Bianca Frogner, PhD
Professor and Director
UW Center for Health Workforce Studies

Bianca Kiyoe Frogner, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Family Medicine in the School of Medicine at University of Washington (UW). She is the Director of the UW Center for Health Workforce Studies (CHWS) and Deputy Director of the Primary Care Innovation Lab (PCI-Lab), which are housed in the Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Frogner is a health economist (NIH T32 trainee) with expertise in health services delivery, health workforce, labor economics, health spending, health insurance coverage and reimbursement, and international health systems.

She is the Principal Investigator of two Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Health Workforce Research Center (HWRC) grants, one focused on allied health and another focused on the training and education of health professionals to address health equity. In 2016, Dr. Frogner served on an Institute of Medicine (IOM) Consensus Study Committee on Educating Health Professionals to Address the Social Determinants of Health. She serves on the editorial boards of Medical Care Research and Review and Health Systems. She received the 2019 John M. Eisenberg Article-of-the-Year Award as lead author of a study investigating physical therapy as the first point of care for low back pain treatment published in Health Services Research. Dr. Frogner recently provided testimony on health care careers to the Worker and Family Support Subcommittee of the US House Ways and Means Committee. Dr. Frogner’s has produced 115 publications including peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and reports. Her research has been shared in over 200 scholarly presentations and has appeared in popular media outlets including CNN, NPR, Wall Street Journal, Vox, and Politico.

Dr. Frogner completed a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. Dr. Frogner received her PhD in health economics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and BA at University of California, Berkeley in Molecular and Cell Biology.

Presenting at the Nexus Summit:

Interprofessional practice and education has a great opportunity to think beyond the traditional healthcare team and impact health and learning outcomes by considering the health professions workforce in light of equity, race and caste, and workforce development. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought awareness to the broad array of professionals involved in the care team, beyond the typical. For example, many health care workers who do not have direct patient interactions such as clinical lab professionals played critical roles in providing information on COVID-19 status, yet these professionals…