Tipirneni appointed co-director of National Clinician Scholars Program

Renuka Tipirneni, M.D. M.Sc., assistant professor of internal medicine, has been named a co-director for the National Clinician Scholars Program at IHPI (NCSP). The program is a national consortium of universities offering unparalleled training for clinicians as driving policy-relevant research and partnerships to improve health and health care. The goal of the program is to reduce health disparities, invent new models of care, and achieve higher quality health care at lower cost by training nurse and physician researchers to work as leaders and collaborators embedded in communities, healthcare systems, government, foundations, and think tanks in the United States and around the world.

Tipirneni is a physician-investigator with the University of Michigan Division of General Medicine. Her research focuses on investigating the impact of health reform policies and programs on low socioeconomic status, racial/ethnic minority, aging and other vulnerable populations, and on delivery of care in the health care safety net. Her current work includes examinations of Medicaid, Medicare and other health insurance policy, and health care delivery innovations including addressing social determinants of health in clinical practice.

She has evaluated the Affordable Care Act, Michigan’s Medicaid expansion, and other state and federal policies, and is a recipient of a K08 career development award from the National Institute on Aging examining the impact of coverage expansions on near retirement adults. Tipirneni also serves as Co-Director of the Michigan Social Health Interventions to Eliminate Disparities (MSHIELD) collaborative quality initiative which aims to identify and address patients’ social health needs across the state of Michigan. She serves as a faculty advisor to IHPI's Policy Engagement & External Relations team, and is passionate about the translation of research into the implementation of health policies and practice, sharing lessons learned across communities and states. As a co-director of the NSCP program at IHPI, she will serve on the top leadership team and coordinate training and programs in health care policy.

Tipirneni completed medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, and health services research training in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Michigan.