About

Ingrid Nembhard is the Fishman Family President’s Distinguished Professor, Professor of Health Care Management, and Professor of Management (Organizational Behavior) at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on how characteristics of health care organizations, their leaders, and staff contribute to their ability to implement new practices, engage in continuous organizational learning, and improve quality of care. She employs both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine health care delivery from provider and patient perspectives and to evaluate organizational performance. Prior to her tenure at Wharton, she held positions at Yale University, including Ira V. Hiscock Tenured Associate Professor at the Yale School of Public Health, Associate Professor at Yale School of Management, Associate Director of the Yale Health Care Management Program, and Director of the Yale Training Program in Health Services Research. Her current research explores leadership and psychological safety in teams, organizational learning from various experiences, the use of patient narratives for quality improvement, contributors to high performance in challenging environments, and the implementation of care coordination in primary care settings. She has received numerous awards, including the 2023 Mid-Career Achievement Award from the Academy of Management’s Health Care Management Division, and her work emphasizes understanding and improving health care organizations through organizational behavior and management strategies.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Nursing
• Clinical psychology
• Family medicine
• Medical education

Selected publications

• The perceived value of a geriatrics‐surgery co‐management program: Perspectives from three surgical specialties

  Journal of the American Geriatrics Society · 2023 · 7 citations

  • Medicine
  • Family medicine
  • Psychiatry

  BACKGROUND: Geriatrics-surgery co-management (GSCM) programs have improved patient outcomes, but little is known about how they change care and whether their value varies by surgical specialty. We aimed to assess GSCM's effects as perceived by Orthopedic Trauma, Trauma, and Neurosurgery clinicians. METHODS: We conducted a mixed-methods study utilizing electronic survey and virtual interviews at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, an academic trauma center, in Philadelphia, PA. Participants included physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses, social workers, and case managers in the aforementioned specialties. Key measures were perspectives on value of GSCM, its facilitators, specialty most appropriate to manage specified medical issues, and factors affecting use. RESULTS: Of 71 eligible clinicians, 45 (63%) completed the survey and 12 (21%) of 56 purposefully sampled for specialty-role diversity were interviewed. Clinicians across specialties valued GSCM highly and similarly for impact on personal management of older adults (grand mean [standard error, SE] = 4.33 [0.24] out of 5; p = 0.80 for specialty means comparisons), patient care (mean [SE] = 4.47 [0.21]; p = 0.27), patient outcomes (mean [SE] = 4.26 [0.22]; p = 0.51), and specialty overall (mean [SE] = 4.55 [0.23]; p = 0.25) but less so for knowledge growth (mean [SE] = 3.47 [0.29]; p = 0.11). Interviewees across specialties reported that value derived from improved understanding of patient history, management of complex medical conditions, goals of care support, communication with families, and patient discharge facilitation. Interviewees also agreed on program facilitators: aligned stakeholders, shared data-driven goals, champion/administrative support, continuity and availability of geriatricians, and thorough communication. Specialties differed on three issues: (1) who should manage some medical concerns; (2) whether GSCM makes their job easier (significantly easier for Orthopedic Trauma: mean [SE] = 4.75 [0.29] vs. Trauma: mean [SE] = 4.01 [0.19]; p = 0.05); and (3) whether GSCM increases coordination difficulty (more for Neurosurgery: mean [SE] = 2.18 [0.0.58] vs. Orthopedic Trauma: mean [SE] = 0.51 [0.42]; p = 0.03 and Trauma: mean [SE] = 0.89 [0.28]; p = 0.07). Orthopedic Trauma had the most positive impression of GSCM overall. CONCLUSIONS: Clinicians across diverse surgical specialties valued GSCM. Hospitals considering implementation or expansion of GSCM should attend to identified facilitators and may need to tailor to specialty.

  PublisherDOI

• Learning from Patients: The Impact of Using Patient Narratives on Patient Experience Scores

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Medical education

  Many healthcare organizations struggle to improve their patient experience scores despite significant effort. Enthusiasm has grown about the potential for patient narratives ? stories about care experiences in patients’ own words ? to provide insights that advance organizational learning about care and thus how to improve it. However, there is no evidence establishing an association between narrative use and organizational performance. In a one-year study utilizing survey data from patients and personnel affiliated with primary care clinics, we tested whether organizations that share narratives with their personnel frequently have higher patient experience survey scores. We found that they do, conditional on domain of experience and personnel’s confidence in own knowledge of patients and practice. For operational measures of experience (e.g., timeliness of care), increased narrative use correlated with higher scores for more confident personnel and higher or lower scores for less confident, depending on measure. For relational measures (e.g., patient-provider communication), increased narrative use correlated with higher scores for the less confident and lower scores for the more confident. These results indicate that narratives use should be encouraged as an improvement strategy and that organizations need to address how narrative feedback interacts with confidence to yield higher scores across domains.

