Year 5. November 2. Advancing Health for All Through Partnership and Innovation
Our department’s strategic plan embodies our commitment to lead in innovation, transform care and advance health for all. This week, I am proud to share three examples of how our colleagues are bringing that vision to life by strengthening partnerships with communities across Los Angeles, helping children and families build healthier habits and improving the systems that support high-quality patient care.
DoM for LA Summit: Finding Hope and Strength in Community
As members of a public university, we are committed to supporting the health of the communities around us. But to do so effectively, we must recognize how much our neighbors can teach us.
Our second annual UCLA Department of Medicine (DoM) for LA Summit, held October 21 at the Los Angeles Central Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium, gave us a chance to learn directly from our community partners and explore how we can work together to improve the health of all Angelenos.
The summit, which included faculty, staff, trainees, students, community leaders and safety-net health care providers, centered on a simple but powerful theme: “Health Unites Us, Community Strengthens Us, Hope Inspires Us.” I am deeply grateful to Alejandra Casillas, MD, MSHS, and Keith Norris, MD, PhD, whose leadership helped make the event possible and whose vision continues to strengthen our department's relationships across Los Angeles.
One of the most meaningful aspects of this year’s summit was its location. After holding our inaugural DoM for LA Summit on UCLA’s Westwood campus last year, we moved downtown in response to feedback from our community partners. It was an apt reminder that building strong relationships requires us to venture out beyond the familiar walls of our institution and meet our neighbors where they are.
That same spirit shaped the summit’s agenda. A community consultant panel, established following last year’s summit, worked with our organizers to determine this year’s priorities, including youth empowerment, mental health and safety-net care.
Community consultant Claudia del Toro, PA, MMS, reflected on the impact of bringing community leaders into the planning process. “It changes the relationship from ‘we are here to help you’ to ‘we are here to work with you,’” del Toro said.
The distinction is important. As Dr. Norris emphasized in his opening remarks, improving health outcomes for the diverse communities we serve requires working with local organizations to identify needs and advance solutions that reflect their priorities.
2026 DoM for LA Highlights
The Power of Community Voices
We began with a powerful keynote address from Ernesto Rodriguez, founder and executive director of Kindful Restoration, a nonprofit that provides rehabilitation, substance use recovery and reentry support for incarcerated youth and adults.
Drawing on his own experiences with incarceration, Rodriguez spoke about the transformative power of hope and the importance of recognizing the strengths that every individual brings to the table.
“All of us have experiences that can help someone walk and find their own well-being, their own way,” he said.
That theme continued in discussions featuring representatives from the Turner-UCLA Allied Health Internship Program, allcove, Homeboy Industries and Drug Checking Los Angeles, each working in different ways to support young people across Los Angeles.
Particularly compelling were conversations about youth mental health and empowerment. Alice Kuo, MD, PhD, MBA, joined community partners to discuss how allcove provides accessible spaces where young people can seek support for their mental health and wellness. Trevor, a high school student and youth adviser, spoke candidly about the need for spaces where young people feel heard, understood and empowered to ask for help.
Equally impactful were reflections from our growing partnership with Homeboy Industries. Kaitlyn Fruin, MD, MS, emphasized the importance of learning from organizations with deep roots in the communities they serve. “In community partnerships, the first phase is really mentorship,” Dr. Fruin said.
Maria Flores, director of Youth Services at Homeboy, offered similar advice: “Wherever you go to build partners, collaboration is really about letting the mission and the values sink in.”
These reflections stayed with me. We often think about community engagement in terms of what our institution can contribute. Yet these partnerships challenge our assumptions, broaden our perspectives and help us refine our roles as clinicians and investigators.
Learning From Our Safety-Net Partners
Another highlight of DoM for LA 2026 was a spotlight on Olive View–UCLA Medical Center, during which our colleagues shared several examples of how clinical care and community partnerships can strengthen each other.
Nader Kamangar, MD, recounted how observations made while caring for patients at Olive View helped identify a growing occupational health crisis.
Around 2014, Dr. Kamangar began seeing Latino men in their 30s and 40s presenting with advanced lung disease. Through careful listening and attention to their work histories, he recognized a common factor: Many were employed cutting and polishing engineered stone countertops, exposing them to dangerous levels of silica dust. Inhaling high concentrations of this dust can cause silicosis, a potentially fatal lung disease.
