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Michael Ong, M.D., Ph.D. (RWJ)
Assistant Professor in Residence, Department of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine
mong@mednet.ucla.edu

Michael K. Ong, M.D., Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine & Health Services Research in the Department of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Ong received a B.S. in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Irvine; his medical degree from the University of California, San Diego; and a Ph.D. in Health Services and Policy Analysis from the University of California, Berkeley.  He completed the Primary Care Internal Medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco, and a VA Ambulatory Care Fellowship with the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research at Stanford University, prior to joining the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Dr. Ong’s research interests focus on improving the delivery of appropriate and efficient health care by general internal medicine physicians.  His research has applied this focus in several areas of general medicine, including hospital-based care, mental health, and smoking cessation.  Dr. Ong’s recent research has focused on heart failure patients hospitalized at the five University of California Medical Centers and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to better understand the wide variation in resource use reported among these six California medical centers. 

His RWJF Physician Faculty Scholars Program project, “Variations in Care: Developing Interventions to Improve Heart Failure Care Transitions,” builds on this work by examining how interventions to improve care transitions, from inpatient to outpatient settings, affect variation in subsequent resource use and outcomes.  This project links quality improvement research with studies of variation by evaluating the association of care transition quality with variation in resource use and mortality among the six medical centers, developing care transition interventions collaboratively with the six medical centers, and evaluating the effect of implemented interventions on resource use variation among the six medical centers.

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