Andrea Hartzler, PhD

Andrea’s passionate about helping people manage their health through innovative, patient-centered technology.  She works as a new investigator at Group Health Research Intitute, and was most recently a research scientist at the University of Washington. where she received received both her Bachelor of Science and PhD in Biomedical Informatics. She is also involved in work at Microsoft Research as a usability researcher (via Collabera). There she provides health informatics expertise for research projects spanning personal genomics, online health communities, patient-reported outcomes, personal health information management, and patient-clinician collaboration.

Supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF), her research covers a number of critical areas ranging from social technologies to help patients connect with peer mentors, decision support technologies for pharmacogenomics, and mobile tools, sensing technologies, and dashboards to support patient-clinician collaboration.

A consistent thread in her research approach is developing a solid understanding of users’ needs through human-centered methodologies, and using that understanding to drive the development of innovative technology that can truly help by meeting those needs.

Andrea’s GHRI biography