Penn Nursing’s Karen Lasater, assistant professor of nursing, senior fellow at the Center for Health Outcomes & Policy Research and senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, has won the 2019 AcademyHealth Interdisciplinary Research Group on Nursing Issues’ New Investigator Award.

One of four AcademyHealth Interest Groups targeting different areas of health care, IRGNI focuses on producing scientific evidence relevant to nursing practice, policy, education and the development of nurses as health services researchers. The IRGNI New Investigator Award honors “the scientific work of emerging scholars in the field of health services research relevant to nursing practice, workforce and education.”

Dr. Lasater has been investigating how patient outcomes correlate to various organization features of the nursing environment. The IRGNI cited her latest work as co-investigator on a study of surgical Medicare patients. The work found that patients in hospitals with better nursing resources experienced lower mortality, fewer complications, fewer readmissions and shorter lengths of stay.