, 2016-2018
Medical Internship, Mio Teaching and Referral Hospital, Kenya, 2014-2015
Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBChB), Moi University School of Medicine, Kenya, 2005-2010
Research interests:
Dr. Chumba’s long-term goal is to establish herself as an independent investigator who leads multi-disciplinary teams developing innovative interventions to improve the quality of care and reduce disparities in care and outcomes for underrepresented and underserved patients. She plans to use mixed-method studies, community-based research, and implementation science with an equity and justice lens approach all her work.
Current research activities and funding:
Diversity Supplement: Reducing Clinical Inertia in Obesity Management of Diabetes in Primary Care: Cluster-Randomized Trial (O’Connor)
Source: 3R01DK128281-02S1 09/15/2022-04/31/2024
Role: Principal Investigator
In the parent grant, the team proposes to integrate obesity management into a web-based point-of-care cardiovascular (CV) shared decision-making system (SDMS) in primary care to provide patient-specific CV SDMS is used as part of usual care at HealthPartners with an average use rate of 75%, there is wide variation in use both at the clinic and clinician level. Dr. Chumba proposes to identify factors that promote or impede use of SDMS in primary care settings and develop modified SDMS-related workflows that aim to increase clinic staff and clinician use of the SDMS.
