Karen Courtney
Dr. Karen Courtney’s background is in nursing and health informatics. She held a National Library of Medicine Predoctoral Fellowship in Health Informatics Research while completing her PhD in Nursing. She has a background in designing, conducting and evaluating community-based health information technology projects. These projects have community-dwelling individuals at the center and focus on meeting the self-identified needs and values of patients and family caregivers. Community-based participatory research pilot work (funded by Clinical and Translational Science Institute/RAND Corporation) with low-resource older adults in Pittsburgh neighborhoods led to a five-year Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US) funded study on community-based telehealth kiosks for health self-management by community-dwelling older adults. Her work with family caregivers and technology has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (US), National Science Foundation (US) and Canadian Partnership Against Cancer.
She is currently the co-lead for an MSFHR Reach award, disseminating an action plan for gender, sex and sexual orientation (GSSO) terminology modernization in electronic health records.
She has been a grant reviewer for Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and National Institutes of Health. She has 30+ peer-reviewed publications on patient or family caregiver – centric information technologies. In her research projects, she has mentored graduate students from various fields (nursing, health informatics, engineering, computer science, interdisciplinary) in research focused on information technology solutions for older adults with chronic health conditions and their family caregivers.