Jane Fazio, MD, assistant professor of medicine; as a pulmonary and critical care fellow, subsequently helped turn those clinical observations into research. The findings, along with workers’ own accounts of their experiences, drew wider attention to the silicosis crisis and drove advocacy for greater workplace protections.
The effort ultimately involved physicians, researchers, public health agencies, community organizations and patients themselves. As Dr. Kamangar noted, none of this work could have been accomplished alone. The story serves as a powerful reminder that important discoveries often begin with listening closely to patients and understanding their lived experiences.
A similar message came from a presentation by Utpal Sandesara, MD, whose research focuses on family caregivers of patients with advanced liver disease. Through interviews and observations conducted in homes and clinical settings, and in collaboration with a community advisory board, his team is working to better understand the challenges caregivers face and the strengths they bring to patient care. Already, their work is revealing opportunities to improve communication about liver disease.
Dr. Sandesara posed a series of questions that deserve consideration across academic medicine: “Can community perspectives not only give us new answers, but can they also give us new questions? Can they reshape our very understandings of expertise, of evidence, of effectiveness?”
Scientific curiosity is fundamental to our work. But to determine which questions are worth asking in the first place, we must listen to the lived experiences of the people we hope to benefit.
The Olive View spotlight also addressed efforts to remove barriers for the next generation of health care professionals.
Laxmi Suthar, MD, program director of the UCLA–Olive View Internal Medicine Residency, highlighted Olive View’s efforts to build pathways into health care careers for young people from underserved communities, with programs that introduce high school and college students to medical professions. Benjamin Meza, MD, discussed additional efforts to introduce local high school students to health care careers through partnerships with LAUSD’s Linked Learning program. He also described how Olive View’s Patient and Family Advisory Council brings patient and family perspectives into institutional decision-making.
During lunch, catered by Homegirl Café, attendees perused research posters on topics ranging from youth mental health to disparities in care for people with rare diseases.
Afterward, Daniel Kozman, MD, MPH, moderated a panel discussion featuring representatives from four organizations working to improve care for Angelenos experiencing homelessness.
Sarat Varghese, MD, and Rodolfo Rodriguez described the broad range of services provided by the street medicine team at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, from primary care and medication delivery to chronic disease management and housing assistance.
Brian Zunner-Keating, MS, RN, and Catherine Weaver, MD, of the UCLA Homeless Healthcare Collaborative, discussed how their program brings medical services directly to people experiencing homelessness, helping overcome barriers to traditional care.
Drawing on nearly two decades of experience at Venice Family Clinic, Coley King, DO, reflected on the importance of continuity as patients move between the streets, community settings and traditional clinics. Meanwhile, Jerry Abraham, MD, MPH, and Ana Karen Rivas described how Kedren Health's COVID-19 vaccination outreach evolved into a street medicine program that integrates primary care, mental health services and addiction treatment. As Dr. Abraham noted, the goal is to "meet people where they're at."
The resourcefulness and compassion of these teams, who continually adapt care to patients' circumstances while building trust and continuity, never cease to inspire me.
Carrying the Conversation Forward
The day concluded with breakout discussions on artificial intelligence and machine learning, engaging and empowering youth, philanthropic support for community initiatives and the role of art in promoting health. These conversations created opportunities for colleagues and community partners to exchange perspectives and explore new possibilities for working together.
One theme that stood out from the summit was the importance of hope. When our organizers asked members of the community consultant panel what they wanted to see more of in their communities and partnerships, “hope” was a recurring answer.
Xen Colón, who served as lead staff for the summit, spoke to the value of coming together at a challenging time for public health care and community-based organizations.
“It’s beautiful to see everybody come together and have a bright moment in a period that’s been hard,” Colón said.
The gathering concluded with reflections from Drs. Casillas and Norris, followed by a Tai Chi wellness activity led by Jachael Gardner, MPH.
First-year medical student Ben Karol, who is working to expand health education opportunities and CPR training for underserved and formerly incarcerated youth, said the summit showed him he wouldn't have to pursue those efforts alone. "I knew there was so much I wanted to do, but I thought I would have to start from the ground up," he said. "Seeing how many groups and doctors are already taking these steps, I'm just so happy to join them on that mission."
