Veronica Yank, M.D.

Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Health Services Research

Veronica Yank, M.D., is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Health Services Research at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation’s Research Institute and Stanford Prevention Research Center. She is also an instructor in general internal medicine at Stanford. Her training includes an undergraduate degree from Harvard, research associate experience at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco, a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, and residency training in internal medicine at the University of Washington.

In her clinical and teaching capacity at Stanford, she is a primary care doctor and supervises and teaches medical students and internal medicine residents. Special areas of clinical interest include diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, depression and other chronic illnesses commonly seen in primary care. In the research realm, she has published papers on systematic reviews, human subjects protections, scientific authorship, and the integrity of biomedical research, publications and peer review. She is the lead physician investigator of a California HealthCare Foundation funded study of web-based training for health professionals on patient self-management support. She is principal investigator of a survey of health professionals to validate self-management attitude measurements and identify their barriers and activities. She is first author of an effectiveness review for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality on off-label use of recombinant factor VIIa, an expensive clotting factor. Current research interests include patient self-management, patient-provider shared decision making, behavior change and lifestyle management strategies to prevent or treat chronic illnesses, and health professional training and the use of new technologies to support these interventions.