  DOI

• A systematic review of research on empathy in health care

  Health Services Research · 2022 · 164 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Medicine

  OBJECTIVE: To summarize the predictors and outcomes of empathy by health care personnel, methods used to study their empathy, and the effectiveness of interventions targeting their empathy, in order to advance understanding of the role of empathy in health care and facilitate additional research aimed at increasing positive patient care experiences and outcomes. DATA SOURCE: We searched MEDLINE, MEDLINE In-Process, PsycInfo, and Business Source Complete to identify empirical studies of empathy involving health care personnel in English-language publications up until April 20, 2021, covering the first five decades of research on empathy in health care (1971-2021). STUDY DESIGN: We performed a systematic review in accordance with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. DATA COLLECTION/EXTRACTION METHODS: Title and abstract screening for study eligibility was followed by full-text screening of relevant citations to extract study information (e.g., study design, sample size, empathy measure used, empathy assessor, intervention type if applicable, other variables evaluated, results, and significance). We classified study predictors and outcomes into categories, calculated descriptive statistics, and produced tables to summarize findings. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Of the 2270 articles screened, 455 reporting on 470 analyses satisfied the inclusion criteria. We found that most studies have been survey-based, cross-sectional examinations; greater empathy is associated with better clinical outcomes and patient care experiences; and empathy predictors are many and fall into five categories (provider demographics, provider characteristics, provider behavior during interactions, target characteristics, and organizational context). Of the 128 intervention studies, 103 (80%) found a positive and significant effect. With four exceptions, interventions were educational programs focused on individual clinicians or trainees. No organizational-level interventions (e.g., empathy-specific processes or roles) were identified. CONCLUSIONS: Empirical research provides evidence of the importance of empathy to health care outcomes and identifies multiple changeable predictors of empathy. Training can improve individuals' empathy; organizational-level interventions for systematic improvement are lacking.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Perceived Usefulness of Patient Narrative Feedback in Primary Care Settings

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2022 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Medicine
  • Social psychology

  Research suggests that using insights from patient narratives ? stories about care experiences in patients’ own words ? has the potential to improve care. Qualitative reports, however, largely indicate that narratives have evoked mixed response among healthcare providers. Systematic study of which individuals and settings perceive narratives to be useful versus not to offer a clearer account of the variance in perceived usefulness has been lacking. Such analysis is critical because perception of value often dictates if and how information is used, which shapes the opportunity to leverage narratives for quality improvement. Our objective in this study was to assess perceived usefulness of patient narratives in primary care and identify individual- and clinic-related correlates of perceived usefulness. To do this, we conducted a cross-sectional study of 276 clinical and administrative personnel in nine primary care clinics affiliated with a health system in the United States. We collected their impressions of narratives, individual characteristics, and perceptions of some of their clinic’s characteristics. We used multilevel regression to examine possible correlates of perceived usefulness suggested by prior qualitative research. Perceived usefulness of patient comments was high overall (3.92 out of 5). Of the individual-related characteristics examined: burnout (ß=0.128, p=0.045) and professional role were associated with perceived usefulness. Care team roles (e.g., physicians) reported greater usefulness than administrative support roles (ß=0.242, p=0.027) and similar usefulness as administrators/supervisors (ß=0.191, p=0.420). Job dissatisfaction, tenure, and sex had no association with perceived usefulness. Of the clinic-related characteristics reported by participants, frequency of seeing patient comments was not associated with perceived usefulness (ß=0.003, p=0.948), whereas greater belief that their clinic engaged in more improvement efforts linked to patient feedback (ß=0.225, p=0.001) and had a learning orientation (ß=0.171, p=0.080) were associated with higher perceived usefulness. Overall primary care staff perceive narratives to be useful. However, perception varies by individual characteristics and clinic-related perceptions. Therefore, organizations should continue collecting and sharing narratives with their personnel, and ensure that structures and resources are available to support initiatives to learn from and respond to patients’ narrative feedback, as much of the variance is linked to organizational support.

  DOI

• A New Frontier: Patients as Sources of Creative Ideas for Health Care Improvement.

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2022 · 2 citations

  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Sociology

  Achieving patient-centered care requires reimagining aspects of care delivery and invites innovation possibilities. Eliciting creative (novel and useful) ideas from patients may enrich innovation with distinct information on experience, emotions, and needs. This research examines the potential of systematically elicited creative ideas to catalyze innovation in ambulatory care. Drawing on literature on creativity and user-based innovation, we developed and tested a survey approach to elicit patients' creative ideas for health care improvement. First, ideas extracted from 600 narratives from a representative sample were categorized thematically and analyzed for impact on closed-ended patient experience scores. Next, 1,053 narratives were collected from patients in one ambulatory care system, and we applied an innovation-focused coding schema. Patients' creative ideas addressed care experiences broadly and were significantly associated with closed-ended patient experience scores, which suggests perceived improvement gaps and idea sharing are correlated. Ideas provided information on solutions, problems, exemplars, and aspirational change, with high levels of specificity. Reframing patient participation at the beginning of the innovation process situates patients in a rare and powerful position of informing agenda setting. This approach expands our view on engagement by reimagining patients as a unique source of expertise to achieve patient-centered care.

  DOI

• Integrating network theory into the study of integrated healthcare

  Social Science & Medicine · 2021 · 60 citations

  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Public relations
  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mark Schlesinger

  Yale University

  5 shared

• Rachel Grob

  4 shared

• Sasmira Matta

  William P. Wharton Trust

  4 shared

• Dale Shaller

  3 shared

• Yu‐Na Lee

  2 shared

• Michaela Kerrissey

  Harvard University

  1 shared

• Yuna Lee

  1 shared

• Amy C. Edmondson

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Mid-Career Achievement Award, Health Care Management Divisio…
• Best Paper Proceedings of the 2023 Academy of Management Mee…
• Runner-Up, Best Paper Award, Health Care Management Division…
• Runner-Up, Best HCM Theory to Practice Paper Award, Academy…
• Runner-Up, Best Paper Award, Health Care Management Division…

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