At the beginning of the summit, in my opening remarks I commented that what I saw in our community partners in collaboration with the DoM and UCLA are gemstones. Some polished, but many with tremendous potential that could shine when they are discovered and refined. It is clear in looking back on the inspiring presentations and new connections that were formed during the day there is a treasure trove of talent and opportunity, which we can build upon, with thoughtfulness and purpose: similar to the task that an expert jeweler undertakes to create a masterpiece.
I want to extend my sincere thanks to everyone who made this year’s summit possible, especially our community consultants, organizational partners, presenters and the dedicated staff who brought it all together.
The true measure of our success will not be the conversations we had during a single day, but what grows from them. My hope is that we build on those conversations, learning from our community partners to make our research, education and patient care more responsive to the needs of Los Angeles. Stepping outside our institutional comfort zones sharpens our focus, refines our research, improves our care and extends our impact.
DoM Research LEADERS and Gasol Foundation Team up to Help Children Build Healthy Habits for Life
The power of community partnerships is also evident in a new initiative to promote healthier habits among children and families.
When the Gasol Foundation selected Southern California as the site of its first U.S. Healthy Habits for Life initiative, it also chose DoM LEADERS to help answer an important question: How can evidence-based programs help children and families build healthier futures in the communities where they live, learn and play?
Led by Arleen Brown, MD, PhD, professor in the UCLA Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research and co-director of the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI), researchers will evaluate the foundation's Healthy Habits for Life Program as it launches within the Downey Unified School District and YMCA locations across Southern California.
Founded by former Los Angeles Laker Pau Gasol and his brother Marc Gasol, the Gasol Foundation takes a community-based approach to preventing childhood obesity and promoting healthy lifestyles. The program is built around the Healthy Galaxy model, which encourages healthy eating, physical activity, emotional well-being and healthy sleep habits among children and families.
The partnership grew out of an earlier collaboration with UCLA. In 2024, the Gasol Foundation received a Community Catalyst Award from the UCLA CTSI to support programs based on its Healthy Galaxy model. After completing the project, the foundation approached CTSI’s Community Engagement & Research Program about building on that work. The Healthy Habits for Life initiative represents the next phase of the partnership.
Gasol Foundation Founder Pau Gasol and guests hear from community partners who discuss the importance of collaboration.
A nationally recognized leader in community-engaged and translational research, Dr. Brown has spent her career studying how individual, health system and community factors contribute to health disparities. Her work focuses on ensuring that proven interventions reach the people who need them most and remain effective in real-world settings.
"We need to make sure we have the community at the table," Dr. Brown said. "The people who know best are the community members, our patients and their families."
That commitment will guide the research team’s role in the project. In addition to evaluating outcomes, the team will work closely with community partners to understand local needs, identify barriers and determine how the program can be adapted for Southern California families and sustained over time. The evaluation will examine not only what works, but also what challenges communities face and what resources are needed to make healthy behaviors more accessible.
For Dr. Brown, those questions extend far beyond the health care system.
As a general internist, she regularly sees how childhood experiences shape health decades later. Conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity are often influenced by habits formed early in life and by social, environmental and economic factors that affect health long before a patient enters a clinic.
"Unhealthy habits in childhood are propagated throughout the lifespan," Dr. Brown said. "How do we think about that life course? This is the perfect way to start."
The partnership also highlights the importance of community organizations in advancing health. Through its network of centers and childcare programs, the YMCA provides trusted spaces where children and families already gather, learn and build relationships. By bringing health education and prevention efforts into those settings, the initiative aims to reach families where they are and support healthy choices before chronic disease develops.
Advancing discovery, medicine and community together at the Healthy Habits kick off event.
Dr. Brown notes that many of the factors influencing health occur outside traditional health care settings.
"Ninety percent of diabetes care is outside the health care system," she said. "How can I, as a primary care provider, influence those other things? It's through partnering."
The collaboration reflects the DoM’s commitment as a public institution to advancing health and improving outcomes across the diverse communities it serves. By partnering with schools, families and community organizations, the initiative aims to bring health resources beyond traditional health care settings and help create environments where healthy choices are easier for children and families. Through prevention, education and community engagement, the project seeks to strengthen local partnerships, expand access to health-promoting resources and support healthier neighborhoods for future generations.
