INRICH Member Profile Card
Scott A. Lorch
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Scott A. Lorch, MD, MSCE, is an associate professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and a senior fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as director of the Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Fellowship program, and is the Harriet and Ronald Lassin Endowed Chair in Pediatric Neonatology at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Dr. Lorch is also an investigator in the Pediatric Quality Metric Consortium site at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He was worked with Pennsylvania and New York pediatric discharge data to examine the effects of hospital occupancy on the efficiency of pediatric hospital care, and the difference between urban and rural hospitals in terms of treatment of children. These outcomes studies were conducted at the Center for Outcomes Research, working with the COR research staff.
Type of member: Regular (since 2019)
Telephone: 215-590-1714
Email Address: lorch@email.chop.edu
Website Address: https://www.research.chop.edu/people/scott-lorch
Current research interests
My area of expertise is health services research, perinatal epidemiology, and health economics. I am the director of the Center for Perinatal and Pediatric Health Disparities Research and is the principal investigator on four federally funded projects: Parental Trust and Racial Disparities in the Care of Discharged Premature Infants; Aggregated Complication Measure for Neonatal Quality of Care funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau; Perinatal Regionalization and Quality of Care; Impact of Obstetric Unit Closures on Pregnancy Outcomes.
Our research group is focused on answering the questions: why do children have different outcomes, whether those outcomes are health care use, morbidity and mortality, or neurocognitive outcomes?
Our group focuses in three specific areas of research: 1) Quality Assessment and Measurement; 2) Racial/ethnic disparities in care; 3) Organization of perinatal and pediatric care
In addition, we are interested in factors that may explain differences in the processes of care delivered by different hospitals, and how these differences translate into differences in outcomes.
Selected publications
2018 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2666220
Burris, H. H., Lorch, S. A., Kirpalani, H., Pursley, D. M., Elovitz, M. A., & Clougherty, J. E. (2019). Racial disparities in preterm birth in USA: A biosensor of physical and social environmental exposures. Archives of Disease in Childhood. doi:10.1136/archdischild-2018-316486 https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2019/03/08/archdischild-2018-316486
Enlow, E., Gray, M. M., Wallace-Keeshen, S., D’Agostino, J. A., Abbasi, S., & Lorch, S. A. (2019). Health literacy of parents of very preterm infants at NICU admission and discharge: A prospective cohort study. Journal of Perinatology. doi:10.1038/s41372-019-0340-y
Lorch, S. A. (2017). Health Equity and Quality of Care Assessment: A Continuing Challenge. Pediatrics, 140(3). doi:10.1542/peds.2017-2213 https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/early/2017/08/24/peds.2017-2213.full.pdf
Lorch, S. A. (2017). Perinatal legislative policies and health outcomes. Seminars in Perinatology, 41(6), 375-384. doi:10.1053/j.semperi.2017.07.006 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28860024
profile updated: 02/04/2022