Allyson Hall, Ph.D., health policy professor in the Department of Health Services Administration has been named program director of the UAB Graduate Programs in Healthcare Quality and Safety.

Hall has studied access and systems to care for vulnerable populations for over three decades.  She will lead UAB’s Master of Science in Healthcare Quality and Safety, as well as a Graduate Certificate that is the most popular graduate-level certificate program at UAB. 

“Allyson’s research on care transitions, patient experiences and health outcomes gives her a unique and important perspective on healthcare quality and safety issues,” said Christy Harris Lemak, Ph.D., chair, Department of Health Services Administration (HSA). “She is also an experienced program director who brings that leadership to this role.”

“Assuring patient safety and high quality care is a continuing challenge for our health care delivery system,” said Allyson Hall, Ph.D., health policy professor who teaches in  in UAB’s Master of Science in Health Administration (MSHA), undergraduate Health Care Management (HCM) and both HSA Doctoral programs. “I look forward to continuing to develop and grow graduation education in healthcare quality and safety.”

Hall received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and her MHS/MBA from the University of Florida.  In 2017, she was instrumental in the launch of the UAB Academy for Addressing Health Disparities through Health Care Leadership, a summer program that is dedicated to increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of students in graduate healthcare management education and leadership. 

As HQS program director, Hall will take over for interim program director, Sue Feldman, Ph.D., who will focus on her main role, directing UAB’s graduate programs in Health Informatics. Hall will work closely with Scott Buchalter, M.D., medical director for the HQS programs and leader of UAB Health System’s Quality Academy.

“We are excited to have Dr. Hall who is an extremely accomplished and experienced leader that will bring new ideas to an already excellent program,” said Buchalter. “Her expertise in the field of care transitions, patient experience and health outcomes will add depth and new focus to the way quality improvement is taught to our many students. We very much look forward to working with her.”

Prior to joining UAB, Hall was an associate professor at the University of Florida where she served as director of the Master of Health Administration program and director of the Florida Center for Medicaid and the Uninsured.

Her current research focuses on reducing fragmentation within the delivery system, including assessments of patient-centered medical homes and transition to primary care programs for emergency department patients. Hall has a long-standing interest in Medicaid with work aimed at improving health care access for individuals living with a disability.