Ultimately, Dr. Brown hopes the program will create a ripple effect that extends well beyond participating children.
"If kids can say, 'We've learned behaviors that we're sharing with our friends and relatives,' that's success," she said. "The healthy choice becomes the easy choice."
Celebrating a shared commitment to innovation and community health with Pau Gasol and members of the research team.
UCLA Health DoM Quality Symposium: Doing What It Takes to Improve Care at Scale
The idea of making better choices easier also has implications for the work that we do every day in our own health system. By improving the processes and systems that support patient care, we can help our teams deliver better outcomes more consistently and sustainably.
Quality improvement (QI) is essential to this work. Although often associated with regulatory requirements and performance benchmarks, its greatest value lies in helping us identify what isn’t working, develop better approaches and make meaningful changes that benefit patients and providers alike.
Putting these principles into practice was the focus of the second annual UCLA Health Quality Symposium, co-hosted by UCLA Health and the DoM on October 22, as part of Healthcare Quality Week. Held at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center's Tamkin Auditorium and virtually via Zoom, the symposium brought together more than 200 clinicians, researchers, trainees, staff and quality professionals, with more than 50 quality improvement poster presentations.
Under the theme of "Advancing Healthcare Quality Through Innovation, Implementation, and Scholarship," the program explored the full journey of quality improvement, from identifying opportunities and designing better care to implementing sustainable changes and disseminating lessons learned.
“As we think about the broader health care landscape, the importance of quality improvement has never been greater,” said Anna Dermenchyan, PhD, RN, CCRN, CPHQ, FAAN, director of quality and interim chief quality officer for the UCLA Department of Medicine. “Health care organizations are facing increasing patient complexity, workforce shortages and burnout, financial pressures, evolving regulatory requirements and rapid advances in technology and artificial intelligence.”
The symposium emphasized the importance of equipping health care professionals with practical strategies to navigate these challenges and translate improvement ideas into meaningful changes in patient care.
Ashley Busuttil, MD, chief medical officer of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, welcomed attendees by reflecting on the interconnected nature of quality, patient safety, patient experience and clinician well-being.
"It's clear that there's intersectionality between quality, safety, and experience, and people often think of that as a Venn diagram," Dr. Busuttil said. "But in some ways, they're almost completely overlapping circles. Patient experience suffers when care isn't safe or timely, and the clinician experience suffers when systems make it unnecessarily difficult for us to deliver good care."
In her keynote address, “The Healthcare We Haven't Built Yet: Quality as the Blueprint for Transformation,” Chidinma Chima-Melton, MD, MBA, FCCP, ATSF, challenged attendees to look beyond incremental improvements and reimagine health care systems around the needs of patients and communities. Drawing on examples from her own leadership experience, she described how fragmented services, barriers to access and traditional delivery models can prevent patients from receiving timely, coordinated care. Her remarks emphasized that meaningful transformation requires more than improving individual processes: It requires rethinking how care is delivered. Technology, including virtual care and digital innovations, can help support that transformation by expanding access and strengthening coordination, but lasting progress depends on human-centered design, adaptability and a sustained focus on patient needs.
Identifying Opportunities for Better Care
Over the course of the morning, presentations and panel discussions unpacked the challenges and opportunities that arise at each stage of the quality improvement process.
The first session focused on recognizing opportunities for improvement and designing interventions that address underlying causes.
As Manisha Bhayani, RN, BSN, MBA, CPHQ, executive director of Quality and Patient Safety, noted when introducing the session:
"High-reliability organizations don't wait for problems to become crises. They actively seek opportunities to improve by using data, engaging frontline teams, understanding variation and designing processes that make the right thing easy to do."
A compelling example came from Courtney Boland, BS, and Erin Dowling, MD, FACP, CPHQ, who described how they assembled a multidisciplinary team to develop a new pathway for patients presenting with gastrointestinal bleeding.
Their presentation highlighted the value of engaging stakeholders early. Bringing together frontline clinicians, operational leaders and support staff helped identify barriers, refine workflows and ensure that proposed changes were practical and sustainable.
The subsequent panel expanded on these lessons, emphasizing that successful improvement begins with accurately defining the problem rather than jumping to solutions. Panelists discussed the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration, reliable data, stakeholder engagement and navigating operational and organizational barriers. Together, these perspectives reinforced that meaningful improvement requires both rigorous planning and flexibility throughout the process.
