Scott Lorch, MD, MSCE
Dr. Scott Lorch is a faculty member at PolicyLab and the director of the Center for Perinatal and Pediatric Health Disparities Research (CPHD) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Dr. Lorch is also a tenured associate professor of Pediatrics and Neonatology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, 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 holds the Harriet and Ronald Lassin Endowed Chair in Pediatric Neonatology and is an attending neonatologist and director of the Neonatal-Perinatal Fellowship Training Program at CHOP.
As a faculty investigator, he is centrally involved with projects concerning racial and health disparities; perinatal epidemiology; regionalization of care; health economics; and quality of care in perinatal, pediatric, and adult settings. As director at CPHD, he assists approximately 20 residents, fellows and faculty members performing research in health equity and health disparities through scheduled didactics, lab meetings, and an annual conference on health equity research. He facilitates engagement and collaboration among faculty, fellows, residents, and staff across the CHOP and University of Pennsylvania research communities interested in perinatal and pediatric disparities work.
Dr. Lorch and his research team have investigated various measures of infant quality of care and analyses of systems for delivering neonatal care, specifically using matching techniques combined with an instrumental variables approach to reduce systematic biases and improve the validity of the results in these types of studies. His work has also used regression-based mediation analysis to assess the intermediate factors contributing to racial and ethnic disparities in fetal death rates. Dr. Lorch has extensive experience in quantifying the quality of health care received by pediatric and adult patients, and identifying factors, such as insurance status, that are associated with poorer quality care. He also has experience using longitudinal cohorts of discharged premature infants to study the role of race and ethnicity on outcomes and health care use. Additionally, his other R01-funded work investigates the role of the health system on variations in patient outcomes.
Dr. Lorch earned both his BA in Political Science and his MD from Northwestern University in 1992 and 1996, respectively. He received his Master of Science degree in Clinical Epidemiology (MSCE) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003.