Implementing, Evaluating, and Sustaining the Change
Developing an effective intervention is only the beginning. Lasting impact depends on whether improvements can be sustained and scaled across an organization.
That challenge was the focus of the second session, which centered on efforts to improve blood pressure measurement practices throughout UCLA Health.
Maria Han, MD, MS, MBA, and Sylvia Lambrechts, MPH, MA, CPHQ, CLHP, described a project aimed at standardizing repeat blood pressure measurements when an initial reading is elevated. Although the pilot was successful, the team quickly recognized that its original implementation model required extensive hands-on support and would have taken an estimated 22 years to deploy across UCLA Health's more than 200 clinics.
To make the initiative scalable, the team introduced electronic reminders and standardized workflows that reduced the need for clinic-by-clinic support while preserving the effectiveness of the intervention.
The discussion that followed explored what it takes to sustain and scale improvement initiatives, with panelists emphasizing the importance of leadership support, operational feasibility, frontline engagement, meaningful performance measurement and adapting interventions to the realities of busy clinical environments.
Sharing the Learning
The final session addressed dissemination, a critical component of QI work.
Even the most successful QI initiatives have limited impact if the lessons remain confined to a single project or institution. Sharing findings—both successes and setbacks—allows others to build on previous work rather than start from scratch.
Dr. Dermenchyan and Russell Kerbel, MD, MBA, discussed strategies for disseminating QI work and provided practical guidance on documenting projects from the outset, identifying opportunities for scholarship and selecting appropriate reporting frameworks.
Dr. Kerbel acknowledged that QI scholarship presents unique challenges. Unlike traditional research studies, QI initiatives often require adaptation to local conditions and evolving clinical environments, making them more difficult to evaluate using conventional research methodologies.
Yet these complexities make dissemination even more important. The speakers emphasized that negative results can be just as valuable as positive ones. Understanding what did not work, and why, can save other teams time and resources while advancing the field.
For faculty, trainees and staff interested in publishing their work, the UCLA Department of Medicine's Clinical Insights (DoMCI), hosted on the University of California (UC) eScholarship Platform, offers an important venue for sharing and disseminating quality improvement scholarship to contribute to a growing body of practical knowledge.
Building a Culture of Improvement
The symposium concluded with a networking lunch and poster session, where attendees exchanged ideas and learned about QI initiatives underway across UCLA Health.
It was encouraging to see such enthusiasm for the work, both in the discussions throughout the day and in the feedback afterward. Among 116 respondents to a post-event survey, 98.3% rated the symposium as Excellent or Very Good, and 97.4% indicated they were likely to apply what they learned in their work. Attendees highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, sustainable improvement strategies and sharing lessons learned to advance health care quality.
I am grateful to the many individuals who made this event possible. I would like to thank Dr. Dermenchyan, Manisha Bhayani, Ashwini Prasad, Monica Nget and Tiffany Halabi for their leadership and planning efforts, as well as the dedicated student volunteers from The Healthcare Improvement & Innovation in Quality (THINQ) Collaborative, whose enthusiasm and teamwork helped make the symposium a success.
The day underscored how closely quality improvement aligns with the mission of academic medicine. As Dr. Busuttil observed in her opening remarks:
"There's value in taking a step back and reconnecting with the things that make academic medicine so meaningful, and that's learning, teaching, problem solving and sharing our ideas with colleagues and disseminating them so they can really have broader impact. Quality improvement really brings all these things together."
The symposium reinforced that advancing health care quality requires more than individual improvement projects. It takes collaboration, continuous learning and a commitment to translating innovative ideas into sustainable practices. As UCLA Health continues to grow, fostering this culture of shared learning will be essential to ensuring that innovation leads to better outcomes for our patients and communities.
Participants networked and reviewed posters following the presentations.
I hope that you will all agree that the DoM’s commitment to Leading Innovation, Transforming Care and Advancing Health for All is a potent force for progress and advancement of critical missions within our health system that will positively impact the communities that we serve.
Dale
P.S.
Across the DoM, members of our administrative teams embraced the importance of community and “competitive collaboration” in solving a common problem—pumpkin carving.
1st Place Winner:
Geriatrics
2nd Place:
Dermatology
3rd Place:
Clinical Nutrition
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